Enable Change Management On Purchase Orders To Track Changes

If you want to track your Purchase Orders a little more closely, then you may want to turn on the Change Management feature within the Procurement & Sourcing module of Dynamics AX. This gives you the added ability to have workflow approvals on your Purchase Orders, but will also give you the ability to view the old versions of the Purchase Orders and see the differences between the versions.

Now you won’t have to play “Spot The Difference” when trying to work out what was updated on the Purchase Order.

How To Do It…

Normally if you create a Purchase Order within Dynamics AX you can immediately print out the Confirmation and then it is available for receiving.

If you look at the Approval Status on the record created, then they will normally have the Approved status as soon as they have been entered into the system.

To add more control to the Purchase Order generation process you can turn on the Change Control feature. To do this click on the Procurement and Sourcing Parameters menu item within the Setup group of the Procurement and Sourcing area page.

When the Procurement and Sourcing
Parameters maintenance form is displayed, check the Activate Change Management flag within the Change Management For Purchase Orders group in the General page.

Purchase Orders that are tracked through Change Management are approved through the workflow engine within Dynamics AX. So there is one last step in the process and that is to create a new workflow that will allow you to approve the Purchase Orders when they are submitted.

How It Works…

Now create a new Purchase Order.

You will now notice that the Purchase Order has been set to a Draft approval status, and there is a submission option to send it to workflow for approval.

Also there is no option available to allow the user to confirm the Purchase Order. When you want to send the Purchase Order through the approval process, click on the Submit button.

This will change the status of the purchase order to In Review and then allow you to approve the PO.

Once the Purchase Order is approved you will be able to send out the Purchase Order confirmation.

Also, if you look at the Purchase Order ribbon bar, you will notice that the Edit option within the Maintain group is disabled, but the Request Change option is now enabled. To make an update to the Purchase Order, click on the Request Change button.

This will revert the Purchase Order back to a Draft approval status and the approval process needs to be completed before it is available to be sent out to the vendor again as a confirmation.

As a bonus, if you switch to the Manage ribbon bar, then the buttons within the History group of the ribbon bar will be enabled. If you want to see what the changes were over time, then click on the View Purchase Order History button.

When the Purchase Order Versions inquiry form is displayed, then you will see all of the different version of the Purchase Order.

To see the changes made, click on the Compare button within the menu bar.

This will show you all of the changes between the two Purchase Orders.

How cool is that!