During a recent implementation of the Dynamics GP Manufacturing module for one of our clients, we noticed significant differences between the existing current standard cost and the proposed or pending standard cost for several finished goods items after performing our first cost rollup. There are several possible reasons for this, some of which include:

• The existing standard cost on the finished goods and/or materials item cards are over or under valued
• Labor and/or machine rates are over or under stated
• Routing times are invalid
• Components are missing from the Bills of Materials (BOMs)

Upon closer look, it appeared that the pending material costs were less than what they should be according to how the BOMs were set up and what the client knew their material costs to be.

Upon an even closer look, with our Item Cost Revaluation report and calculator in hand, we were able to review several BOMs and identify specific components that were not being included in the cost rollup even though they were included in the BOMs. These same components were also excluded from backflusing during the posting of Manufacturing Order (MO) Receipts; i.e. the component quantities were not being relieved from inventory and component costs were not flowing to the GL.

It turns out that records for certain inventory items were missing from one of the costing tables in the company database. But how? What could have caused this? Microsoft had a couple of possible explanations for the missing records:

• If items are imported via SQL
• If items start out as a perpetual valuation method and are later changed to periodic

The latter seems to be the most likely cause in this case. We performed the following steps to resolve the issue (after first testing in a test environment). The referenced scripts should be obtained from Microsoft Dynamics Support… Read the rest of this entry »