Dynamics AX Budget Planning Customer Experience
Doug Kenyon - Sakata SeedYogesh Kasat – Real DynamicsRyan Sandness - Microsoft
AXUG Summit | Tampa, Florida | October 11–14, 2016 | #CountOnSummit #AXUGSummit
Session Agenda• Company Overview• Budgeting Requirements• Demo• Key Learnings• Benefits to the Business• Enhancements in AX ‘7’
About Sakata Seed• 100+ year old independent seed company
o Headquartered in Yokohama Japano Publicly Traded on Tokyo Stock Exchange
• Producer / Wholesaler of Hybrid Vegetable and Flower Seedo NO GMO Products
• Semi-autonomous global subsidiarieso Sakata Seed Corporation (Japan/Asia)o Sakata America Holding (US/North America)o European Sakata Holding (EMEA)o Sakata SudAmerica (Brazil/South America)
• Sakata Seed America, Inco Almost 40 years oldo Headquartered in Morgan Hill, CAo Seed Processing, Packaging, ando Distribution Facilities in Morgan Hill CA and
Burlington WAo Research and Production Facilities in Salinas CA,
Colusa CA, Yuma AZ, Fort Myers FL, Burlington WA
o Subsidiaries in Mexico and Guatemala
Budget process overviewBudget
guidelineDepartment
ReviewExecutive
review Final Budget
• Draft based on history
• GL or budget history
• Budget by month, GL#, Department, Cost center
• Reviews and changes by cost center managers
• Cost Center manager submits changes
• Rolled up to the department level budget
• Reviewed by department managers
• Rolled up at company level
• CFO reviews & makes changes
• Company wide budget reviewed by the management team
• Final Changes
• Final Budget• Used for Budget
Controls & Financial Reporting (Budget vs. Actuals)
FTE Count, Salaries and overheads (including Forecast Positions)
Sales forecast
CAPEX
Cost Center Review Finance review
Budget workflowFi
nanc
eInitial
PY ActualsPY BudgetedBaseline
Dep
artm
ents Distribute
PY BudgetedBaseline
Cos
t Cen
ters Distribute
PY BudgetedBaseline
Cost Center Request
PY BudgetedBaselineRequested
Submitted
PY BudgetedBaselineRequested
Department Roll up
PY BudgetedBaselineRequested
Department Review
PY BudgetedBaselineDept Approved
CFO Review
PY BudgetedBaselineDept ApprovedCFO Approved
Final
PY BudgetedBaselineDept ApprovedCFO Approved
Baseline including
CAPEX, Salary and Sales
budget
Budget Cycles @ SakataBudget & LE2
• Purpose: Preparation of Next Year Budget. Also LE (latest estimates) for current year
• Timeline: Nov to Jan
• Team involved: Budget Office, Cost center managers, Department Managers, CFO
LE1
• Purpose: Budget revision based on latest estimates for rest of the financial year budget.
• Timeline: ~Sept• Team involved:
Budget Office, Cost center managers, Department Managers, CFO
Forecast
• Purpose: Forecast for Next year, Year +1 and Year + 2.
• Timeline: ~Jan• Team involved:
Budget Office, Department Managers
Excel Layout
DemoYogesh Kasat
LE2 Cheat Sheet for Cost Center and Department Managers
• 1. Open Dynamics AX from Citrix
Opening Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3
• 2. Work on your LE2 and NY plan using ‘AX->Budgeting->Common->Budget plans->Budget plans assigned to me’
• 3A. Aggregate the cost center plans for your department using the ‘complete’ action from the workflow ribbon. (Department Managers only)
• 3B. If unable to aggregate, review the pending/incomplete budget plans for cost center’s using the budgeting hierarchy. (Department Managers only)
• 4. After aggregation, open Worksheet and make necessary changes (do not touch table, delete, or filter) to the cell value in the ‘Data’ sheet. (Department Managers only)
Working on your LE2 and NY Budget Plan and Worksheet
• 5. Click Publish to save your changes in Dynamics AX 2012 R3. This will ensure latest data is always available in Dynamics AX and upon opening of the spreadsheet
• 6. Save the worksheet to ensure additional supporting information (that does not get stored in Dynamics AX) in the spreadsheet is saved, for example – additional sheet you added for details of travel expenses.
•Note: Always publish and save
Save Vs Publish
• 7. Delegate if you want to review with someone else before committing the LE2 or NY values. You can delegate to anyone belonging to your department or to budget office team.
• 8. Approve when you are 100% sure of committing the LE2 and NY values.
Delegate Vs Approve *Note: LE2 cycle is December 2015 – March 2016NY is New Year for FY17
Key learningArea Type Comments
Organization hierarchy Implementation When you are manually sending excels, there is not much structure or can have matrix organization. We had to spend some time to streamline our department / location and regional managers, their approvals in the workflow
Excel Add in Product limitation - Slowness; performance issues for large data sets. Custom upload functionality was big saver.
- Filtering issue (received hotfix from MS) - Templates need to be re-created every year (matrix fields)- Deployment across environments
Row level security Product limitation Payroll accounts had to be filtered, fixed by changes in process
Shared Folders and security of budget data
Product limitation As excel worksheets are stored in shared folders (document handling), users can access other users files.
Enterprise portal Product & Implementation - Plan was to use portal to avoid need for clients- Excel add-in needs to be installed locally even if you are using EP. (defeats
the purpose and we used TS).
Licensing: Budget clerk is a Enterprise role; every budget user needed
Other - Created custom role for budget managers; provided access to budget planning process and removed other unnecessary pieces from the role
- This was a functional role and lot less expensive
Benefits to the Business
• Time savings in manual work of splitting worksheets for departments, cost centers and consolidating them back
• Better visibility of process – tracking progress/deadlines for cost centers /departments is much easier • Time savings in generation of initial budget guidance • Less chances of errors due to removing manual steps and time saving in double/triple checking
numbers/managing versions of spread sheets
Net Effect: 200+ man hours saving and reduced 45 days of calendar time in budgeting cycle
The Case Study - BudgetingCase Study by Microsoft https://customers.microsoft.com/en-US/story/seed-company-cultivates-productivity-with-updated-erp-budgeting-solution
AXUG Summit | Tampa, Florida | October 11–14, 2016 | #CountOnSummit #AXUGSummit
What’s New in Dynamics 365 for Operations
Workspaces
Workspaces
Power BI
Budgeting EnhancementsEXCEL• Improved performance via new Excel add-in and architecture changes
o Records that don’t apply will be filtered out before getting into Excel• Templates are no longer year specific• Browser based app should eliminate issues with local versus Citrix/TS Excel
SHARED FOLDERS• Excel worksheets are stored in Azure blob storage, and not accessible to users
EASE OF USE• Simplified Security setup using organization hierarchy, rather than worker position
o Also available in R3 CU8+• Removed scenario constraints
Open Issues• Salary accounts
o No changes. Some customers will leave these costs in their department, and others will enter these budgets in from the HR or other department
• No SharePoint support for budget planning docso Azure blob storage only. Any formulas should be included in budget template. Any supporting doc can be
done via justification documents
• No justification documents in AX7 RTMo Coming with Fall Update
AXUG Summit | Tampa, Florida | October 11–14, 2016 | #CountOnSummit #AXUGSummit
Contact Info• Doug Kenyon, Sakata Seed
• Yogesh Kasat, Real Dynamics• [email protected]
• Ryan Sandness, Microsoft• [email protected]
AXUG Summit | Tampa, Florida | October 11–14, 2016 | #CountOnSummit #AXUGSummit
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