What Is in Dynamics 365 2026 Release Wave 1 for Warehouse Management? The Full List

The 2026 release wave 1 plan for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management lists eight warehouse management features. Six carried a general availability date of June 2026, one is set for September 2026, and one has been in public preview since August 2025 with no general availability date. They cover scanning hardware, inbound putaway, work classification, receiving, packing traceability and database archiving. None of the eight changes where an item is stored based on what you have already shipped.

That is the whole list, read off Microsoft’s Release Planner on 22 July 2026. This page gives each entry its own treatment, because the summaries circulating about this wave are drawn from the announcement rather than from the plan, and the two do not say the same thing.

The full warehouse management list, 2026 release wave 1

• Improve database health by archiving load data. No public preview date. General availability September 2026. Entry last updated 14 May 2026.
• Enhance warehouse efficiency with dynamic item placement. Public preview June 2026, general availability June 2026. Entry last updated 18 March 2026.
• Automate dynamic work classification with Power FX. Public preview 24 April 2026, general availability June 2026. Entry last updated 14 May 2026.
• Enable precise serial and batch capture in cluster picking. Public preview 24 April 2026, general availability June 2026. Entry last updated 21 May 2026.
• Streamline transfer order receiving in WOM with ASNs. Public preview 24 April 2026, general availability June 2026. Entry last updated 4 June 2026.
• Improve picking efficiency with wrist-mounted scanning devices. Public preview 30 March 2026, general availability June 2026. Entry last updated 4 June 2026.
• Improve operations with Warehouse Management mobile app V4. Public preview 1 August 2025, no general availability date set. Entry last updated 16 October 2025.
• Capture worker IDs for warehouse packing events. Public preview 1 July 2025, general availability 1 July 2025. Entry last updated 18 November 2025.

Source: the Supply Chain Management view of the Microsoft Release Planner, warehouse management section, 2026 release wave 1, read 22 July 2026.

A note on how this was read, because it matters if you want to check it yourself. The Release Planner is a JavaScript application. Fetching the page will not give you the feature list, and neither will most of the ordinary ways of reading a web page programmatically. It has to be rendered in a real browser. That is a small detail with a real consequence. The list is harder to audit than an announcement blog post, so it gets audited less, and the announcement travels further than the thing it summarises. Every quotation below was taken from the rendered page.

What each of the eight actually does

Each planner entry carries two paragraphs. Business Value is written to be quoted. Feature Details is written to be implemented. Where they differ, the difference is usually the thing worth knowing.

Enhance warehouse efficiency with dynamic item placement

This is the entry carrying most of the placement story, so it deserves both paragraphs in full. Business Value:

Transform your warehouse operations with dynamic item placement. You get smarter inventory balancing during inbound processes like purchase and transfer orders, plus automated replenishment. Define storage locations and quantities for each item, either manually or through data import. Your warehouse adapts in real time, maximizing space and efficiency so items are always in the right spot with the right quantities.

Feature Details:

Warehouse and item storage policies are now available, giving you dynamic control over where and how much inventory is stored. Define preferred storage locations and target quantities for each item, either by editing directly or importing data at scale. The system intelligently balances inventory during inbound processes, ensuring optimal placement for fast fulfillment. Warehouse spatial locations further optimize routes, cutting travel time and boosting picking speed.

Read the two sentences that sit next to each other in that second paragraph. You define the preferred storage locations. The system then ensures optimal placement. Both statements are accurate and they describe two different jobs. One is a decision about where an item belongs. The other is faithful execution of that decision, including in the case where the decision was wrong the day it was made.

The scope word in both paragraphs is inbound. Purchase orders and transfer orders. That is putaway, the question of where a pallet goes as it arrives at the dock, answered against policies you supplied. Balancing stock as it arrives is a real and useful capability. It is a different operation from reading a year of order lines and concluding that an item has been in the wrong pick face since March.

Two smaller things in that entry are worth noting. The phrase "importing data at scale" tells you the expected input is a file of decisions somebody made elsewhere. And "warehouse spatial locations further optimize routes" is Microsoft describing route optimisation, which is the order in which a picker visits locations, not which locations hold which items.

Automate dynamic work classification with Power FX

This one gets skipped in most summaries and it is the most architecturally interesting entry in the wave. Feature Details:

Dynamic work classification powered by Power FX formulas lets you evaluate warehouse queries in real time, so you can prioritize work based on load priority or any operational data. This removes the need for multiple location directives or work templates, reducing configuration complexity and making your warehouse more responsive.

Two things follow from that. The first is that Microsoft is naming location directives and work templates as the mechanism this replaces, which is a useful confirmation of how the previous generation of this configuration worked and what its cost was.

The second is what "prioritize work" means. This decides the order and classification of work that already exists. It is a sequencing and routing capability, and a flexible one. It does not decide where an item should be stored, and the entry does not claim it does.

There is a third point that matters more than either. You write the formula. Power FX is a low-code expression language, and the entry describes it as letting you "define and adjust operational logic with a flexible, low-code approach". The system evaluates your logic in real time against live data, which beats maintaining a thicket of directives. What it does not do is work out what the logic should be. If you want work prioritised by item velocity, you supply the velocity ranking. The engine will apply it perfectly and will never tell you the ranking is stale.

This is the honest answer to the most common objection in this area, which is that you can configure your way to any of this. You can. Configuration is a delivery mechanism for an analysis. It is not the analysis.

Improve picking efficiency with wrist-mounted scanning devices

The Warehouse Management mobile app now runs natively on wrist-mounted scanning devices. The entry lists instant feedback through distinct sounds and vibrations so workers do not have to look at a screen, improved accuracy, improved productivity, reduced physical strain, and rapid deployment across many devices.

It is the most concrete entry in the wave and the one most likely to be noticed on the floor. It is also the only entry carrying numbers, which is covered further down this page.

Improve operations with Warehouse Management mobile app V4

The entry states the substance plainly:

In version 4, the Warehouse Management mobile app moves from Xamarin to React Native.

A move from one UI framework to another is a rewrite of the application your floor spends its entire shift inside. The entry lists what comes with it: colour themes and sound options, a camera-based barcode scanner, performance improvements, better network resilience, and built-in Wi-Fi self-diagnostics. The Wi-Fi diagnostics in particular will matter to anyone who has spent an afternoon trying to work out whether a device problem is the device or the building.

Two facts about this entry deserve more attention than they get. It has been in public preview since 1 August 2025 and carries no general availability date at all. And the entry was last updated on 16 October 2025, which makes it the least recently touched item in the wave by a wide margin. That is not a criticism of the work. It is a planning input. If your roadmap assumes V4 in production this year, the plan does not currently support that assumption, and the place to confirm it is the planner rather than a summary of it.

Enable precise serial and batch capture in cluster picking

For items tracked below the location level in the reservation hierarchy, this adds two strategies to the cluster setup: capture serial and batch numbers once before distributing items, or capture them separately for each cluster position.

That is a narrow feature and a real one. Anyone running cluster picking on serialised or batch-tracked stock has had to choose between accuracy and speed at exactly that step. It changes nothing about placement, and it does not pretend to.

Streamline transfer order receiving in WOM with ASNs

Receive transfer orders in warehouse-only mode with a single license plate scan, using packing structures defined inside the advance shipping notice. Inbound work, on the receiving side, for sites running warehouse-only mode.

Capture worker IDs for warehouse packing events

The mobile app now records which worker performed each container handling step, such as adding items to a container or closing it. The entry frames this as traceability, accountability and audit readiness, and adds that it helps identify training needs or process gaps.

Worth being straight about what this is. It is a record of who did what and when, at the packing station. Used well it finds the process gap. It is also the entry most likely to need a conversation with your people before it is switched on, and that conversation goes better when it happens first.

Improve database health by archiving load data

This is the entry that repays reading most closely, and it is covered in its own section below.

The one feature that touches your history is the one that moves it out

Seven of the eight entries are about doing warehouse work. One is about the data that warehouse work leaves behind. Here is its Feature Details paragraph:

Move historical load and work records to long-term retention using the built-in archiving capability of Supply Chain Management. This reduces index size, improves database health, and speeds up tasks like sandbox refreshes. The extended archiving framework now supports the following tables: WHSLOADTABLE, WHSLOADLINE, WHSSHIPMENTTABLE, WHSWORKTABLE, WHSWORKLINE, WHSWORKINVENTTRANS, and WHSWORKTRANS.

Read the table names. WHSWORKTABLE and WHSWORKLINE are the warehouse work headers and lines. That is the record of the work that was created and completed: which items were picked, from which locations, in which order, on which day. WHSWORKINVENTTRANS and WHSWORKTRANS carry the inventory transaction detail underneath them.

That data is the raw material for every question worth asking about placement. Which items are picked most often. Which items travel together on the same order. Which pick faces are being replenished twice a shift. Which locations nobody visits. You cannot answer any of those from a snapshot of current on-hand. You answer them from work history.

So the single feature in this wave that touches pick history is one whose purpose is to move it out of the live database.

That is not an accusation and it should not be read as one. Index bloat on the warehouse work tables is a real and well-known operational problem, it slows down environments that people have to work in every day, and an archiving framework that handles it properly is a good thing to ship. The business value paragraph is straightforward about the goal: keep the database lean, improve long-term performance, speed up sandbox refreshes. All legitimate.

The point is narrower, and it is a planning point. Two facts from the entry make it actionable. Microsoft describes the operation as moving records "to long-term retention", and separately as "archive or remove". Those are different outcomes, and which one you get depends on how you configure it. And the entry states that the capability "is not turned on by default, so review your configuration to start archiving load-related records".

Off by default means the decision is yours and it has not been made yet. So make it deliberately. Before anyone enables archiving on the warehouse work tables, settle three questions. How much work history does your analysis need, in months. Where do archived records go, and can they still be queried. And who signs off on the retention window, given that the person who wants a lean database and the person who wants two years of pick lines are usually not the same person and usually do not meet.

Twelve months of work history is the practical floor for placement analysis, because anything shorter cannot see a full seasonal cycle and will happily recommend that you move your Christmas stock to a back aisle in July. General availability for this feature is September 2026, which is enough notice to have the conversation before it is a live setting in your environment.

Matching the announcement to the list

In March 2026 Microsoft’s release wave 1 announcement said warehousing gains "AI-powered picking, inventory rebalancing, and hands-free scanning." Three phrases. Here is what each one resolves to in the list above.

Hands-free scanning resolves cleanly. It is the wrist-mounted scanning devices entry, supported by mobile app V4. The devices are real, the app runs natively on them, and the feature does what the phrase says.

Inventory rebalancing resolves to dynamic item placement, and specifically to the inbound balancing described above. Putaway as stock arrives, against policies you defined.

AI-powered picking does not resolve to anything in the list. The two nearest entries are wrist-mounted scanners, which are hardware, and Power FX work classification, which is a rules engine where you write the rules. Neither derives placement or sequencing from data on its own.

Be careful with what that means. The claim here is narrow and it is worth stating precisely: the warehouse management section of the 2026 release wave 1 plan contains no feature entry that matches the phrase "AI-powered picking". That is not a claim that no such capability exists anywhere in Dynamics 365, and it is not a claim that Microsoft is misrepresenting the product. Announcement copy summarises at a level where a scanner and a rules engine can reasonably sit under a heading like that, and every vendor writes announcements this way. The planner is where the specifics live, and the specifics are what a roadmap gets built from.

The inventory and logistics section was checked separately in case rebalancing lived there instead. It contains three features: tracking attributes, net price in unified pricing, and vendor rebate management. Nothing placement related.

The part of the planner nobody reads

Each feature entry carries a change history field. Three of the eight warehouse features have one.

Archiving load data has an entry dated 6 May 2026 reading "General availability date moved to Sep 2026". Wrist-mounted scanning has one from the same day reading "General availability date updated to Jun 2026". Worker ID capture on packing has one dated 11 November 2025 reading "General availability date moved to Jul 2025".

This is the most useful field on the page and it is the one that never makes it into a summary. An announcement is a snapshot of intent at the moment it is published. The change history is the record of what happened to that intent afterwards. If you committed to a September go-live on the basis of a June general availability date, the planner told you it had moved and the announcement did not.

The last-updated dates carry the same kind of signal. Dynamic item placement was last updated on 18 March 2026, the announcement date, and has not been touched since. Four other entries have been revised more recently, two of them in June. An entry standing still for four months while its neighbours move is not necessarily a problem. It is worth knowing before you build a plan on it.

How long each feature spent in public preview

Put the two dates on each entry next to each other and a third signal appears. Wrist-mounted scanning had roughly three months between public preview and general availability. Power FX classification, serial and batch capture, and ASN receiving each had about two.

Two entries stand apart. Dynamic item placement lists public preview and general availability in the same month, June 2026. Archiving load data lists no public preview date at all.

A short or absent public preview is not misconduct and it usually means the change is small or low risk. What it does mean is less time in front of customers before the feature is generally available, and therefore fewer people having found the awkward edges first. It is a reasonable thing to weigh when you decide whether to be an early adopter of a given entry. It is also worth noticing which two entries those are: the one carrying the placement story, and the one touching your work history.

One more thing all eight have in common. Every entry in this wave carries the line "Enabled for: Users by admins, makers, or analysts". None of them switches itself on. Each one is a configuration decision somebody has to make, which is the recurring theme of this whole list.

The one number in the list

Seven of the eight entries describe their benefit in words. One attaches figures.

The wrist-mounted scanning entry says the devices "can save 3 to 5 seconds per scan", and that "some organizations see up to a 27 percent improvement in picking accuracy".

Those are Microsoft’s numbers, quoted as Microsoft states them, with the hedges Microsoft attached: can save, some organizations, up to. They are not independently verified here and the entry does not cite a study.

What is worth noticing is where the numbers sit. The only quantified benefit claim in the entire warehouse management wave is attached to a hardware accessory. Not to the placement feature, not to the work classification engine, not to receiving. That is a reasonable choice on Microsoft’s part, because seconds per scan is measurable on a stopwatch and placement quality is not measurable without a customer’s own order history. But it tells you something about which claims in this wave are testable and which are not.

If you are being asked to justify a warehousing investment on throughput, three to five seconds per scan is a number you can multiply. Take a picker doing four hundred scans in a shift. At four seconds saved per scan that is roughly twenty seven minutes of recovered time per picker per shift. Across twenty pickers that is about nine hours a day on paper, which sounds like four extra people and will not be four extra people.

The reason is worth understanding, because it is the same reason placement matters. Scanning is not the constraint in most picking operations. Walking is. Time saved inside an activity that occupies a minority of the shift is real but bounded, and some of it is reabsorbed by the walking that sits either side of it. That does not make the scanners a bad purchase. It makes the saving a number to test on your own floor rather than to put in a business case unexamined, which is the correct treatment for every figure in this wave including this one.

What to actually do with this

Build the roadmap off the planner, not the announcement. The planner has the dates, the change history, and the feature details paragraph. The announcement has the headline. Only one of those three has ever moved a go-live date.

Read the feature details, not just the business value. Every entry has both. Dynamic item placement is the clearest case in this wave: the two paragraphs describe the same feature at very different resolutions, and only one of them tells you the scope is inbound.

Settle your work-history retention before September. The archiving feature is off by default and generally available in September 2026. If anyone in your organisation intends to analyse picking, the retention window on the warehouse work tables is now a decision with a deadline on it.

Separate placement from movement. Six of these eight features make an existing movement faster, more accurate, or more traceable. That is real value and it lands on the floor. None of them changes the decision about where an item should live, which is the decision that determines how much movement there is to make faster in the first place. If the metric you are held to is lines picked and shipped per person hour, that distinction is the whole conversation.

Check wave 2 before you commit to anything past September. As of 22 July 2026 the 2026 wave 2 release plan is not published. The URL returns a 404 and the Release Planner’s wave filter offers only 2024 wave 2, 2025 wave 1, 2025 wave 2 and 2026 wave 1. General availability for that wave is 1 October. Anything on this page about what Microsoft has not shipped is scoped to wave 1 and stays scoped to wave 1 until wave 2 is readable. This page will be revised rather than retracted when it is.

None of this is a criticism of the eight features. Every one of them improves somebody’s day at work, and a warehouse running mobile app V4 on wrist-mounted scanners with worker ID traceability on packing is in better shape than one that is not. Placement is simply not the thing they improve, and if you went into wave 1 expecting it to be, the list is the fastest way to find out.

For what the Warehouse slotting feature itself reads, and why open orders are not the same input as shipment history, see Can Dynamics 365 optimize inventory placement?.

For the full ground-up treatment of the underlying problem, read Warehouse Pickup Optimization: The Operator’s Guide.