Anyone syncing D365 and Business Central Items with Multiple Units of Measure?

Drew_Sharkey

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365-release-plan/2021wave2/smb/dynamics365-business-central/use-multiple-units-measure-when-synchronizing-items-resources-dynamics-365-sales

This new feature enabled the ability to have multiple units of measure sync with D365. It does this by creating an Item Unit Group for EVERY Item number in BC and then it expects you to couple this with an equivalent in D365. Problem is that in D365 the Item Unit Groups can be shared across multiple products so if your integrating BC to an existing D365 tenant then you hit a problem because you need to be able to couple multiple BC records to a single D365 record.

Anyone experienced this? Am I missing something obvious here or have Microsoft deployed something they haven't really thought through properly?

Tomigs

Hi Drew,

Have you been forced to use that option being already deployed? That is very bad, yes it introduces a lot of questions.

In our case we are facing this now just before go-live. So we have prepared and been working on the system assuming that it would be through the units of measure as usual but just before going live we find out that after the last update it is mandatory now to use Units groups insted of syncing the good old unit of measure ("Unit Group Mapping" option comes enabled by default on the Dynamics 365 connection setup).

Our problem, apart from the timing not ginving us a chance to test it properly, is that the direction is different from the default one: the products are created in CRM and then synced to BC. And I don't think that this is possible with the new way of working. In order to sync the product from CRM to BC, the item unit of measure must exist and be coupled first. And you cannot create an item unit of measure before creating the item.

So unless I'm seeing it the wrong way, there is no way now to sync new products from CRM to BC, they need to be created always in BC and synced to CRM.

What I think we'll have to do is removing the Unit of Measure from the mapping of the products and populating the units of measure for the products through codeunits in the sync.

We'll probably disable the sync for the the new configuration ("Unit Group" and "Base Unit of Measure") as we don't need it.

Regards,
Tomas

Drew_Sharkey

I feel your pain, Tomas. We enabled the new feature in Sandbox and then had all the associated issues. Even more so when we forced Sync from BC to D365 it pretty much corrupted the products definition in D365. We were lucky that we got live without this feature enabled.

Microsoft have assumed that you will have BC installed and live running first, and then want to add D365 afterwards, so BC is the data master. Anyone who is going the opposite way (i.e., existing D365 user who then wishes to install BC) has many struggles to overcome.

Tomigs

Thanks Drew for the extra notes, I think you are right.

As you said, we finally had to change everything around to fit with the new way of syncing the units of measure: with some tricks we were able to sync products from CRM to BC, but then we realized that we'd hit errors on creating the sales orders and on syncing the posted sales invoices because there are pieces on the code checking that the item unit of measure is coupled. So eventually we took a step back, and redesigned everything around the unit groups and the sync of products is now BC to CRM. I guess I'm used to the flexibility of being on premises and being able to adpat the base code and now on cloud you are very constrained on how you can adapt.

It's been troublesome as we found out just before go-live, but hopefully adapted now for good.

I'm a bit concerned for the future on how to deal with these type of upgrades in BC on cloud in general and for the CRM integration in particular. I suppose we'll learn to adapt.

Regards,
Tomas