Dynamics 365 Business Central: Track & Trace

Dynamics 365 Business Central: Track & Trace

For today we are going to talk about Item tracing or inventory tracing, if you have problems with inventory and someone calls you and gives you a lot number, you should be able to trace that lot number to where you bought it from and them possibly do a recall or something like that. For example, if we pick a batch of coffee, this coffee that we bought, its Inecta’s kitchen, we have an enormous amount of coffee here. And on here should be a lot number where I could read an find out who bought it and all the information about this product. If the tracing was done properly, I could probably figure out from what field this was grown, which would be amazing. But for right now, we would just go into NAV or Business Central and see how item tracing works. Similarly, you might have a food product, you also have pills, pills have lot numbers as well.  

Item tracing
Let's talk about item tracing, I am here in Business Central, in the item list. I’ve created an item called coffee beans if I click on that and take a look at how it was created. I did pretty much the same thing as I did with the other items, except I added something called lot all in the item tracking code, so what lot all does, it allows you to specify that this item is tracked by using lot codes, it is tracked everywhere. Meaning that for purchase, for sale, for transfer, anywhere in the system you must specify the lot number you are working with. I created a number sequence called LOT for the lot number so when I'm actually receiving inventory it automatically assigns the lot.   

If I close this out and go ahead into purchase orders, I’m going to create a new purchase order and receive a lot. I am going to buy it from the Frabrikam and I just look up my coffee beans, get it into the main location. We are going to get 30 bags for 5 dollars. Put in the invoice number to the vendor and just go ahead and process and post. It complains now, it says, hey you didn’t give me lot number for this, so ok, let me fix that, so if I go into more options, line, item tracking line. Then I can specify the lot number for this item that I’m receiving. And I can actually go into actions functions, assign lot number and it gives me the next lot number in my number sequence. Just assigns that, I could have typed in a number here as well. I just close that out. Now I’m going to try again to post this like so. Receive an invoice and hopefully, everything went well.   

Let's go ahead and sell this, just to show you. that we have to do the same thing in the sales order. I’m going to go ahead here and I’m going to sell to the Adatum corporation, we are going to pick the item number, coffee beans from the main location. We are going to sell 10 for 12 dollars. We go in here and now we want to specify which lot number we are selling out of. If I go in here into more options, functions. I have to go into related information, item tracking items, right here then I get a screen where I can specify the lot number that I’m selling out on.   

List of lot numbers
If I click on the three dots here, I get a list of lot numbers that I have and I actually happen to have two lot numbers, I did buy this item before we started this demo. So, I have a lot number #1 and lot number #2. This is a good example of doing that you could have many lot numbers here. I’m going to pick the lot number 2, close that out. Ten are going out of here, and now I just go into posting post.

Now, the point of this video was, of course, to show you that lot numbers are cool, and you can use them anywhere in the items. But how do we actually trace them? we have everything lot tracked, what is the point unless we can trace what happened? I can actually get into the item here and take a look at actions and there is something called item tracing here.

If I click on item tracing, I hopefully can type the lot number right. I can type in Lot, I think its 3 zeros.Then click actions, trace. Then we can see everything that happened to this lot number. You can see that we actually bought it on a purchase header 10711 and then we sold it on this shipment header. We bought 30, we sold 10, so we have 20 left. It's tracing this lot number, this lot number could have been moved around on a transfer order, they could have been from one location to another, it could have been into production and out of production and it would have worked fine.

Similarly, I can look at lot number 1, which has a very similar trace, you can see that was also bought and sold for 20 and 17, etc. That’s how item tracing works in business central. If you have any lot tracked items, you can basically lookup everything that happened to that item using item tracing.