Digital transformation is disrupting every vertical, and the manufacturing industry is no exception. In order to overcome the industrial overhaul, manufacturers need a robust business management solution at their core. Dynamics 365 Business Central for Manufacturing provides manufacturers with the tools to transform their operations, improve efficiency and complete complex processes accurately and efficiently. Thanks to robust and intuitive features, manufacturers can stay ahead of the competition by providing customers with accurate information and on-time orders, get a clear picture of inventory levels, increase production efficiencies, and forecast upcoming product demand.
Dynamics 365 Business Central is a cloud-based ERP solution designed especially for SMBs and features everything a small-to-midsize organization needs to manage their back-end business processes. Business Central is fast to implement, easy to configure, and simplicity guides innovations in product design, development, implementation, and usability.
Business Central comes in two editions: Essential and Premium. The Essentials license gives users access to features like invoicing, purchasing, opportunity management, budgets, finance, fixed assets, purchasing order management, resource management, workflow, contact management, simple inventory, advanced inventory, and distribution.
To gain access to Business Central’s manufacturing and service management modules, users will need to purchase the Premium license, which offers all of the vast functionality in “Essentials” plus robust manufacturing features such as:
Production Bill of Materials As a required protocol for the configuration of all other Manufacturing modules, this enables you to create bills of materials and calculate standard costs
Production Orders The Production Orders module includes a manual supply-planning tool as an alternative to automatic planning, and with it you can create and manage production orders while posting consumption and output to those orders. After a production order is created, you can calculate net requirements based on that production order.
Agile Manufacturing This enables you to run the Agile Manufacturing, Supply Planning and Capacity Planning modules.
Version Management Create and manage different versions of the manufacturing bill of materials and routings.
Supply Planning Plan material requirements based on demand with support for master production scheduling and materials requirements planning; basic Supply Planning encompasses:
a) Automatic production/purchase orders
b) Action messages for quick and easy balancing of supply and demand
c) Support for “bucket-less” and “bucketed” material requirements planning
d) Setup for items with their own reordering policy, whether manufactured by or purchased from a third party
Demand Forecasting Manage demand forecasting based on items and input demand (sales) forecasts for products and components in a more convenient way (daily/monthly/quarterly).
Sales and Inventory Forecasting You can take advantage of the Sales and Inventory Forecast extension to gain deep insight about potential sales and a clear overview of expected stock-outs; the built-in Cortana Intelligence leverages historical data to help you manage your stock and respond to your customers.
Capacity Planning Add capacities (work centers) to the manufacturing process by setting up routings and using them on production orders and in material requirements planning.
Finite Loading Manage finite loading of capacity-constraint resources; through Finite Loading, you can take capacity constraints into account so that no more work is assigned to a work center than the capacities can be expected to execute during a given time period.
Machine Centers Designed to help you manage capacity of a single machine/producing resource, machine centers allows you to plan/manage capacity on several levels – on a more detailed level for machine centers and on a consolidated level for work centers.
For more information on how Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central for Manufacturing can help take your business to the next level, contact one of our expert consultants today.