Automotive release schedules, pricing and procurement translated

How Plex Customer/Sales Management — release schedules, blanket orders, cross-customer pricing and commissions — and Supplier/Purchasing Management — RFQ lifecycle and supplier scorecards — map to D365 sales agreements, trade agreements, procurement workflows and vendor collaboration. Written for the automotive supply chain where cumulative releases and EDI dominate.

What you will be able to do

• Map Plex release schedules and blanket orders to D365 sales agreements and delivery schedules
• Explain why cumulative release management in D365 typically requires EDI middleware or an ISV
• Translate Plex master and cross-customer pricing to D365 trade agreements and the pricing hierarchy
• Describe D365's commission setup and its limits compared to Plex
• Map the Plex RFQ lifecycle to D365 requests for quotation and purchase agreements
• Identify which open documents migrate at cutover and at what grain

Introduction

Plex Customer/Sales Management and Supplier/Purchasing Management serve a specific audience: automotive and discrete-manufacturing supply chains where customers issue blanket commitments, release against them cumulatively via EDI, and expect just-in-time delivery precision measured in hours, not days.

Release Schedules and the Automotive Cumulative Model

Plex Customer/Sales Management is designed for the automotive release-schedule model. A customer issues a blanket commitment (annual or programme-life volumes), then sends periodic release schedules — typically via EDI 830 (planning schedule) and 862 (shipping schedule) — that specify exact quantities by date. Plex tracks:

Pricing: Master Lists, Hierarchies and Unified Pricing

Plex supports master pricing and cross-customer pricing. According to primary sources (Rockwell's Customer/Sales Management page), pricing is configurable at multiple levels, but the exact hierarchy — which level wins when multiple prices apply, whether exclusion rules exist, how customer-specific overrides interact with master prices —…

Salesperson Commissions

Plex includes salesperson commissions as part of Customer/Sales Management. The detail of the commission model — split rules, tiered rates, retroactive adjustments — is not documented publicly.

Supplier and Purchasing Management

Plex Supplier/Purchasing Management supports the RFQ lifecycle: solicitation, vendor response, comparison and award. D365's equivalent is the Request for quotation (PurchRFQCaseTable):

Open-Document Migration at Cutover

[!NOTE] Customer and vendor master data (addresses, contacts, payment terms, delivery terms) migrates in Wave 2. Trade documents depend on master data — the load sequence must respect this dependency.

EDI: A Symmetric Concern

Neither Plex nor D365 provides native EDI processing. Both rely on external middleware:

Knowledge check

Summary

Plex trade translates to D365 with moderate structural reshaping. Blanket orders become sales agreements; pricing restructures to fit the trade-agreement hierarchy; RFQs map closely; supplier scorecards require quality-integration design.