Above all, customers benefit from Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations because it helps coordinate and consolidate people, data, and processes. In the spirit of continuous improvement, Microsoft releases new functionality for asset management for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations. Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) was formerly Dynaway’s Asset Management solution. EAM will now be available within Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations and supported by Microsoft. This Microsoft investment is great news to our customers and prospects since it adds tremendous value for those customers who need to plan and predict asset maintenance. I have been requesting this functionality for several years since it's really the last piece of functionality that Dynamics 365 (formerly Dynamics AX) has been missing! If you have been looking for reasons to upgrade from your Dynamics AX 2009 or 2012, the addition of Asset and Plant Maintenance should be one more reason to make the move.
Maintenance asset supervisors efficiently manage requests, work orders, cost, forecasts and much more with EAM. Microsoft plans to accommodate 4 basic types of asset management with future functionality including condition, corrective, predictive and preventative work orders. The controlled preview will be available through the early access program in July 2019 as indicated in Microsoft’s release notes found here.
What to expect with EAM for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations
According to this article “Enterprise Asset Management in Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations” by Muhammed Ala, the General Manager for Dynamics 365, the “EAM capabilities customers will see in Dynamics 365 include:
- Asset tracking to track asset hierarchies and their locations and manage the complete lifecycle of the asset.
- Preventive maintenance for tracking, managing, and monitoring the maintenance needs of an asset based on the manufacturer’s recommendations.
- Predictive maintenance uses machine learning models to enable preventive maintenance based on EAM data.
- Work order management and scheduling offers the option to plan (automatically or manually) based on key parameters such as worker capacity, availability, or work order criticality.
- Integrated planning combined with production job scheduling helps with decision-making when machine repairs are needed.
- Spare parts tracking to effectively manage inventory.
- Cost control to make it easy to manage the estimated and actual cost of maintenance.
- Out-of-box insights (KPIs) provide a rich set of analytics to measure an asset’s effectiveness using uptime, downtime, repairs, mean time between failures, mean time between stops, and mean repair time.”
Microsoft Dynamics 365 takes EAM to the modern level
In this article, Ala states “Organizations are moving at an ever-increasing pace towards digital transformation by taking advantage of new and emerging trends such as industrial IoT, AI, mobile, predictive analytics, and mixed reality applications. Assets within these organizations are becoming increasingly interconnected, providing in many cases real-time signals not just about their operations, but also about the health of the assets themselves. This combined with deep machine learning, predictive analytics, and mixed reality (MR) is reshaping the future of EAM. With this IP acquisition, our plan is to launch an AI-enhanced, transformative EAM solution by bringing together the best of what Microsoft provides in Dynamics 365, Power Apps, Power BI, IoT, MR applications, and Machine Learning. This EAM solution complements our existing Dynamics 365 for Field Service application that provides a modern, connected solution for organizations that manage assets in customer locations.”
Still have questions? We can help!
Clients First has seven locations across the U.S.A. Two of our locations focus on Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (formerly Dynamics AX) and Acumatica. We have been working with Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations since its inception in 1998. We are a Microsoft Gold ERP Partner and a Certified Cloud Service Provider (CSP).
While our focus is on Manufacturing, Supply Chain, and Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) for Aviation and Heavy Equipment, we have customers in other industries, too, so please reach out to us to learn more!
Email: Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota or Dallas/Fort Worth, Texas, or call us at 800.331.8382.
