Human Resource Management in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012–Employee Life Cycle Management

One of the key assets of every organization is their workforce and the skills and competencies obtained by their employees. Managing employees starting right from Recruitment to Retirement is always a crucial and cumbersome process. The human resource department(Roles such as Recruiter, HR Manager etc.) face several challenges in the employee life cycle management, when they do not get to see the right information in the right time at the right place.

Common pain areas ?

• Gathering job applications.
• Loosing track of qualified candidates.
• Missing correspondence action.
• Complex employee transitioning.
• Managing employees skills at one place to schedule them in the right job.

Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 helps you with all of these pain areas and helps in making the job of human resource department easier in every aspect of employee life cycle management.

Below is a walk through of the various screens in AX 2012 in each phase of the employee life cycle management in an organization. This post will help customers looking for Human resource management capabilities of AX 2012.

Recruitment:

View application that have just arrived and approve if the applicant meets the job requirements.

• See application details
• See job advertise details and media that has been put in place for the recruitment

Automatic transition of applicant’s Skill details to the employee profile when the applicant transitions to worker/employee of the organization.

In case recruiter finds that none of the external applicants are good enough to meet the specific job requirements, then they can setup and run skills mapping profile to find out all the people who are already in the organization. System can search among all the applicants, existing workers and the company contacts.

Good thing is, AX 2012 does not just does the search in the current logged in company but searches in the whole organization.

Run a result report to see all the individuals available inside the organization who can fit into the job.

Hire workers:

Screen the final applicant, interview, email, and create and send Offer.

Hire worker right from the Application screen after offer is sent and candidate accepts the offer..

Manage your workforce:

On board resource, administer the new hires into the company, setup compensation eligibility, benefits, pay rates etc.

Employee transitions management:

Manage the transitions of roles and positions of employees within the organization easily staying at one common worker master form.

Retirement:

Terminate workers and be able to keep track of all their employment history and list of past workers.

These were a little about the overall capabilities of AX 2012 for efficient human resource management. Yet another powerfully simple functionality of AX 2012.

Thanks

Keep DAXING 

AX running slow while opening 'Settle open transactions'.

AX running slow while opening 'Settle open transactions'.

- Make sure there are no Blocks by running 'EXEC SP_Who' and clear the blocks when use see session ID on 'Blk by'
- If the issue still exists, check the query plan and get the bad query
- run 'update statistics with full Scan' on the tables query is using.

This should fix the problem. Otherwise, go to tables manually and run 'Rebuilt' and 'Reorganize' by right + clicking the table.

Example : UPDATE STATISTICS tablename     WITH FULLSCAN

Item approval workflow AX 2012

There are a lot of workflow templates that are delivered with Dynamics AX 2012, but that doesn't mean that those are the only ones that you can use.  Developing new workflow templates and actions are pretty straight forward and you can easily extend out the system to incorporate other workflow scenarios that have not been added yet.

In this blueprint we will work through one example and show you how you can develop your own workflow process for product approvals that allow you to submit, track and approve the product review process.

Here are all of the topics that are included in this blueprint:

1. Create a New Development Project for your Workflow Development
2. Create a Menu Item for the Product Management Workflows
3. Add the Workflow Editor Menu Item to the Product Area Page
4. Create a New Workflow Category for Your Product Management Workflows
5. Create a Base Enumeration to Track the Approval Status
6. Add the Approval Status Field to the Product Table
7. Adding the Approval Status to the Released Products Form
8. Add a canSubmitToWorkflow Method to the Table to Enable Workflows
9. Create a Query on the Products Table for the Workflows to Reference
10. Create a Workflow Type Using the Workflow Wizard
11. Create A Simple Product Approval Workflow
12. Enabling Workflow Submission on the Product Details Form
13. Updating the Submission Manager Method to Start the Workflow
14. Relabel the Workflow Submission Menu Items
15. Update the Completed Method on the Approval Event Handler
16. Using the Tutorial Workflow Processor to Process Workflows
17. Performing the Workflow Approval through the Dynamics AX Forms

In this walkthrough we showed how you can create your own workflow templates and activities.  The product approval process could easily be extended out to include more steps and approvals for the products, allowing for it to be used for new product introduction and development.

This does not just have to apply to product approvals though, you can use exactly the same process to create workflow templates for the approval of other areas where the approval processes may be needed such as Customer, Vendors and BOMS.  All you need to do is change the base tables and forms that are being referenced and the process will be almost identical.

You can also extend out the approval logic to update more information through the workflows like flags for allowing the use of the record after it has been activated, and also incorporating information that has been gathered during the process.  If you want to get really creative, you can even create custom workflow elements that incorporate other technologies like Outlook for the creation of tasks and appointments.

Don't be afraid to create new workflow templates, once you have built them, then they will provide a much better way to streamline your business processes, and the hour or so that you spend creating them will be recouped quickly by the removal of the manual workarounds that would have been used without them.

If you want to view the original post which may have additional content then click here.

Create new client Configuration for a Specific layer

This post will guide you through the steps to create a new AX client config file for a specific layer in AX 2012 R3. 

1.     Click Start > Administrative Tools > Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Configuration to open the Microsoft Dynamics AX Configuration Utility.

2.     Click Manage > Create configuration. The Create Configuration window is displayed.

3.     Enter a name for the configuration, and then click OK. The configuration is created.

4.     Click the Connection tab.

5.     Verify that the server name, instance name, and port information for the Application Object Server (AOS) are correct.

• If it is not correct you can click Edit and change it as needed.
• If there is no server information, click on Add and type in the correct information (Server name is the AOS server)

6.     Click the Developer tab.

7.     Select the Application object layer to open. (USR should be used for user access). Also, we need to provide Development license code for the specific layer(CUS layer in my case).

8.     Click Refresh to update the configuration.

9.     Click Manage > Export configuration to file. The Export Configuration window is displayed.

10.     Save the configuration to your preferred location.

steps to access printers on AOS server

Note. This article is for the setup of the demo hyper-v environment and shouldn’t be applied to production Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3 configurations. Obviously you must not muck about with the configuration of your live Dynamics AX environment unless you know what you’re doing, and probably not even then.

The label setup for the new Warehouse management module allows you to define label formats and printers.

Go to Warehouse management > Setup > Document routing > Document routing. Click on New in the Document routing printers fast tab and you’ll notice that the Printer name drop-list is blank:

The reason for this is given in this Technet article, quote “By default, users cannot print documents or reports from a printer connected to a Microsoft Dynamics AX Application Object Server (AOS). You must enable printing in the AOS and client configuration files, as defined in this topic.”

You need to change the AOS configuration file and the client configuration. I’ve logged into the demo hyper-v as ‘admin’ (not administrator) but I’m not entirely sure that that’s necessary. Open the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Server Configuration program by navigating to the start menu and searching for it:

You should see:

The ‘Original (installed configuration) can’t be changed, so Manage > Create configuration; give your configuration and name; and click OK:

Now you can see that we are working in your new configuration, and we can tick the ‘Allow clients to connect to printers on this server’ checkbox:

Click Apply and the system prompts us to restart the AOS:

Click Yes and the system tells you that it’s stopping, and later starting, the AOS. The AOS can take too long to start and you might receive a warning message that you must restart the service manually from the Control panel > Administrative tools > Services, but by the time you get there, the AOS will have started:

The next step is to set the client configuration. This time we need the Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 Configuration utility:

This should give you:

Same deal as before, we need a new configuration. Click on Manage > Create configuration; give your configuration and name and click OK:

Now we want the Connection tab, and to tick the ‘Connect to printers on the server’ checkbox:

Click Apply and OK and you’re done.

Open Dynamics AX, and back in the Document routing form you’ll see the admin user’s shared printers (the AOS is running as ‘admin’):

Incidentally that default ‘Label’ printer is setup to print to text files, the text file location is shown in the printer’s ‘Printer properties’. So far I haven’t had any success in changing that:

SQL Query to Mark Purchase Orders with Production Orders

Update PRODBOM set InventRefId = purchTable.PurchID , InventRefTransID  = PurchTable.InventTransID where PRODBOM.ProdID = 'xxxxx' and PRODBOM.INVENTTRANSID = 'xxxxx'

Update Purchline set InventRefId = prodBOM.ProdId , InventRefTransID = prodBOM.InventTransID where Purchline.PurchID  = 'xxxx' and PURCHLINE.INVENTTRANSID = 'xxxx'

Example:

-- Need to update InventRefId = 'PO-00396604' and InventRefTransID  = 'LOT-078665474' on ProdBOM with Purchline data (PurchId, InventTransID)
-- Need to update InventRefId = 'WO-00605046' and InventRefTransID = 'LOT-078665467' on Purchline with ProdBOM data (ProdId, InventTransID)"

Installing Platform update on a Disconnected Local Developer Virtual Machine

Steps to Install Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations Platform Update on Local Developer or a Demo VM

Microsoft is doing a pretty good job with their docs site where they have listed the instructions on how to do a PU on Cloud and disconnected VMs. Have a look at the link below

Apply the latest platform update to your Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations environment

My post supplements Microsoft's documentation and additionally it lists down the steps with some more details and screenshots and towards the end of this post, you will notice how I validated and verified if my PU installation was successfully done.

a.       Download the latest platform update package (zip) file from LCS

b.       Go to LCS >  Your Project and then navigate to Asset Library by clicking on the breadcrumb bar

c.       Once you are in the Asset Library page, click on Software deployable package as shown above.           will start downloading the package. Note it’s around 700 MB so it might take 5 to 10 mins 

       depending on your bandwidth, to download.

d.       Once it’s downloaded copy the Platformupdate.zip file into your local vm and Extract the zip                file to your local drive (I created a folder called PlatformUpdate11)

e.       Next, Open the DefaultTopologydata.xml file from E:\PlatformUpdate11\AXPlatformUpdate
          Replace the machine name from the localhost to your VM name

f. 

g.     Open command prompt from the VM (as Admin), and then navigate to the Extracted folder to run the command AxUpdateInstaller.exe list (This will help to determine the components and their versions which are installed on your local dev box)

h.      

    Prepare the string for <ServiceModelList> as shown below

<ServiceModelList>

        <string>AOSService</string>

        <string>ALMService</string>

        <string>BIService</string>

        <string>DevToolsService</string>

        <string>DIXFService</string>

        <string>MROneBox </string>

        <string>PayrollTaxModule</string>

        <string>PerfSDK</string>

        <string>ReportingService</string>

        <string>RetailCloudPos</string>

        <string>RetailHQConfiguration</string>

        <string>RetailSDK</string>

        <string>RetailSelfService</string>

        <string>RetailServer</string>

        <string>RetailStorefront</string>

        <string>SCMSelfService</string>

</ServiceModelList>

i.         Your final DefaultTopologyData.xml should look as below:

       

j.        Generate the runbook

AXUpdateInstaller.exe generate -runbookid="LocalDev-runbook" -topologyfile="DefaultTopologyData.xml" -servicemodelfile="DefaultServiceModelData.xml" -runbookfile="LocalDev-runbook.xml"

k.       Import the runbook file

AXUpdateInstaller.exe import -runbookfile="LocalDev-runbook.xml"

l.        Verify the runbook file

AXUpdateInstaller.exe list

       Execute the runbook

AXUpdateInstaller.exe execute -runbookid="LocalDev-runbook"

This will take some time as it starts executing each of the steps in the runbook.

The most time consuming step as per my observation is backup of the AOS Service

After 15 to 20 mins, it will come up with a message Everything is OK and will be static for more than 15 mins, but don’t abort it, still the scripts are running in the background, Let it finish.

After 2.5 hours, it progressed to the next Step 27

Once you notice, The step completed message and it comes back to the prompt, that means all the steps in runbook are executed and now you can move on to the next command

n.      Export the runbook

AXUpdateInstaller.exe export -runbookid="LocalDev-runbook" -runbookfile="LocalDev-runbook.xml"

Exporting the runbook will be useful for future references:

o    For e.g. to analyze the downtime requirements for production, and so on.

o    To send the file to Microsoft in the event of failure to install a deployable package.

o.      Verify if the components are updated correctly.

Run AxUpdateInstaller.exe list command and see the updated components. Note the difference in version numbers

Update 11:

p.       

    Also note, your Visual Studio Extension for D365 gets automatically updated as part of the Update 11

How to check new VS Extension:

Open Visual Studio -> Go to Help > About Visual Studio and check in installed Products list. We should be able to see the latest version of the VS Extension – Dynamics 365 Unified Operations Platform 7.0.4679.3516

Check the update PU 11 version from the browser:

That's all for now. Hope it gives you an idea on how to do a PU Update on a Local Developer's VM. Note, each PU Update may have slight differences here and there, so I always recommend to visit the Microsoft docs site to get the up-to-date documentation before you perform these steps.