Recently I had to configure the auto generation of serial numbers for finished items just after production orders are created, so I first tested the functionality in my demo company EWR with produces Wind Turbines.
So the request is to be able to generate Serial Numbers for blades after the production order so later labels can be printed and attached to the finished products. Users do not want to be forced to introduce Serial Numbers in later processes like inventory journals, purchase or sales orders.
First we need to define an appropriate Tracking Number Group at Inventory Management, Setup, Tracking number group.
Here we have to focus in the following fields:
- Only for inventory transactions: Activate to Yes in order to have a serial number per each unit. So if the production quantity is 5 we will get 5 serial numbers.
- On physical update: Deactivate to No. If the value is Yes the serial number is only generated when the inventory transaction is physically updated.
- Production activation: Activate to Yes as we want to generate the serial number for our fisnished items.
Once the Tracking number group is created we have to assign it to the blades products to be manufactured at Released products, Manage Inventory, Tracking, Serial number Group.
The released item must also have a Tracking Dimension Group that has the Serial Number dimension active. Here we indicate that we do not need to indicate the serial number on inventory transactions issues and physical inventory is not grouped at Serial Number level. With the right configuration would be only possible to issue items when the serial number is introduced but in this case we do not want to track it at that level.
To test if the Serial Numbers are automatically created we create a production order of 3 blades.
And with the production order still on status "Created" we view the Inventory Transactions at Inventory, Transactions and we see that 3 inventory transactions are created with their respective serial number.
About the format of those serial numbers, the Tracking Number Group has several parameters that can be used in order to compose the serial number like the date, reference number, Lot ID and the number sequence.
That is all and you see how easy is to manage Serial Numbers in production with Microsoft Dynamics 365 in the Cloud. For more information about Serial Numbers and Batch Numbers visit the following link at Microsoft Learn.