What’s New in AX 7?
According to Dan Brown, Microsoft Dynamics AX R&D’s general manager, Dynamics AX 7 will make available new key elements, including:
- a new browser-based interface, which will replace the current Windows Client; this basically means that Dynamics AX capabilities will be available via new “work spaces,” promoting remote access across a variety of device platforms for enhanced collaboration;
- superior user experience that will be delivered via the context-sensitive Windows 8 framework, based on the HTML5 technology;
- first-class lifecycle management offered by Microsoft partners for Microsoft Dynamics AX 7 currently in production on Azure; deployed based on a single-tenant model, AX 7 will use Azure IaaS (infrastructure as a service) and SQL Azure’s DaaS (database as a service), which perfectly fit the needs of most AX users, especially in terms of scalability and disaster recovery.
By using Dynamics AX in conjunction with Citrix, your organization may benefit from lower processing costs. It’s also worth mentioning that the first elements of Microsoft Dynamics AX 7 will be released this autumn, as a cumulative update (CU) for AX 2012 R3.
The upcoming cumulative update for Dynamics AX, commonly referred to as CU8, will include new features, hotfixes, and regulatory updates, which are expected to increase business efficiency, flexibility, and availability.
The new capabilities have been developed to simplify the user-system interaction for better decision-making, business conceptualization, and license/deployment estimation. A simplified yet more interactive user-system interaction also delivers one of the reasons why the Dynamics AX development team has already moved most of the development tasks to Microsoft Visual Studio.
Dynamics AX 2013 R3 CU8 will mainly revolve around manufacturing and distribution, making available more product variants, automatic batch reservation along with order processing and consolidation, superior warehouse and retail integration, and streamlined payroll processes.
What do all these mean to you?
If you’re a manufacturer, the new capabilities will enable you to use the same product specifications, formulas, and recycled materials to develop other products. This can be especially useful in metal forming and plastic molding projects, for example, where metal scrap and plastic regrind recovered from previous processes are reused. To help manufacturers handle the cost of recycled materials, new features will allow users to include a “Recycled” section and calculate final costs based on the standard cost value of materials.
You can also use different by-products in your manufacturing processes. Thanks to a few special functions, you’ll be able to select “By-product”, which will make possible BOMs (bills of materials) for output and indicate the “by-product” production type.
A really great aspect is that the new cumulative updates along with Dynamics AX 7 will allow users to selectively implement the capabilities they want and need. Since the system will install only the codes of the updates selected, it will complete fewer processes. As expected, this will improve server/application response time and reduce service disruption.
But Dynamics AX 7 promises to deliver much more. Enhanced manufacturing and warehouse operations, improved rate and route planning, incredible enterprise manageability, greater mobility, embedded radio frequency, and superior omni-channel shopping experience for customers are just a few elements included in the new “dynamic business” model developed by Microsoft. By choosing Dynamics AX 7, you’ll benefit from an intuitive yet simple ERP solution, which will add more and more value to every interaction between you and your customers.