Announcement: Warehouse Mobile Devices Portal improvements with February update of AX 2012 R3

A monthly cadence AX 2012 R3 update for February has just come out on LCS, and with it a few changes our team has done that deal with overall behavior and performance of WMDP - the Warehouse Mobile Devices Portal used in the Advanced warehousing module.

I want to call them out here, and if you are reading my blog to keep up to date with the Warehousing changes, I strongly encourage you to install the below changes:

• A functional enhancement, that allows you to start execution of a work order that has some lines awaiting demand replenishment, processing the lines that can be picked already now
• Can also be downloaded individually as KB3205828
• Make sure to pair it up with KB3209909, if you use the Full button when executing work
• You can read more about the functionality in my earlier blog post: http://kashperuk.blogspot.dk/2016/11/tutorial-link-executing-outbound-work.html
• A performance optimization, that avoids updating certain persisted counters on the wave when work goes through its stages. 
• This also ensures they do not get out of sync, as they were used to make certain decisions about what is allowed for a work order
• Can also be downloaded individually as KB3217157
• An integrity enhancement, that ensures we always are in a valid state in DB, where each service call from WMDP is now executed within a single transaction scope
• Can also be downloaded individually as KB3210293
• Can be turned off in code for a selected WHSWorkExecuteDisplay* class, if needed
• This is a great change ensuring we do not commit any data unless all went well, but might hypothetically impact your new/modified WMDP flows, if you handle your exceptions incorrectly today. If you do find issues with them, please let me know, I am curious to know your specific examples.
• Various minor enhancements, that ensure WMDP performs well under load
• Can also be downloaded individually as KB3210293
• This includes improvements to enable better concurrency in various WMDP scenarios, better error handling on user entry, etc.

Again, install these, try them out, and provide feedback!

There are a lot more enhancements and bug fixes that went into this release, you can read the full list by following the link below:

https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/dynamicsaxse/2017/03/01/february-release-dynamics-ax-2012-r3/

Thanks!

Tutorial Link: Executing outbound work with pending demand replenishment work

Introduction

In Dynamics 365 for Operations we solved one of the long-standing complaints, where large work orders could not be started because of pending replenishment. A typical workaround then would be to artificially broke down the replenishment lines into a separate work order, so workers can do the picking for the majority of stuff. Then of course you'd get into problems with merging the two (or more) Target LPs onto one (which we now also support - see my previous blog post).

Read the feature description and and walk through a sample flow on our SCM blog:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dynamicsaxscm/2016/11/04/processing-work-that-is-awaiting-demand-replenishment/

For those on AX 2012 R3

We have not back-ported this feature to AX 2012 R3 yet. We have it in the backlog, but no ETA for when that will happen.

Update: This is now available on LCS under KB3205828

Feedback

We'd love to hear your feedback on this feature if you are going to use it in your production environments.