Creating a Kanban Manufacturing Rule

The final piece that needs to be configured within the Lean Manufacturing process is a Kanban Manufacturing Rule which tells the system how to create your Kanban events that are associated with the your Production Flows. These events could be inventory movements, or production of product, and can be triggered by multiple scenarios within the Dynamics AX.

NOTE: This is part of the Configuring Lean Manufacturing blueprint series where we show how to configure production processes using the Lean Manufacturing functionality that is built into Dynamics AX 2012.. If you want to see all of the other posts in this series, click here.

How to do it…

To create a simple Kanban Manufacturing Rule that automatically creates Kanban production events whenever a sales order is created, follow these steps:

1. From the Production Control area page, select the Kanban rules menu item from the Lean manufacturing folder within the Setup group.
2. When the Kanban rules maintenance form is displayed, click on the Kanban rule button within the New group of the Setup ribbon bar.
   
3. Select the type of Kanban event that you want to create from the Type dropdown. In this example we will select the Manufacture option.
   
4. Then from the Replenishment strategy field, select the type of way that you want to initiate the Kanban. In this example we will choose Event because we want this to be triggered from a Sales Order being placed.
   
5. If the Multiple activities check box is checked, uncheck it, because we don’t want to chain activities together in this example.
6. From the First plan activity drop down, select the activity that we defined against the Production Flow in the earlier steps.
   
7. Within the Details tab, select the product that you want to manufacture as part of the Kanban Manufacturing step, and enter it into the Product field.
   
8. Within the Quantities tab, you can also set the Maximum quantity field to be the increment size for the planning and scheduling. I am setting this to 1 so that I can see every product that I need to plan at the each level. If you want to plan the production Kanbans at the order quantity level, then you can leave the value at 0.
   
9. Within the Events tab, you will be able to select the Sales event type. This is the method that will trigger the Kanban. I selected Automatic in this example because I want the orders to show up on the Kanban planning board automatically when the orders are placed.
   
10. Once you have completed the setup, then you can click the Close button to exit out of the form.

Note: If you select the Automatic option for the Sales event, then it will give you a small warning, but you can ignore it.

How it Works…

Now that we have defined our Work Centers, our Production Flows, and our Kanban Rules we can start placing orders and we will see the orders automatically being sent to our Kanban Scheduling board.

All we need to do in the system is create a Sales order for the product that we have defined the Kanban Sales Event for, and save the line.

Then, from the Production Control area page, select the Kanban Scheduling board menu item from the Lean manufacturing folder within the Common group.

The lines from the order will automatically show up on the scheduling board, and will be waiting to be scheduled.