Microsoft Dynamics AX has been a robust enterprise resource planning tool, but like every digital tool, it needs maintenance. It’s natural for a system to start experiencing errors after years of configurations, updates and the accumulation of data. What can you do to extend the life of your Dynamics AX system, squeezing out every bit of performance until your company decides it’s time to migrate to Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations?
Get the most out of your current system by taking advantage of our tips below.
1. Clean up Inventory Settlement Tables
To minimize errors and keep your system running at optimal speed, we recommend that you keep the number of records in your tables to 200,000. Tables that are too big result in random read, write or overflow errors to your queries.
Perform monthly and quarterly checks on your system. Because your system always changes and data is constantly added, routine housekeeping is important to keep your system error-free.
At the end of the month, when you’re doing inventory close, additional records are added to the inventory settlement table. If the record count is greater than 200,000, run a clean up job to archive the data from the previous financial years.
2. Maintain your Database log
Database logging tracks specific types of changes to Dynamics AX fields and tables. When your table is more than 200,000 records, query for records older than a certain date. We recommend to only log in non-transactional data. Don’t log in any transactions. For example, for sales orders purchase orders or inventory movement, you can log in vendor information, but don’t log in the transactions. Logging in transactions bloats your tables and it explodes into an unwieldy number of records.
3. Delete your temporary data
You can get errors when temporary tables are full. One thing to check would be your temporary sales order or purchase process orders. Run queries and clean up your periodic tables under AR and AP. There is no reason to keep data over a month. Only keeping what you need keeps your system running faster.
Another place to check for temporary data is your Temporary Master Planning Data. Generally, when Master Planning runs this data is cleared out afterwards. But occasionally, that data continues to sit there. Problems occur when too much data builds up. A little is okay, but a lot maybe a symptom of something abnormal going on with your MRP.
Consider checking your Sales Line tables on a quarterly basis. Once a sale is posted and paid for, the related data becomes history. Some companies will have their parameters set up so that once a sale is processed, the data moves into a voided table. If you don’t want to delete the historic data, then think about archiving your data instead.
4. Update your Kernel
Not having the most updated Kernel version is often a cause of slow system performance. Check and update the Kernel from Microsoft to make sure you’re using the most updated version. Also make sure your Kernel version matches with your client, AOS, SQL server and all locations. Keep in mind that DEV/TEST/Production should all have the same kernel
5. Mind your batch jobs
A scenario that we see frequently are errors that occur when batch jobs start up before the previous batch is done processing. This happens to batch jobs that run frequently, like batches that run every minute. The solution is to spread out the batch jobs.
For businesses who run hundreds of batch jobs and have numerous batch jobs, and map them out. Delineate which jobs run at what times. And estimate how long they take to execute. This information will help you figure out if batch jobs are running into each other, for example, a table might be hit up at the same time.
Conclusion
Many businesses who are still running Dynamics AX prioritize getting the most out of their current system. In those cases, maintenance is an important part of a comprehensive regimen to keep your Dynamics AX systems running without errors that kill productivity.
Thinking about modernizing your ERP and moving to Dynamics 365? Register now for October 2, 2019 live webinar, Your D365 Readiness Checklist: What to Consider Before You Upgrade.