Monday, January 29, 2007

X12 EDI 857/856 Documents

Is anyone utilizing 857 or 856 ASN with their EDI processes in AX/Axapta? It appears that BizTalk doesn't support this out of the box and neither does Covast EDI Accelerator. If so, please send me an email and tell me how you implemented this document to integrate seamlessly with your AX install.

Thanks in Advance!

David

6 comments:

Adam H said...

David, I just came across this post(even though I frequent your blog quite often regarding Dynamics AX). Did you ever get a solution to the 857/856 documents?

I know you time is valuable, but I'd love to share some thoughts with you, and get some advice on working with AX. I work for a small ISV who is building an EDI supply chain integration into AX(out of the box solution). Possibly we could be of some help to you at some point, and I'd love to hear the pitfalls you encountered while learning the ins and outs of AX. I just started this early this year on AX (after alomst 10 years of working with GP), and seems to be a different world!

Currently, I'm trying to understand what a typical install looks like (modules, time for implementation, users, etc)

Also, I'd love to chat about your findings with AIF (I notice you also did a survey in which I'm curious in what you found). We have basically uncovered all of the underworkings of AIF(classes, xsd's, queries, etc) We're debating on using AIF and Webservices, or building our own integration that still utilizes everything that AIF does. (There are still several things that AIF cannot do - waiting to see 5.0).

In any case, we are planning to have a fairly comprehensive system for document integration into AX utilizing XAML, workflows, AIF, .Net BC, among other tools to help us now and in the future.

David Bowles said...

Adam,

We did end up modifying the Axd classes to meet our needs in the X12 857 transaction. Basically we had to create a shipment level table and a pallet level table to handle the ASN side of the 857's data and the merge those tables into the CustInvoiceJour and CustInvoiceTrans tables.

From my experience, it looks like a typical install has G/L, A/R, A/P, and then depending on your businesses needs a permutation of Production, Master Planning, and possibly Product Builder (for manufacturing-based companies) or Service (for service-oriented industries. If you are straight resell, then you probably would not need either.

CRM, Warehouse, Fixed Assets, Bank, HR, and Payroll are all add-ons depending if you already use solutions for those aspects or may not want to integrated those into AX.

It took us about 10 months to implement AX and we implemented G/L, Bank, A/R, A/P, Master Planning, Production, and Warehouse I.

It looks like for other companies anywhere from three months to a year and a half. It all depends how the implementation is structured. One particular company I am familiar with via the AX Users' Group went live first on financials and that implementation only took three months. They then worked on implementing Production second which they estimated to be another three months.

Although some companies can break up the modules, our company was a case where our Legacy system could not 'partially' run so it was all or nothing for us.

I'm available to chat anytime you'd like. You can reach me at my email address on my blog under contacts.

DB

Adam H said...

Thanks for the info!

One other thing we came across that seems to be a big hindrance are the services and licensing needed to run AIF with web services. I would hate to have to pass that along to the customer for each install. That is one other reason we may build our own integration to hit the Axd, and AxInternalBase classes. It just won’t be as efficient.

Unknown said...

You might be able to get some help on EDI training at this website that I found. Good luck and I hope I have been of some assistance.

Anonymous said...
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Anonymous said...

Here is a link to the blog site that covers the 856 ASN Topic
EDI Blog On 856 ASN.