How to link one production order to multiple sales orders in AX 2012

If you create a production order with reference to a sales order, Dynamics AX links the two orders.

 create a sales order for the item and then use Product and supply > New >Production order to create a new production order:

The sales order reference is carried on to the production order:

(‘Reference lot’ is the unique ‘Lot id’ of the sales order line).

You can see the sales order number on the reference tab of the production order:

And the system has updated the sales order line with the production order reference:

And in this case, if I look at the inventory transactions from the sales order line I’ll see that the batch number has been automatically assigned as well:

(That ‘Ordered reserved’ status will be set even if the Inventory management parameter ‘Reserve ordered items’ isn’t selected). And the sales order and production order inventory transactions are marked to each other:

But what about the case where your customer isn’t co-operative (or is simply slightly dis-organised) and sends you more than one sales order for the same item at more or less the same time?

Let’s allow master planning to generate a planned production order for our make-to-order item. Make-to-order items are normally assigned to a coverage group with a coverage code of ‘Requirements’, and this’ll generate a planned production order for each sales order line:

(I’m using the ‘Edit in grid’ Planned production order form, because that shows me the ‘Pegging’ information at the bottom of the screen – the demand that has triggered the selected Planned production order).

I select the planned orders and ‘Group’ them. Of course I could have automated this step by using a coverage group with a coverage code of ‘Period’:

After I refresh the planned production order form I can see that I now have one planned order pegged to both of my sales orders:

The final step is to firm the planned production order, making sure that I select ‘Extended’ marking:

This time, I don’t see a sales order reference on the production order (it’s marked to more than one sales order):

So we’re thinking of a customised fact box to list the marked sales orders.

But the sales order lines do reference the production order (because they are each only linked to one order):

And of course the batch number and marking have been applied to the sales order line inventory transactions:

It’s the inventory marking that’s driving most of this functionality and that’s how you’d manually link a sales order to an existing production order (if you had to change an existing order)