Business Problem

Microsoft Dynamics Ax 2009 has a gap in functionality with regard to order management for repair orders.  MDSi has several equipment repair and configuration labs on site.  Customer equipment can be staged and configured or physically repaired and reconditioned.  While Microsoft Dynamics Ax 2009 does provide some of the functionality required to perform in-house repairs, it falls short in supporting the expanded workflow of a repair lab.  Repair orders needed to be tracked, labor costs tracked, and part/item inventory locations need to be updated in Ax to reflect where the parts are located based on workflow transactions.  For example, if a repair technician brings a part to his/her workstation and marks the repair line as in process, Ax needs to be updated to reflect the inventory has been transferred to the repair technicians ‘bin location’.

Solution

The solution was to fill the gap with a Silverlight 4.0 line of business application that will provide a simple user interface that allows warehouse workers and technicians to simply change the status of a repair line.  The application will perform the necessary inventory movement journal transactions to move the part from staging bins to in process and finally to complete warehouse bins.  If a part is successfully repaired a sales order is generated to allow for the invoicing of the repair.  If the repair cannot be completed, a disposal order is created.

All repair orders show in the main view.  Users can filter or group using the data grid.  From this view the user can also view the repair lines of a repair order and edit the details of a repair order.

Creating or editing a repair order is accomplished through the screen above.

Editing the details of a repair line displays a modal view.

Warehouse personnel can pick the repair lines that are awaiting staging.  The above view shows all the repair lines that were picked by user dsandor.  From here, the user can print repair labels for the items and post the items.  When the user posts the items it indicates to the repair technicians that there are parts in the ‘inbound’ repair staging bin location.  Technicians will retrieve the items from the staging location and indicate the part is now ‘in repair’ which transfers the part in Ax to the tech’s bin location.

This project was developed in Silverlight 4.0 and C#.  It leverages WCF Services and SQL Server 2008 R2 T-SQL Stored Procedures to query data from Microsoft Dynamics Ax 2009.  Create, Update, and Delete operations are performed by interfacing with the .NET Business Connector for Dynamics Ax.  The application uses the MVVM design pattern and was developed in little over one week.