Master Planning and Shelf Life

There is functionality within Dynamics 365 Finance and Operation which allows you to plan for material expiring before being used. In addition to tracking the shelf life of products and materials, it can help enable you in planning for the future to ensure that your organization isn’t accumulating excess waste. Below is a brief illustration of how this functionality can be used from setup to the overall results.

Shelf Life Setup

Product Dimension group

To enable items to be shelf-life controlled, the item must be tracked at the batch dimension. This means the batch reference and the required dates are recorded upon receipt or manufacture and through every inventory transaction of the item. In the Contoso company on the demo database, I used the Tracking dimension group of “Batch-Phy” to exemplify this feature. This is the period, in days, that you want to check the item to ensure the product is re-sellable. It is added to the manufacturing date to determine the Shelf advice date. Quality orders can be configured to automatically generate when the product approaches its advice date.

Shelf life period in days

This is the number of days before the product expires. The days are added to the manufacture date to derive the expiry date. This is truly the date the product while be considered unworthy to sell.

Best before period in days

This is the period in days, that the item is deemed sellable but may not retain its original properties. It is subtracted from the expiry date to calculate the Best before date. Reports can be run identifying the inventory past the Sell by date.

Master Planning Parameters

The Master plan parameters needs Use shelf life dates activated. This will cause master planning to create a planned order when the inventory is due to be expired.

Background Information

The item we are going to illustrate is purchased. It has a 5-day lead time. It has a minimum stock level of 75 against a warehouse and has a requirement coverage code. This means there is a 1:1 relationship between the demand and any supply needed. The warehouse has three batches of 25 each. Each batch has its own expiry date.

Master planning results

So now when master planning runs, even though we are not projected to use any inventory, it creates a planned order because the item is below the minimum when each lot expires. It will work the same in any master planning scenario; basically, treating the expired stock as demand which it needs to supply. If you’re interested in learning more or enabling this feature, please Contact Us for more details and feel free to connect with us on LinkedIn and Twitter!