Microsoft is unleashing more great functionalities with AX2012-R3 and now it is becoming more powerful player in the ERP segment. Definitely the improvements for the Retail segment are most awaiting and game changing things which attract the global retailers.
Who wouldn’t be interested to go on with a single ERP system that handles entire Business process, back office duties, most advanced Retail POS and packed with the Omni channel experience to the customers?
Now, it definitely sounds great to project Dynamics AX as “Next generation ERP system”.
How ready we are with AX-Retail? Are we in a position to pitch into the retail implementations?
Below page talks about some highlights of AX2012-Retail with successful customer implementations.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics/retail.aspx
As I found there is a need to build the skills on AX2012 retail, I wanted to take you with me in my journey of AX retail. As I did in my previous blogs, I continue to demonstrate the end result with a clear demonstration that gives satisfied learning experience.
In today’s post, I will give you a start up on using Dynamics AX for retail.
AX-Retail terminology:
Head office: From where the organization operates all its retail stores located in different geographical locations of the country.
Retails store:
A store that is geographically located at a particular place. In a city, if a retailer has 3 outlets these are nothing but Retail stores in AX.
POS Register:
At each store, there would be number of billing terminals which are POS terminals.
Let’s have a quick look at the retail database diagram as that crucial to work with Retail.
Each store has a “Store data base” where the AX-database’s replica (almost) will be available. Each POS can also work offline with an offline database at the POS.
POS register can record the customer transactions and data can be pushed to the store data base. From store database, using the synch services, the data can be pushed to the Dynamics AX database.
Main thing to focus is, there is lot of data push and pull operations would need to be performed at the retail side to transfer data from stores database to Headquarters and vice versa.
Examples of the data that should be transferred between store and headquarters:
- Sales data that is recorded at POS must be transferred to Head quarters
– Payment data and product receipts data that is recorded at POS.
– New Products that need to be released to stores.
– New store personnel data and credentials
– Offers and schemes related data that should be applied to stores and POS
POS configuration:
First understand that “To which store your POS is going to connect to”.
Click Start> Type “Retail” choose the Retail database utility and click the program that appears.
You will see the POS configuration.
Above screen shot shows, our Point of sale system (POS) connected to a store called “S001” which is from the Legal entity “CEU” and the POS register ID is “0101”.
Note: If you have another data set, you might see the “USRT” company and related stores in your POS configuration.
Let’s have a look at the Headquarter data:
Go to Retail/Common/Retail channels/Retail stores to see the different Retail stores of the company.
- Each store will be linked to a warehouse
– Store has a default customer account where all the transactions of onetime customers would get posted to the default customer account.
Go to Retail>Setup>POS Register to see the POS registers in the store “S001”
POS register is linked with a “Store” and thus POS terminal gets the properties from the store.
A few examples on what flows from stores to POS
- List of products
– POS screen layout
– Employees who can login to the POS
As I mentioned it is just a start up on Retail. In my next post, I will take you through the below scenario.
Scenario: How the employees gain access to POS terminal. How to see the list of store personnel who are connected to a store, reset the password of a specific user and how to get the changes reflected during the POS login.
Here are a few links for Retail resources:
Functional documents for AX2012 Retail:
A blog that has links for retails resources and some good blogs:
http://ax-retail.com/documentation-ax-2012-r2-for-retail-and-pos/
Till next post, Keep DAXing!
