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Master data management in Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3

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Master data management (MDM), in terms of enterprise data stewardship is a combination of organization wide policies and tool for managing master/reference data that are shared and used by several applications, such that those shared data reflect a single source of truth. Since master data is a key asset, every enterprise leverage MDM in one way or another to link disparate systems. In terms of Microsoft Dynamics AX, following are the typical scenarios where managing master data becomes essential -

• In a global deployment consisting multiple instances of AX, sharing master data like customer, vendors and products between all instances.
• Sharing master/reference data across two or more legal entities.
• Synchronizing product, and pricing information that originates from master instance to other shared instances.
• Sharing data with systems that do not implement Microsoft Dynamics AX, like CRM, pricing engine etc…
 
Starting with Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3, we are happy to announce support for master data management feature. This builds on top of Data Import Export Framework (DIXF) that shipped in R2, and extends the concept of entities, transformation, and staging to enable configurable data synchronization capabilities. Some of the key capabilities supported with this release are
 
Capabilities
• Data synchronization across multiple instances of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 R3, or across multiple legal entities (or partitions) within the single instance.
• Five of the most requested entities ships ready for MDM – Customers, Vendors, Employees, Party, and Product.
• Ability to extend existing DIXF entities or add new entities through customization
• Configure selective synchronization of record set or field set by adding import or export filters
• Support single/multi-master record management scenarios
• Ability to centrally detect conflicts automatically and resolve manually.

This just a quick introduction of upcoming foundation feature in Microsoft Dynamics AX, I intend to publish further details in our blog post, so stay tuned. Also I am doing a session at Convergence 2014, if you are attending please do stop by.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 04, 2014
    Will MDM be avilable for Dynamics AX R2 CU7?

  • Anonymous
    March 07, 2014
    As far as I remember, it was said that it would be "back ported" to support R2 CU7. Time will tell. :-)

  • Anonymous
    April 30, 2014
    Is there any E-Learning course or MS Academy course to learn and get hands on lab for Dynamics AX MDM ?

  • Anonymous
    May 07, 2014
    www.usmsystems.com As times and business needs change, so do the skills and services required. Discovery is what we do first and foremost to understand your workforce challenges. With this information we will work with you to prioritize opportunities and identify remedies for business impact. USM can mobilize the right people, skills and technologies to help clients define and implement recruitment needs thus reducing their IT talent hunt with the best of breed. What is the most important to USM is that you have the very best of our human capital expertise working with you to achieve your human performance goals. Whether you need a full-time or temporary employee, USM has a range of capabilities to help you recruit, manage and retain talent at all levels. We do business by drawing strength from each other to deliver value to our clients and we are committed to every partnership we make based on our knowledge, skills and global infrastructure to deliver the desired human capital expertise.

  • Anonymous
    May 13, 2014
    Hi, we just got on AX2012 R3. is there a whitepaper available for the new MDM functionality? Thx, SVen

  • Anonymous
    June 26, 2014
    Hi, I have a couple of questions regarding MDM in AX. We need to decide can we use MDM or implement our own solution via Enterprise Bus (eg. BizTalk) The scenario is that we want to share some master data between AX instances but each instance has a slightly different model (deferent customizations)

  1. Does Dynamics AX 2012 R3 MDM support the scenario when we have different fields on a particular table in different AX instances? eg. AX1 CustTable has fields: AccountNum, CustGroup, Field1, Field2; on AX2 CustTable has fields AccountNum, CustGroup, Field3, Field4; I would like to use AX1 as a single master. So I would like to export only AccountNum and CustGroup to MDM Repository and then push it to AX (of course Filed3 and Filed4) will need to have some default values (in case of a new record) and remain unchanged in case of an update What are the issues I should be aware of:
  2. Do I need to maintain different custom definitions of DMF / DIXF in each AX instance or I can create them in AX1 and export them to AX2 (eg. via Model or xpo + sync mappings somehow and additional import/export definition)
  3. What about publishing the schema from AX to MDM. Will it be compatible for all AX instances? What is I publish a field definition in the schema and this field is not available in the other AX Best Regards, Sebastian
  • Anonymous
    April 12, 2015
    Any differences between this and virtual companies?  Does this cause any issues with them during upgrade from 2012 r2 to r3 in you have vc in place?  Thanks!