Development Matters Blog

Merit Solutions Advanced Lot Management (ALM) is the application that allows efficient control of lot tracked materials (raw or finished goods) within Microsoft Dynamics GP (versions 9 and 10).

The system requirements correspond to requirements of Microsoft Dynamics GP. ALM version 9 requires Dynamics GP’s Manufacturing module to run, while ALM version 10 does not require the Manufacturing module.

Lot Attribute Maintenance

The Lot Attribute Maintenance window is arguably the most used window of the ALM application. Its main purpose is to provide information on the lot properties of an item, including the Lot Status, Expiration Date, and Vendor Lot, as well as other lot attributes defined in the Lot Category for the item (Cards > Inventory > Item (Maintenance) > Item Maintenance Options > Lot Category) and provide a place for editing those attributes.

In the Lot Attribute Maintenance window, both types of lot tracked Items (Cards > Inventory > Item (Maintenance) > Item Maintenance Options > Track), Non-QA Controlled and QA-Controlled (Cards > Inventory > Item (Maintenance) > Additional > ALM Item QA Control Setup), are listed.

For Non-QA Controlled items, the default Lot Status always will be set to Approved and default Expiration Date always will be set to 0/0/0000. These settings for Non-QA Controlled (but lot tracked) items can be changed on Lot Attribute Maintenance window.

For QA Controlled items, the default Lot Status will be inherited from the Advanced Lot Management Configuration window > Default Lot Status for New Lots () option.

On the same window, the default value for Lot Status Attribute can be changed. The Expiration Date is by default set to the value of: System Date minus one day (for example: for all lots received on 5/7/2009, default expiration date will be 5/6/2009). This means that Item Lots can’t be forwarded along, before their attributes are reviewed by QA personnel, and the Expiration Date is at least changed to the present or any date in future.

Filter By option on the Lot Attribute Maintenance window affects only QA Controlled items. Set the Filter By value to “Rejected”, click Refresh and check lots of both QA Controlled and Non-QA Controlled items.

By the way, any changes made on this window to Lot Attributes, have to be saved by clicking Save button. Simple leaving or closing the Lot Attribute Maintenance window is not enough.

Merit Solutions Advanced Lot Management (ALM) is the application that allows efficient control of lot tracked materials (raw or finished goods) within Microsoft Dynamics GP (versions 9 and 10).

The system requirements correspond to requirements of Microsoft Dynamics GP. ALM version 9 requires Dynamics GP’s Manufacturing module to run, while ALM version 10 does not require Manufacturing module.

Expiration Date

Expiration Date is one of lot attributes tracked with ALM 10. In case the expiration date of a lot is in the past, then that lot can’t be used. Users should be careful with this, since every newly accepted lot automatically receives (expired) expiration date – the system date minus one day. This was made on purpose, to force QA users to manually enter valid expiration dates for each lot.

Once entered, these dates can be changed by QA users at any time. On the Lot Attribute Maintenance window, when selecting a lot, it’s Expiration Date is shown in the corresponding field. Simply overwriting the existing value with the new one and saving new setting is enough.

In case value in the Expiration Date field is empty, i.e. ‘00000000’ it means that the selected lot was accepted more than once, and that each time a different expiration date was set for it. By opening the Change Expiration Date window, a complete list of existing Expiration Dates for the lot will be listed. These values can be changed one by one on the Change Expiration Date window. On the Lot Attribute Maintenance window, the common Expiration Date can be set as already described above. A Warning message will inform the user that the previously set dates will be lost.