Dynamics 365 – Engineering Change Management – Part 4 – Product Obsolescence

Welcome to the final Blog of our Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Engineering Change Management series! As a reminder, the features mentioned in the previous blogs will need to be enabled before using D365 SCM Engineering Change Management. Now, let’s talk about product retirement or obsolescence. As everyone knows, consumers want the newest, best available version of a product. Businesses are responsible for providing those bright, shiny new products. But how is that accomplished in Dynamics 365? The Engineering Change Management feature! In this blog post, we will discuss product obsolescence (blocking all usage) and end-of-life (allowing sales of remaining inventory only).

When the business decides to improve an item, or just not sell a particular item, what happens to the existing inventory and open transactions? To obsolete an item and not allow further transactions, first ensure the Product Lifecycle state is created. The ‘Obsolete’ state, shown below, has the blocked policy selected for all business processes. Another option is to create an ‘End of life’ state, to allow certain transactions, like sales orders, picking lists, or inventory movement (scrap) journals, to be posted to use the existing inventory, but not create or buy new inventory.

Our blog example will focus on using the Obsolete life cycle.

With the product lifecycle state added you are ready to create the change order in the D365 Engineer Legal Entity. After adding the impacted product(s), update the lifecycle state in the product details FastTab. After all the details are complete, save and validate the change order, then submit to the workflow or manually notify the next person in line.

The engineer or product manager assigned to the change order can open the request by navigating to D365 SCM > Common Module > Work Items > Work items assigned to me. Once the change order has been reviewed and the engineer agrees to obsolete the product, they will need to Approve the change order. There are additional options to reject, request change, delegate, or cancel the change order. These options have been reviewed in previous blogs of the ECM series. Once the change order is in the approved status, the option to search for the business impact becomes available. This is a manual step requiring the engineer to notify all parties affected by the change order.

Once the business impact step has been completed, the workflow task will need to be marked approved.

To start the next task, accept the workflow as shown above. The next task is to view the engineering version of the impacted product(s) to ensure the product lifecycle state has been updated to obsolete. Open the Engineering version from the Target References menu of the Impacted Products. In the Engineering version screen, take note of the Product lifecycle state. If it does not say ‘Obsolete’, then go back to the change order and accept the task or refresh your D365 screens to ensure the workflow step was completed. Once complete, return to the change order and complete the workflow step. This step releases the product to the operational company, and the workflow history becomes completely available to view.

The change order is now ready to be marked as complete.

Navigate to the operational company to view the released product engineering version to see it matches the obsolete state as assigned in the engineering company.

If the business has decided to scrap existing inventory, a movement journal can be created to complete this task for all operation legal entities with inventory. Do not forget to remove the product from the Commerce product hierarchy or create a Sales trade agreement journal to discount the remaining inventory to sell off, if needed.

Now that you have read through the series of blogs for the D365 Supply Chain Management Engineering change management feature, are you ready for the Ellipse Solutions team to help you implement? Do you have questions that we can answer? We are happy to help you succeed with all aspects of Dynamics 365! Contact a sales team member from our website at www.EllipseSolutions.com today!