Life Sciences
Professional Advantage specialises in high performing solutions for the Life Sciences industry that comprise the responsiveness your staff expect, the flexibility to support
your vital processes to work within the tight compliance environment.
Microsoft Technology enables life sciences manufacturers to collect, manage, and share
the right information with the right people. Helping life sciences companies deliver key information in an accessible, user-friendly way. These intuitive solutions help provide a secure environment for enhanced collaboration among departments and factories.
Solution
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Business Intelligence
They should aggregate data across business functions and manufacturing sites in real time -- fostering collaboration and giving managers greater visibility into manufacturing performance.
The solutions must help provide security, which will facilitate regulatory compliance.
Lot Management
Many process manufacturers need extensive lot management capabilities. For example, process manufacturers must be able to track materials:
- From a specific supplier.
- As intermediate and finished goods.
- When created during production.
- As sold to specific customers.
- At the sub-lot level in catch weight environments.
- For quality control specifications and test results tied to the item/lot combination.
- For track and trace.
Lot management functionality in Process Industries for Microsoft Dynamics AX goes well beyond simple lot tracking. The solution gives manufacturers visibility into individual lots,
lot status, lot quality control (QC) data, and item potency, and robust lot picking options help them to distribute inventory in optimal sequence and eliminate waste due to expiry loss. FEFO logic is included, as well as same lot batch
Production Date Tracking
For accurate reporting and tracking, Process Industries for Microsoft Dynamics AX captures the production date and the lot number of raw materials received from a specific vendor. The system then calculates the shelf life of the given lot using the production date of each raw material or finished good. Process Industries for Microsoft Dynamics AX can also manage the shelf advice date (for example, “best before” date), and the retest date for every lot of a particular product. (Often a product must be retested on a regular basis to ensure the quality of the product is still acceptable.)
Manufacturers can then pull inventory in optimal sequence employing either first in/first out (FIFO) or FEFO rules to determine which lot to pick. Most ERP systems use the more common FIFO lot policy, which does not work for raw materials because the calculated shelf life date would be incorrect.
Batch Attributes and Lot Picking Options
In some process industries such as chemical manufacturing, items must be tested for well-defined quality specifications such as pH or potency. It is not uncommon for different lots of the same product to have different quality specifications. Although most manufacturers provide their customers with specifications for standard products, some customers order products with more precise or tighter specifications that differ slightly from the baseline quality standard.
To deliver to a customer’s specifications, the manufacturer either must produce a special lot that meets the customer’s request exactly or find a lot already in inventory that meets those requirements. If a lot meeting the customer’s needs is already in inventory, locating and pulling it to fulfill the customer order is always quicker and more cost-effective than producing a special lot.
Manufacturers can maintain exact lot location information and accurate quality specifications by lot, so it’s easy to quickly determine if a lot meeting the customer’s requested specifications is in stock or whether one must be planned and produced.
A user can even specify for each customer whether the material or product may come from any lot, must come from a full lot, or must come from the same lot that was shipped to the customer on the last order. Process Industries for Microsoft Dynamics AX then selects only those lots that meet or exceed a customer’s requirements.
Lot Disposition and Status with Quarantine Management
With Process Industries for Microsoft Dynamics AX, a user can specify one of two main inventory dispositions—available or unavailable—for a given lot, and then define multiple statuses per disposition. In essence, this determines whether the product in that location is netable or non-netable. Disposition codes are logical statuses of materials, whereas quarantine zones are typically physical locations. Process Industries for Microsoft Dynamics AX supports both.
A product is considered unavailable when the lot has been moved to a quarantine area or designated as quarantined. (Users can also define multiple quarantine areas within a warehouse, such as a separate testing area or a damaged goods location.) After a lot has been quarantined and flagged as unavailable, the user can record multiple reasons why the particular lot was quarantined.
Tracking lot status provides manufacturers with information about why a product is unavailable and supports correct disposition decisions based on whether the lot is simply waiting for testing completion or has been tested and failed
Rebates and Trade Merchandise Spending
Process Industries for Microsoft Dynamics AX provides users with effective tools to monitor and manage promotional programs, including calculating rebates in the same way it calculates sales commissions. However, the system credits the amount to the customer rather than to the salesperson. In most cases rebates are cash payments or discounts
taken against a customer’s invoice. However, trade merchandise spending programs usually involve an amount of money accrued by a customer to be spent on events and promotional items.
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