AX Upgrade - some misc feature gotchas

This post is to consolidate various functionality related notes.  Some of the items noted are from folks that have emailed me or posted as a comment on this blog or in one of the AXUG online community forums:

1.  Partitioning was added as a feature in R2.  Here is the link to the technet article which describes this new feature.  A new field is now on tables that have business related data.  The new field is Partition.  Mostly noted to say there is a few field on the tables, but if you are importing data from a pre-R2 environment into an R2/R3 environment, this field would need to be considered in the load process.

2.  Personnel functionality added as a feature in R2.  The new field is Personnel action type.  This is described in a technet article.  This will prevent you from adding any new workers in your R1 to R2/R3 environment.  If this functionality is not needed, then you can disable it in the license configuration via the AOT.  See screen shot below.  (Thank you to Jeff Stone, Support Director at Merit Solutions for posting in the AXUG SIG - AX Application Lifecycle Management Community on January 16, 2017.)

3. AX 2012 R3 contains new Warehousing and Transportation Management features (WAX and TRAX), but there is not an upgrade path.  So when upgrading from 2012 R1 or R2 to R3, you will not have this functionality available.  But you can upgrade to this new functionality by draining all your inventory, open transactions, inventory close, consistency check, enable WAS/TRAX, and then bring it all back in, etc.  (Whew - that was a mouthful and special thanks to Dave Philips, MSFT Senior Premier Field Engineer at Microsoft Fargo, ND who posted this in the AXUG Open Forum on January 19, 2017.)

4.   Where's my code - Peeling the Onion...

If any of your software providers have changed, take a close look at what layer they are in.  We had purchased software from a VAR vendor, subsequently the software was sold to an ISV vendor.  So when upgrading to R3, our DBA used the –replace command (which is a good thing as it retains the legacy IDs.  But since the model was in the ISV layer, it had nothing to replace and basically did a fresh install.  However what it left was the R1 model in the VAR layer and caused a compile error since it was an R1 model!

5. If you are upgrading to version CU9, you will have an issue with MRP hanging.  There is bug in the upgrade process that results in a table not populating properly - UnitOfMeasureConversionCache table.  This will result in Forecast Scheduling hanging.  If you truncate the table, AX will rebuild the table and all will be well.  There is a KB on LCS to fix which is included in CU10.  Thanks goes out to Michael Ebensteiner on the Microsoft Support team!!!  I started first looking at what was newly implemented and found Sequencing of Production orders and Demand Scheduling were new in R2/R3 and started with chasing down these rat holes to no avail.

6. Microsoft's Security Development Tool can now only be run via the AOT and can only be run in single user mode!  I had forgotten that in our RTM/R1 installation, we created a menu item for the tool.  **Update: Sorry, we misread a warning message, it is OK to run this and can be added as a menu item fairly simply.  WHEW - I love this tool!  Will use it as much as I can until I get to D3FO when it goes away.  😭😭😭

7. Continuous Number Sequences may not work correctly.  After our upgrade, we found that AX pulled in 000000 as the next sequence number and the transaction will fail.  This was for several functions.  We found a blog post that described a stored procedure not getting updated properly.  So true for us:  https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/axsupport/2013/10/11/issue-with-number-sequence-after-upgrade-to-ax2012-r2-in-place/ 

8. Process to release production orders has changed.  We found that if you have a BOM with mixed flushing principles the picking list could be affected.  This was due to how we had set up our BOMs.  We used "Manual" for those items we wanted to appear on the pick list.  We had to update our BOMs to use "Start" which corrected the issue.

9. General Ledger Voucher Transactions the journal batch number field cannot be personalized on the Voucher transactions form (Nav path: General ledger\ Inquiries\ Voucher transactions).  This was an update by Microsoft for performance reasons (see KB2758624 for details).  The journal batch number is important to our Accounting staff.  We will develop a custom inquiry/report to retrieve this field.

10. Trial balance transactions missing after upgrade to CU9.  This is only an issue with CU9, but noting it all the same.  We found after our upgrade, we could no longer look at general ledger transactions that were created pre-upgrade. There is a hot fix for this and once applied all was well - KB3024254.