How to Use Enterprise Asset Management for D365 Finance and Supply Chain Management

Have you heard about the Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) module for Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management? Wondering how it can help your business? Here’s an overview of some of the standard  functionality so you can get an idea of how it works and how you could use it to expand your asset management capabilities.   

Before we get into specific features, let’s cover the difference between fixed asset management and enterprise asset management. Fixed asset management has been around for a long time in Dynamics solutions. This is primarily focused on financial matters related to assets, such as acquisition and depreciation.  

The enterprise asset management module, however, allows you to manage assets in a physical sense. This might include things like asset status, how long each asset has been used, previous issues, and any maintenance needed. This is powerful for many organizations and allows you to manage assets completely within a single streamlined system. It gives you a ton of control and visibility over how your assets can be acquired, monitored, and maintained.  

Here are some basic features of EAM for setup, maintenance requests, and work orders: 

Basic features during setup 

This module’s basic setup features allow you to define locations and asset rules in detail making it easy to control and understand where assets are and where they can go. The assets themselves can be set up with data fields including location, asset type, usage, and many more variables that can be configured by users.   

It’s also easy to define maintenance and workers for a specific location, enter financial dimensions, set up controls for how many and what types of assets can be at each location, and a lot more.  

Asset and location lifecycles are another key feature. With this, you can create user-defined statuses such as new, active, and ended, to change what sort of activity is allowed during each phase of the lifecycle. You can then choose different lifecycle types for different types of assets, so the lifecycle phases make sense for each one.  

Maintenance requests (corrective maintenance) 

Maintenance requests have a mobile-friendly interface so they can easily be created on workers’ phones or tablets. Just like with the location and asset setup, maintenance requests have user-defined lifecycle options such as requested, in progress, rejected, or finished.  

Similarly to location and asset setup, maintenance requests have user-defined fields that allow the worker to include whatever information is relevant to the organization and the asset. For example, requests could include a service level, problem descriptions, asset type, maintenance request type, fault symptom, and anything else that might be important.   

You can also set a default person responsible based on location and asset type, set a default maintenance type (such as corrective), and set other defaults based on sub-fields within the request.  

Maintenance plans and rounds (preventative maintenance) 

Of course, waiting to create a maintenance request until an asset has a problem can result in expensive downtime. Maintenance plans and rounds allow you to schedule preventative maintenance for assets.  

Maintenance plans are used for scheduling maintenance of a single asset, whereas maintenance rounds are used for scheduling inspections and maintenance on a group of assets, such as all the assets within a single facility.  

Preventative maintenance can be time-based, such as a once-weekly inspection, or counter-based, such as an inspection triggered when an asset reaches 500 hours of use. Tolerances are a useful feature based on the timing of asset inspections. A 2-day tolerance, for example, means that if you normally routinely inspect an asset on Wednesday, but a potential issue triggers an inspection for the Monday prior, the system won’t schedule the usual Wednesday maintenance since the asset was inspected just 2 days before.  
 

The creation of work orders from maintenance plans and rounds can be as manual or as automated as your organization requires and this approach can be customized based on location or asset type.  

Work order basic features 

Work orders are an integral feature of any asset management system, and D365 goes above and beyond in allowing users to create efficient and effective work orders. The features available include being able to set a default work order type, user-defined lifecycle states, maintenance job type, skill sets needed, and so much more.  

Being able to set defaults makes it much easier and faster to create work orders for specific item types, because certain details will be filled in as soon as the item is chosen. It’s also possible to categorize work orders into project types so the data can be used for your fixed asset management.  

Another valuable feature is the investment work order – this is a work order for an item your organization is building and installing internally. Once the item is installed, it will be converted into a fixed asset. In the meantime, the investment work order automatically creates a project so you can manage the building and/or installation from the project management module.  

Want to learn more about enterprise asset management? 

The functionality above is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of what you can achieve with this module. The easiest way to understand the full enterprise asset management capabilities is to see it in action. Check out our free, on-demand webinar Enterprise Asset Management in Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management - Part 1 and Part 2 for a demonstration of location and asset setup, maintenance requests, preventative maintenance, and work order creation. 

Contact our Dynamics experts any time with questions or to talk about your enterprise asset management needs.