Trade and Source are important aspects of Microsoft Dynamics that must be known if you want to attain the maximum benefit from your Microsoft Dynamics ERP for your business. In the following article I have tried explaining the two concepts and how they work in Microsoft Dynamics. Read on to know.
Microsoft Dynamics provides an all-in-one solution through giving you real-time connectivity within your business. Trade and Source are important aspects of Microsoft Dynamics and need to be known to use it to its maximum potential.
Trade
The Trade module of Microsoft Dynamics can be used to integrate purchasing processes and sales with other vital functional areas of an organization including master planning and CRM, application integration framework, financials, warehouse management, production and logistics. The salient features of this module are:
- Delivering better customer service through a range of sales processes that are more efficient
- Reducing costs through optimizing and supporting the warehousing and purchasing processes.
- Enhancing customer and supplier relationships through trade agreements.
- Trading seamlessly with subsidiaries through the software’s ability to manage intercompany orders, all within one system.
- Achieving improved cost control through greater visibility into accurate inventory valuation and cost prices.
Sources
Sources are an important aspect of trade agreement in Microsoft Dynamics and, they come into consideration when populating the result field in a trade agreement. In essence, the result fields of a trade agreements are filled using different sources. Sources can be divided into multiple groups, some of which are guarded by policies. They include:
- Trade agreements, which has been a legacy feature of Microsoft Dynamics, ever since it came into existence. It’s a price-discount setup and and is considered to default source in a default scenario, where the user updates or creates a document from the User Interface directly. No Trade Agreement Evaluation (TAE) policies are applied in such a scenario though.
- Manual input, where a manual-type TAE policy is imposed to prevent the user from overwriting an input already entered into a particular trade agreement field.
- System sources, where documents are updated or created using means other than the ones used in the default scenario. The resources referred to update or create such documents could either be copied from other documents or imported via AIF. In this source group, a system-type TAE policy is imposed to prevent overwriting of values in one or more result fields of trade agreements.
- Sales and purchasing agreements can also be considered as sources for discounts and prices, including the legacy feature of trade agreements. The sales and purchasing agreement feature can serve as a source in basically two ways. They include:
- For as long as a documents are linked to agreements, the agreements will serve as a system source. A group of fixed TAE policies is imposed to prevent values from being overwritten in such a scenario.
- Even if documents are unlinked from their respective agreements, the discounts and prices that originate from the agreements can be preserved. Hence, the agreements continue to serves as sources and TAE policies are applied accordingly.
If you wish to learn more about Microsoft Dynamics modules, consider enrolling yourself for AX 2012 Finance Training or Ax 2012 POS Training or AX 2012 Trade and Logistics Training, etc. They’ll help you get the maximum from your Microsoft Dynamics ERP.
Have thoughts or opinions to share? Post them in the comments below; I’d love to hear from you as well.
