What’s New in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R2 for Product Information Management

This blog post describes some of the enhancements to the Product Information Management (PIM)
area that have been implemented in the R2 release after the launch of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 (RTM).

Discovering the small secrets of the Authorized by
company fact box

Yes, it almost qualifies as an Easter egg! If you resize the Authorized by company fact box in R2, you will find a new column by the end of the grid, and in this column you’ll find the item number that identifies the product within its legal entity.


 
 
This field saves you the hassle of first having to select the company and then the More link to be able to right-click on the Item number field in order to jump to the details of the product in the specific legal entity. Since these fields are part of a grid, you can of course drag the Item number field closer to the company field and thereby have a smaller FactBox with the direct link.

This allows you to jump directly to the record and continue the setup process for the product, with the option to use templates.

And speaking of templates…

“Catching” the process fields in templates

With the addition of the Process Industry (PI) solution, a lot of new functionality and product characteristics have been enabled. A small subset of the fields that were added with the solution brought about some minor issues and especially the question of whether a field was a catch weight item or not has caused some confusion.
These issues have now been resolved in order to unblock the procedure.

Enhancing the product services

If you rely on some of your products to be created via AIF services, you will find a couple of updates to the services.

Firstly, the PI characteristics have been added to the released product services, allowing you to read and write product definitions.

Secondly, a much requested field such as the default order type has been added to the released product service. This allows you to indicate whether the product should be purchased or produced or if it should use Kanban.

And thirdly, the product and product master dimension value services have been updated to offer full CRUD support.