Dynamics NAV 2018: what’s new?

Microsoft releases a new version of Dynamics NAV on a yearly basis. The release of Dynamics NAV 2018 was on December 1. What’s new? We also provide new functions within our software solutions, and have new functions in development.

Boltrics developments

Voice picking
Simultaneously with the release of Dynamics NAV 2018, Boltrics has added the integration option with Vocollect from Honeywell for voice picking within 3PL/Nekovri Dynamics. How does it work? Pretty simple. Order your voice terminals and headset via Honeywell. And Boltrics will ensure that bi-directional communication will be enabled between the hardware and your WMS. Fully tailored to your needs. And that without the need for customization.
How does it work for your warehouse employees? From the WMS you send your warehouse employees the relevant instructions for the products to be picked and the most efficient pick route. With each action, your employee informs the system directly what has been picked. Does it occur your employee picked a wrong product, box or pallet? Then he/she will immediately receive feedback from the system to pick the right products. This way you can ensure that your colleagues in the warehouse can work faster and make fewer mistakes – simply because they have their hands free.

Purchase and sales orders with grouping criteria
With purchase and sales orders you have the possibility to group or to call these on demand. For example, you can register multiple goods in/out from one purchase order. Simply link back the receipts related to the central purchase order number. When looking at the process of outbound, you can think of creating multiple sales orders that are linked to one receipt. If required, 3PL/Nekovri Dynamics can automatically do this for you by means of (self-)specified grouping criteria. For example, the system automatically links sales orders to one receipt based on delivery date, a specific customer and/or a specific address or region.
3PL/Nekovri Dynamics already supported the possibility to link multiple goods in/out to one order. With the new release, the software also supports the possibility to link multiple purchase or sales orders to one goods in/out.

Serial number registration
In the new release, the addition of “Serial number registration” allows you to register in 3PL/Nekovri Dynamics the serial numbers and other specifications upon entering the goods, sending them or registering both. Allowing you to easily follow the goods during the entire supply chain: from the factory to the end consumer. Based on the serial number, all related impacts, results or movements can easily be retrieved. In addition, with this new module you can also:

• Adjust the specification method per item
• Add layered structures
• Check during the process of goods in, movement or goods out whether all serial numbers have been fully specified
• And easily exchange information with your client and suppliers via an EDI link.

Want to learn more? Matthijs Smittenaar shares in his blog the advantages of “serial number registration”>>

Cycle Counting
With the module Cycle Counting, you get the possibility to perform system driven counts – for example via a scanner – and book the differences directly in Microsoft Dynamics. The module offers different possibilities, such as ad hoc counting on the basis of parameters or controlled counting tasks from “the office”. The counting tasks are tracked in a separate table, so you can monitor the progress of the counting tasks– based on statuses. In addition, you can always retrieve these in past counting. Want to know more? Read more about the possibilities in the blog of our colleague Jan-Dirk Bergsma >>

Power BI: Order pick performance & Transport
By using Power BI, you no longer have to lean on historical data, but it also enables you to make forecasts for the future and gain better insight into timelines. It helps you to translate the slurry of data into self-explanatory reports and dashboards. And to help you on your way, we have added predefined datasets and dashboards – based on a survey among our customers – to keep track of the most important KPIs for logistics service providers. Furthermore, Power BI from Boltrics has been developed in the same way as our product. So as a standard branch product, together with our customers we work on our solution. This also means that the data sets we add, are added in a generic way and that all customers who have purchased Power BI via Boltrics automatically receive those updated data sets. Furthermore, not only for data sets but also reports based on those data sets will be made available. With the release of Dynamics NAV 2018, two data sets have been added from Boltrics:

• Order pick performance: By measuring productivity, you know exactly how many packages, pallets or boxes you can handle with the current occupancy.
  
• Transport: Thanks to the datasets – and associated dashboards and reports – you always have insight into the margin per type of transport, your top 5 customers, and the costs and revenues per period per driver and/or trailer are clear.
  

Learn more about Power BI. Watch our on-demand webinar in which we show how predefined Power BI datasets and reports can help you to turn your data into rich analysis and clear visual reports.

Other developments
You can also use the following functionalities in the new release:

• Make one order picker available to pick multiple orders at once
• Plan via fact blocks in a planboard
• Schedule ‘empty’ addresses without the necessity of an order

 

The new possibilities of NAV 2018

User Tasks
The new User Tasks allows you to create tasks to remind you of work to be done. You can create tasks for yourself and assign tasks to others. Other users can also assign tasks to you.
You can use the Delete User Tasks report to bulk delete all or some user tasks. In the request page, you can set filters to determine which tasks must be deleted.

Image Analyzer
The Image Analyzer extension makes use of powerful image analytics to detect attributes in in the images that you add to items and contact persons. With this, you can easily review and assign them:

• Contact persons: recognize a person’s gender or age. For example, your warehouse employees or drivers.
• Items: identify attributes like type and color, for example fruit. The extensions suggests attributes based tags found by the Computer Vision API with a confidence level.

After enabling the extensions, Image Analyzer activates each time you add an image to an item or contact person. The attributes, confidence level and details can be seen right away, and you can decide what to do with each attribute.

Preconfigured Excel reports
The Business Manager and Accountant Role Centers have a new option in the ribbon for Excel Templates. From the Excel Templates list, users can choose a preconfigured report that is ready to print from Excel.

Posting setup improvements and missing posting notifications

• You can now see a visual indication of mandatory G/L accounts that must be set to cover most of your scenarios related to specific posting setup.
• Open posting setup cards to see only accounts needed for features you’ve enabled.
• A new smart algorithm suggests posting setup accounts on posting setup lists. Simply add a combination of posting groups you want to set and click Suggest Accounts. The algorithm will analyze existing posting setup and suggest G/L accounts from similar posting setup. You don’t however have to agree with the suggestion: you can adjust it to fit your needs.
• Better control of deleting posting setup has been added. If you have posting setup used somewhere, you can check to see if it is already being used somewhere by inspecting the Used in Ledger Entries field. You can also get a notification while preparing a document that posting setup is missing. This reduces frustration at the moment of posting.

Bulk posting of orders, invoices and credit memos
Are your sales going so well that you can’t process the high amount of invoices fast enough? Is this luxury problem becoming a drain on resources? No worries: batches of orders, invoices, or credit memos can now be processed in one go by choosing the documents, and then choosing Post Selected.

 

Change Global Dimensions improvement
In earlier versions of Dynamics NAV, the Change Global Dimensions report posted one exceptionally large transaction that blocked all activities. The Change Global Dimensions report now behaves as follows:

• The whole task is parallelized and executed per table in separate independent background jobs.
• Other users can work with read all data in tables that are not involved in the update of global dimensions. Note, however, that all changes to tables in the list are blocked until all of them are completely updated.
• Any failed task can be rerun from the place of failure. If, for example, a failure occurs when 95% of the records are processed, the rerun task will finish the final 5%.

Intrastat reporting improvements
You can now indicate that you’re required to prepare Intrastat reports and set the default transaction types for normal sales and purchases, as well as sales and purchase returns to make your Intrastat reporting faster. Whenever you enter a document that must be included in your Intrastat report, Dynamics NAV makes use of the default transaction type values from the Intrastat Setup window. Use the Intrastat Checklist report and see a visual indication of which Intrastat journal lines that contain errors that you must correct before submitting the Intrastat report. You will see the exact details of the error, and you can toggle Intrastat Journal lines to show lines with errors only or all lines.

Submission of EC Sales List with more than 9999 lines
You can now submit the EC Sales List report with more than 9999 lines. All you need to do is set a threshold on the number of lines in the VAT report configuration for the EC Sales List report. Set the Maximum No. of Lines field to 9999 and you’re covered. When you submit such large EC Sales List reports, messages will be generated and sent to your government gateway. You can see the results of the submission in the Log Entries window.

Posting directly to general ledger accounts from documents
If you need to add an additional fee or a type of service to a sales or purchase document, but the item isn’t in your catalog, you can now add it on the fly in the document and post the revenue to the correct general ledger account from the document lines.