Business Central Manufacturing Show

In episode 35 of his podcast, Martin welcomed Martin Blaha from the Czech Republic, who moved to the UK in 2016, where he still lives and works. While Martin worked in various consulting roles for various Business Central partners for 11 years, he embarked on an entrepreneurial journey last year. Hence, Martin now owns MB365 Consulting – a new generation Business Central partner. Being asked why he calls his new company a "new generation Business Central" partner and what distinguishes the "old" generation from the "new " one, Martin B. outlined that his way of working, compared to traditional partners, is characterized by flexibility, agility, and a focus on delivering quicker results at a lower cost, the lower cost resulting from working remote and thus having no corporate debts. He referred to his small but very efficient team, consisting of the best developers on the market. While many traditional partners still adhere to the so-called waterfall-project methodology, meaning that each project step runs over many months, he works in a hybrid agile environment as Microsoft recommends, allowing him to run a first iteration quickly and collect feedback very quickly. Leading over to the, as Martin K. called them, "hard facts of Business Central", they started to talk about the topic of Martin B.'s latest blog post "Five things you didn't know about planning worksheets" and why he is so passionate about it. According to Martin B., his enthusiasm for production stems from his journey from working with manufacturing software to transitioning to Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Business Central. He emphasizes the value of understanding manufacturing processes and the desire to share knowledge to prevent common pitfalls in implementations. He has seen, as he puts it, "so many missed or failed implementations where people just did not know what they're doing". His passion for the planning worksheet is rooted in the fact that it brings significant value to the customer "by sorting out the daily work in logic sequence and manner". Talking about the "Frozen Period", a key concept of the planning worksheet, denoting a period where the schedule is fixed and shouldn't be altered, Martin B. stressed the importance of setting the start date in the future to analyze urgencies, such as unshipped sales orders or missed planning opportunities. Lead times and communication also play crucial roles. Another best practice recommended by Martin B. is to define the worksheet process plan and then run it in small steps to achieve specific goals and balance supply and demand for each area individually. Moreover, utilizing filtering options extensively allows for running planning worksheets for bespoke purposes. Categorizing items is another key aspect, helping streamline the planning process by organizing products based on their characteristics. However, these practices might require adjustments to fit each company's unique needs. Additionally, Martin B. places a lot of emphasis on the significance of personal relationships in successful ERP system implementations, stressing the value of on-site interaction over remote communication alone. While planning worksheets in Business Central play a crucial role in balancing supply and demand throughout the manufacturing process chain, reservation entries serve as the glue holding everything together by ensuring alignment between supply and demand, and orders being fulfilled in the correct sequence. The conversation ended with discussing the importance of finding a balance between flexibility and strictness when using reservation entries in Business Central for manufacturing.

In episode 34 of his podcast, Martin welcomed José Miguel Azevedo, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Senior Solution Architect with KPMG in the UK, one of the BIG4 consulting companies. José has more than 24 years of experience with different ERPs, ranging from SAP and Oracle to Dynamics 365 Business Central, his focus areas being Navision and Business Central, where he held various roles in consulting, like business consultant, functional consultant, project manager, program manager, etc. He has worked in companies of all sizes and with clients from the fashion, food, pharmaceutical, manufacturing, and services industries. Although Jose admitted that speaking foreign languages is not big fun for him, he dared to move to and work in London and join Martin for the podcast. They kicked off their conversation by delving into José's personal journey, highlighting his move from Portugal to London. José's decision to leave his comfort zone and embrace new opportunities at KPMG underscores his passion for manufacturing. He emphasized that the industry resonates with him due to its dynamic challenges and the need for out-of-the-box thinking. Martin and José explored the essential tools and strategies for successfully implementing Business Central in manufacturing, and José stressed the importance of identifying whether a company is make-to-order or make-to-stock and tailoring the approach accordingly. According to him, simplicity is critical for setting up Bill of Materials (BOM) structures and utilizing lead times to aid Material Requirements Planning (MRP) and Available to Promise (ATP) calculations. When discussing Capable to Promise (CTP), José outlined that while it's a powerful tool, it should be introduced only after establishing a solid data foundation. He pointed out that most manufacturing companies already possess historical experience and can set lead times and workarounds at the item level to provide customers with realistic delivery dates. The conversation wrapped up with a focus on the significance of relationships in the manufacturing sector. José recalled his challenging implementations, noting that successful projects were marked by solid professional relationships. Both Martin and José agreed that while technology is an enabler, the people behind it genuinely drive success. Despite both admitting they're not particularly language-oriented, they exchanged friendly banter about Martin learning some basic Portuguese before meeting at Directions EMEA in Lyon. José ended the podcast by expressing gratitude for the conversation and the opportunity to share his insights.

In his latest podcast episode, Martin hosted Ivar Keskpaik, who, amongst a plethora of other roles and positions, works as a Business Consultant for Softera Baltic, Lithuania. He holds an MSc in Physics, is a chartered engineer, a certified Theory of Constraints (TOC) practitioner, and has been titled the “most famous Interim Manager of Estonia” by the Magazine “Director”. Ivar and Martin discussed how manufacturing companies working with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central can apply the Theory of Constraints. Martin introduced the podcast's topic by asking Ivar to explain the Theory of Constraints (TOC) shortly. As Ivar outlined, this concept was developed by Eliyahu M. Goldratt in the late 70s of the last century and describes a management philosophy and methodology that allows one to focus only on the constraints in a process and to make good bottom-line results for a short period in any type of company. TOC is more complex than other management theories, such as Lean or Six Sigma, and Ivar admitted that it took him 20 years to grasp it fully. As Ivar went on, the high complexity of TOC lies in its being based on a flow-based approach and not on a resource-based one. Flow-based thinking is about making sure things move smoothly and efficiently from start to finish, therefore trying to detect the constraints - or bottlenecks - in a process and maximizing them to the maximum flow. Transferring this to the typical Business Central manufacturing customers, namely SMBs, their constraints are always on resources. However typically, the bottleneck isn't stable, but it keeps on shifting from one work or machine center to another. Once the constraint has been detected - by scrutinizing the workload of the different capacities - the planning must only be done for this resource. The workload should not be distributed equally among all resources to remove the constraint. Talking about best practices for implementing TOC at manufacturing companies using Business Central, Ivar related that it always starts with a visit to the customer and talking to the management board to understand the company's problems. Then, of course, there will be an inspection of the shopfloor to see and understand the technologies the customer is using. Based on these findings, the bottlenecks are then analyzed: where are they located? Are they floating or not? etc. After that, the planning and scheduling part will be dealt with. But, as Ivar stressed, the first step always will be to detect the bottleneck. Often, customers mistakenly think that their most expensive resource is their bottleneck and hence are not happy when hearing that to remove the constraint, they will have to disbalance their resources and even take away workload from their most expensive machine. They fear that this will bring their production cost up or that the cost per unit of this machine will increase significantly. Ivar encountered these arguments, in which the conflict between the cost-based approach and the flow-based approach becomes evident, by pointing out that both approaches have the goal to make a profit but that the flow-based approach will bring results like better profits, a bigger turnover, and higher customer satisfaction in a comprehensively shorter time than the resource-based approach. The bigger flow through removing the bottlenecks will lead to delivering more work orders in time. Sometimes, Ivar even offers to set up a mini-project for the respective company so that the decision-makers can see the results and then discuss the main project.

Martin's guest is Andrew Good, CEO of Liberty Grove Software from Canada. Andrew is an engineer, project manager, analyst, manufacturing expert, and Microsoft Certified Trainer. His extensive knowledge and background have been built from personal experiences with many companies, working in various operational and management roles. Projects have ranged from new implementations to streamlining business operations. 21 years of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics NAV experience mean that he can fall back on many different perspectives when working with customers. He has helped clients get the most out of their Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central/NAV systems through integrations, upgrades, and extensions that allow them to deal with their changing business environments, regardless of whether financial operations, rentals, distribution, and manufacturing. Being asked whether providing the master data that are so essential for a functioning planning process also means fun to him, Andrew admitted that, overall, from an organization's perspective, it is a painful process. Nevertheless, as he pointed out, the dividends that are paid to the organizations are huge both in the short and long term because, in the end, they are rewarded by getting a single system that provides them with trustworthy financial, inventory, and manufacturing information. And according to Andrew, the process of providing and maintaining master data is an ongoing one. The system needs to remain trustworthy and stable also after go-live, and for this, the data must be kept in good shape continuously. Depending on the organizations' size, there are a variety of techniques at hand for this. Martin then brought up the claim "Transform your business with human-friendly solutions to power progress" that he read on Andrew's website when preparing for the podcast and that he would like to investigate further. Starting with the "transform your business" part, Andrew outlined that when you look at the transformation necessity for the manufacturing companies, it is not primarily related to their "direct processes", meaning everything connected to manufacturing, but mainly concerns all their indirect processes, like engineering, purchase, finance, etc. where the day-to-day work can be significantly streamlined and improved to make people more efficient. Andrew sees a second area of transformation opportunity in leveraging the already massive data that are available in the organizations by using tools like Power BI to provide insights into how the factory is run. Of course, this also will impact production itself because Power BI can also be used to monitor real-time production data, thus finding out if production is running to its quote, finding fundamental issues with a certain part, etc. Discussing the "human-friendly solution" part of the claim, Andrew stressed that he is no fan of productivity initiatives being introduced by top-down directives. Not including the experience and opinions of all staff members will generate a lot of resentment and resistance to those initiatives. Andrew advocates for a more collaborative approach where also the view and the voices of the "direct" people in the project count. According to Andrew, it is always key to get people on the shop floor involved. Regarding the third part of the claim, "to power progress", Martin wanted to know whether and how Andrew measures and documents the progress his customers make. Andrew related that he encourages his customers to gather and analyze data and examine how it changes over time. They should also keep track of the activities having been executed during the same period to see the impact of these changes. He is a firm believer in constant measuring, monitoring, and then acting based on the monitoring. The typical metrics that get tracked in manufacturing companies, of course, depend on the companies' focus.

In his latest podcast episode, Martin was super excited to have one of the North American Business Central manufacturing rockstars with him. Steve Chinsky is the Manager Dynamics Practice with Accelerynt. He has over 23 years of experience consulting, implementing, and managing Dynamics NAV and Business Central projects. His over 180 NAV and BC implementations were done in manufacturing, supply chain (aka WMS(, food and beverage, jewelry, retail, service, oil and gas, chemical, industrial equipment, and home goods industries. In addition, he worked over 16 years as an Accountant (CMA) in various positions (Director of Finance, Controller, and Director of Operations). Steve is, among others, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Most Valued Professional (MVP), a Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP), and a Certified Navision Manufacturing Specialist. He is a Board Member and Program Committee Chair of the NAVUG (the NAV user group), Summit Program Committee Co-Chair, and he is on the Program Committee for DynamicsCON Live and the Content Committee for Directions North America. With this impressive background, the question naturally arose what is so special about NAV and Business Central that it qualifies for such a level of commitment. Steve related that having worked for 16 years in accounting, it finally became somewhat repetitive and rudimentary, and due to lots of recommendations, he started to look at ERP and a "company called Navision." He was really fascinated because it was so easy and simple, and over time, he knew that he wanted to get involved with the community that was building itself in the early days. Moreover, he has always loved helping people, so when he started to work with different partners, he supported anybody new and wanted to know how the software worked. From there, it was a small step to organizing conferences and being part of advisor boards or committees. And this is what he really loves doing. Being asked what piqued his interest in manufacturing, Steve said that, originally, he mostly worked in the supply chain environment. But when he met a customer who produced the glue for the United States postal stamps, he was intrigued by being involved with manufacturing literally, as he put it, "from soup to nuts." He likes to mold different companies that are coming to NAV and Business Central into the software and to accompany every step, and that's what kept him there. Steve was happy to share some of the best implementation practices and tips he has ready for manufacturers in the NAV and Business Central environment: As Steve outlined, implementing an ERP is always also a business process reengineering task because, if you want to move from an old system to a new one, you can't do this without analyzing all your processes and, most likely, subsequently also changing some things. He illustrated his point by saying that you can't change your favorite ice cream flavor from a chocolate chip to another one but want to keep the chips, the color, and the flavor. As Steve said, "Everything is on the table with a new ERP system."

Our podcast is back! After a half-year break, Martin felt it was time to "revive" the podcast again, last but not least because many Business Central manufacturing enthusiasts reached out and encouraged him to continue with it. So, in episode 30, he was happy to talk to Jeff Brickler, solution architect at an ISV called CADtalk in Cincinnati, USA. Jeff's background is quite outstanding because he hasn't been an IT/manufacturing person for his entire career. He started as a Latin teacher in high school with a master's degree in Classics. He joined CADtalk eight years ago and has worked closely with manufacturing customers as a support specialist, consulting and services manager, and solution architect since then. Dwelling on the fact that Jeff has been working with manufacturing companies for quite some time, Martin wanted to know more about Jeff's experience with these companies: what makes them unique and what is the intellectual challenge of working with them. Jeff described that, although the customers he deals with are very different, they all have some things in common: they are all quite "down-to-earth," meaning that they work hard to make good products and are also very cost conscious. What is more, he also meets a lot of engineers who are very detail-oriented and ask a lot of questions, so the challenge here lies in offering or showing them products that are really going to work and provide value. When asked what he thought was the most important skill needed for working in such an environment and whether his teaching experience helped him in his new job, Jeff said there's not much difference between a demonstration for a software product and teaching. As he put it, a lot of teaching is really about trying to give a good overview of what you're about to teach or what the subject matter is, and then frame it in a way that makes it interesting to the audience, and then listening to that audience to know what's interesting to them. So what you need in both jobs is patience, not getting frustrated, and an ability to explain in multiple ways. Because sometimes, the way he thinks of something may not be the same as the way the customer thinks of it, meaning that we might have a different vocabulary or how we structure it in our mind might be different. The two then talked about the similarities between the users of Business Central and those of other ERP systems and came to the conclusion that independent of their size (the Business Central companies are usually a bit smaller than the others), they share the same challenges. They all design and produce complex products with a relatively small lot size that require engineering. In Business Central, they have also to manage the BOM. Regarding whether CADtalk's Business Central customers use the manufacturing or the jobs module, Jeff stated that their customers mainly use the standard manufacturing module because that helps them keep a standard BOM. In his opinion, even when customers have lot sizes of one, it is always preferable to create a standard BOM instead of just creating a job for that one-off. A BOM makes updates more manageable in case of engineering changes which would be quite difficult with the Jobs module. Talking about the impact of having so many ISV solutions for Business Central, Jeff outlined that this makes working with customers a little bit challenging in the sense that at CADtalk, they need to keep being aware and up-to-date about the products on the market. Customers would very much appreciate them knowing the ecosystem and preferably having some kind of relationship with the other vendors so that they are always aware of how all the different products or software interactions work together. Jeff and Martin ended their talk by expressing their hope to meet at Directions EMEA in Lyon later that year and continue their discussion.

Since a bit of time has passed since the last episode, let me briefly bring you up-to-date: In June, we at NETRONIC organized an event series that we run under our "next by NETRONIC" event brand. The idea of next by NETRONIC events was to host online events in which we just play a facilitating role for having panel discussions, dive into Business Central-related topics, and avoid NETRONIC scheduling demos. Hence, the "next by NETRONIC" event brand is ideal for running an event series in which actually other ISV solutions play a key role. To some extent, we regard the Business Central Manufacturing Exchange as the "event frontend to Microsoft's AppSource". We want to provide manufacturing ISVs the opportunity to showcase their AppSource apps to a broader audience. We - by the way - will only allow presenters that have their apps in Microsoft AppSource. With the Business Central Manufacturing Exchange, we want to make it easier for our customers and partners to find manufacturing apps that close requirement gaps ... just like our visual scheduling apps do. So, the industry vertical solutions webinar was the last of the events and two industry vertical ISVs presented their solutions: Michael BradleyAdri Cardo

Following last week's shopfloor discussion episode, here is the 28th episode of the Business Central Manufacturing Show. Again, this episode originates from our Business Central Manufacturing Exchange webinar series. It is a recorded panel discussion on warehouse challenges and solutions. I hosted this panel discussion and was excited to have Žilvinas Lapačinskas (Software Baltic), Mark Hamblin (Insight Works), and James Crowter (Clever Dynamics) as my guests. To some extent, we regard the Business Central Manufacturing Exchange as the "event frontend to Microsoft's AppSource". With the event series, we want to provide manufacturing ISVs the opportunity to showcase their AppSource apps to a broader audience. So, last week, we ran a warehouse solutions webinar in which three warehouse ISVs presented their solutions. At the end of the webinar, I hosted a panel discussion with all three warehouse experts. Namely, these are I highly recommend that you not only tune into this podcast which is the recording of this panel discussion. Instead, I also recommend that you watch the recording of the entire webinar to see how Softera, Insight Works, and Clever Dynamics can help you with your warehouse challenges.

The 27th episode of the Business Central Manufacturing Show is somewhat different than all the others that you have been listening to so far. This episode is not a conversation with one guest. Instead, it is a recorded panel discussion on shopfloor challenges and solutions. I hosted this panel discussion and was excited to have Bent Korsgaard (Naveksa), Mark Hamblin (Insight Works), and Matthew Woodhouse (Clever Dynamics) as my guests. A bit of background: Recently, we at NETRONIC ran a webinar series that we called the Business Central Manufacturing Exchange. Oftentimes, when we speak to customers (and also to partners), we are confronted with requirements that are outside our scheduling core competency. Sometimes, we are asked for shopfloor solutions and time tracking. Another time, it is product configuration. And yet another time, it is that people request some warehouse functionality from us. Not seldomly, we are also asked for manufacturing solutions that are specific to one particular industry. Hence, we grasped a general need for more transparency on the Business Central manufacturing apps and solutions landscape. We took that need seriously and launched the Business Central Manufacturing Exchange to address this need. To some extent, we regard the Business Central Manufacturing Exchange as the "event frontend to Microsoft's AppSource". So, last week, we ran a shopfloor solutions webinar in which three shopfloor ISVs presented their solutions. At the end of the webinar, I hosted a panel discussion with all three shopfloor experts I highly recommend that you not only tune into this podcast which is the recording of this panel discussion. Instead, I also recommend that you watch the recording of the entire webinar to see how Naveksa, Insight Works, and Clever Dynamics can help you with your shopfloor challenges.

The guest in episode 26 of Martin's Business Central Manufacturing Show was Andrei Panko. Andrei is a program manager in the Business Central engineering team at the Microsoft Development Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. Having a Microsoft employee as a guest on the podcast was really a novelty. In the other episodes so far, all speakers were Business Central manufacturing experts working for a Microsoft partner. So this podcast provides most interesting insider insights into how things work in the Microsoft Business Central development team. Andrei started working as a consultant, developer, and project manager in 2004 - back then it was Dynamics NAV, of course - and was an MVP for six years running. He has extensive field experience in the supply chain and has engaged in many other aspects of the Business Central application and platform as well. Besides, he is the author of the book "Supply Chain Management in Microsoft Dynamics NAV", which was published in 2008, and he holds a patent for metadata-driven machine learning for systems. Before diving into how things happen at Microsoft, Martin first wanted to know how Andrei got into manufacturing and how it does matter to him. Andrei related that one of his first customers was a small manufacturing company that needed to improve its processes and for whom he purchased and implemented Business Central. According to Andrei, the great strength of Business Central, even back then, was that it could be easily and flexibly modified to fit specific unique company processes. While Andrei and Martin agreed that this strength still exists, they both think that the way of creating these enhancements has changed quite a lot. In their opinion what had been real customizations in the past, now increasingly get turned into apps. This led to a discussion about whether Business Central has become a much more core part of Microsoft's overall strategy, by e.g., providing the AppSource infrastructure or integrating it with Power Platform. Andrei gave a short "historical" discourse from how the ERP was deployed 20 to 30 years ago to how it is done today by way of SaaS. The red thread running through this development over time is one of the core initiatives at Microsoft Business Central. The team has been helping partners reduce the number of ad-hoc developments. This not only changed the selling and deployment model of many partners but also changed the requirements for Business Central. In order to help partners and customers reduce the number of ad-hoc developments, Business Central has become tighter integrated with the Office products, tools are now much better integrated with the overall ERP and there is much more tooling support also from the power platform. In this context they talked about another way of reducing ad-hoc developments, namely listening to, and using the feedback they get from customers and partners. Andrei related two interesting facts:

Episode 25 of Martin's podcast was all about the difficulties and obstacles that can stand in the way of a successful implementation of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. The guest in this jubilee episode was James Crowter from the UK. He is the founder and Managing Director of Technology Management, an established Navision and Business Central partner whom everybody knows as TecMan. In addition, Microsoft has appointed him as MVP (most valuable professional) for business applications for the sixth year running. And if that was not enough, he last year volunteered to become the chairman of the Directions EMEA committee. James is passionate about how businesses can improve their efficiency by getting process optimal more of the time. And for the last 25 years, he has been working to help organizations of all sizes and types implement the ERP and CRM software that typically they decide they need when things are going wrong. While he has seen projects run unbelievably well, at the same time he has also had some unbelievably hard projects. Of course, this statement was the ideal hook for Martin and he wanted to know the reasons why projects become hard. Likewise, he asked for tips on how to avoid such negative experiences. James stated that in companies wanting to implement a new system, often the misconception prevails that buying software is a magic bullet to make them well organized. But there is more to it. For James, accuracy is not achieved by just implementing software but is a state of mind. Hence, in some cases, in addition to changing the software, companies also have to change their people's approach to the way that they do things. According to James, "garbage in, garbage out" is one of the main reasons why projects sometimes become so hard. To avoid this, ERP users should strive at having a well-structured and maintained database. You can have the best tool in the world but if you don't use it in the correct way and if you feed it poorly maintained data, you won't get a good result. Consequently, people need to know that they have to be prepared to put in the work to get the results they want. From James' experience, this bit is often what they lack. In that regard, an important parameter for many ERP-supported processes in manufacturing is precise time estimations. Often the responsible people only have a rough idea about what process is going to take how much time and will be done by whom. But it is vital that the processes get quantified precisely. You have to outline them as early as possible in as much detail as possible. As it is absolutely essential that a significant amount of time is put in for initial data entry and initial data structure definition, the question arose as to what extent this is manual work or can be automated. As James put it, the key question here is rather "What do you actually need?" than "What have you historically done?" and that requires not the data entry per se, but needs decisions about what the data should be. This is a process of evolving and revising and hence is very individual. This led them back to the key message of their conversation, the importance of the manual and thorough and thoughtful parameter set up - now with a focus on item parameters. They agreed that it is vital that this is done by the production managers or whoever is in charge of the production because these people know their company's needs and hence should not delegate this task to temps or outsource it. The conversation then ended with Martin's admission that before the two of them would meet again - this already being a done deal - he certainly would need to get smart on item parameter setting.

Martin talked to Bart Vanbelle from Belgium who is Business Consultant with the Belgian partner ESC. Bart’s background is different from all the guests in the podcast so far. He started his career with international experiences as a cocktail bartender. After shortly running two catering businesses for a few years, he first came into contact with Navision, version 2009. He was a key user in a Navision implementation. Surprisingly enough, being part of an ERP implementation enthused him more than mixing drinks. Hence, he decided a U-turn move for his career at the age of 30. He started studying supply chain management full-time, had his bachelor after 3 years and joined ESC. At ESC, he is mainly responsible for manufacturing implementations and just recently got promoted to being the team lead of ESCs center of manufacturing excellence. In the conversation, Bart surprised Martin with the ADKAR model and mixed a delicious "knowledge cocktail" of how to successfully implement Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Phase 1 - A like Awareness As Bart pointed out, every company that wants to implement an ERP, should be crystal-clear about the purpose for this step. Depending on the kind of company the answers to this will, of course, differ. Some companies want to gain some extra revenue, for example, others again aim at saving time. Just saying "we want it", would not be the right motivation at all. Phase 2 - D like Desire Once the purpose for the implementation is clear, the questions will get more specific. In the desire phase, the key users should learn the reasons why they are going to make the change and what will be in it for them, and, of course, how it will help the company in general. As Bart related, he has often met key users that either didn't know the answers to these questions or just said, "because we have to". And again, this would not be the right motivation. At this point, the implementation team not only needs to provide the technology and analyze and optimize the processes but also make clear to the users how they will benefit from the change. Phase 3 - K like Knowledge In the K phase, the key users will acquire knowledge about the new system. There will be trainings and workshops in which they will learn how the system works and see what is the best fit for their department and their end users. Depending on how the key users have adapted to phase A and D, the K phase will be more or less successful. Or, as Bart puts it, the learning curve will be higher or lower, depending on the reaction to phase 1 and 2. When somebody isn't interested in learning a certain topic, why should he? What makes Bart as a consultant the happiest is when he gets to a point where users are so interested in the solution that they start learning and doing research on their own initiative. Phase 4 - A like Ability According to Bart, a lot of knowledge is needed to work with Business Central and looking at it for the first time can be really overwhelming. But once users have acquired the knowledge, they can start to use the system independently and even try to challenge it. And when users start challenging the system, Bart is sure he has done a good job. If users know more than him he is sure that they will benefit from the new system. Ability, as Bart puts it, should be a consequence. If you have the desire to work with a system, the ability will follow automatically. Phase 5 - R like Reinforcement Once the project is live, the implementation team's work is still not finished. Every couple of months or weeks they will go back to the company and evaluate the project together with the people on site. As Bart explains, there are always things that need checking or can be improved.

Martin met with Shannon Mullins, Chief Revenue Officer of Accelerynt, and a Microsoft MVP of business applications. She has over 20 years of experience in - amongst others - deployment implementation of CRM and ERP systems and hence has a deep understanding of the functional aspects of projects’ process automation and system design and the reporting needs and requirements for complex ERP systems. While talking to Shannon for the first time at last year’s Directions EMEA in Milan, Martin quickly noticed to his shame, that he never had a woman as a guest to his podcast and decided on the spot to change this. So it happened that Shannon agreed to become the first in – as we hope – a long line of female guests. After having wondered a bit about the fact that more people from Europe visit the Directions North America than vice versa, Shannon related that some years ago, she switched into the manufacturing focus and that she liked manufacturing projects because they are a lot more complex and detailed than just a pure financial project. Then it was straight to the main topic of the podcast: how moving to the cloud helps smooth and automate processes in Business Central. Process improvement and automation is run by Shannon and her team by looking at how manufacturers are currently doing their processes. Then they figure out how they not only can leverage Business Central but also Power Automate, Power BI, and Power Apps so that the manufacturer gets a robust future-forward system. In short, Shannon recommends making multi-step processes into one step. Using ERP in the cloud together with the power platform leads to spending less time on development and more time on improvement in customer service, which in turn smoothes integration processes and also saves money. The customers’ reporting needs and the KPIs they want to see depend on who is consuming the reports and here one can distinguish two types: On the one hand, the very detail-oriented accountants and on the other hand people running a plant or part of the plant who are looking more at the summary level and want to have an overall picture. Concentrating on the latter, one sees that the KPIs that are important to them very much depend on whether they are more labor-centric or more machine-centric. Of course, a manufacturer with very expensive machinery is usually more concerned about those machines being up than a customer that is very retail, who, in turn, will be more concerned about keeping delivery dates. In this context and together with the ever more advanced automation processes, one can observe that the KPIs tend to change their nature from backward-looking into becoming forward-looking and predictive. The past approach was, for instance, that companies came to work on Monday and saw that there was a machine downtime on Friday. Then they tried to figure out why. With Business Central and the power platform, manufacturing clients now can get a real-time notification and with this can make much more real-time decisions and pivots. Shannon and Martin agreed that with moving to the cloud, ERP has totally transformed in that data have become much more real-time and you can automate more processes. The danger associated with an increasing automation degree, of course, lies in getting rid of people. But this is not what is intended - the purpose is rather to make people’s work more meaningful and also to change the scope of their work. What's more, having everything real-time and transparent certainly increases the pressure on production leaders: Now that they have to make more informed decisions, they have to make sure they have the reporting they need. And that's where automation can come in place. Rather than sitting there and watching reports all day long and trying to figure out what's going on, they get an automated notification if something happens that they should be aware of.

I met with Ken Sebahar, who is the President of Solution Systems, Inc., a Microsoft Gold-Certified Partner near Chicago, Illinois. Ken and his colleague Michael host the great podcast “A Shot of Business Central and a Beer” in which they provide listeners with news and updates related to Business Central in an entertaining manner. Of course, with a podcast like this, beer was the ideal hook for our conversation. At the beginning of our conversation, you can learn which of us enjoys an advent calendar with German beer. If you listen until the episode's end, you also hear who loves drinking a hot wine punch at a Christmas market. Well, after and before chatting about drinks, we flew full circle on Business Central production orders, jobs, and assembly orders. Once we had the beer advent calendar thing clarified, we started to differentiate typical manufacturing companies. Ken used two key criteria. I would call one criterion the "degree of process repeatability and predictability". Dimensions of this criterium are item structure, BOM, routings, operations, scrap percentages, etc. The second criterion to look at is both the billing and the cost recognition process. The combination of those criteria helps you to figure out if a manufacturer tends to qualify either for the Business Central manufacturing module or for the Business Central jobs module. However, oftentimes the decision between the jobs and the manufacturing module is not an either/or decision. Instead, Ken favors combining both functionalities for those manufactures with individual, project-type deliveries that base on standardized, but proprietary items. Combining jobs and manufacturing enables customers to benefit from all WIP billing, costing, and revenue recognition advantages that the job module brings. Likewise, customers can add all required items as job planning lines to the bespoke job - independent if those items get purchased or manufactured. The integrated Business Central planning engine sees the demand from the job planning lines and creates suggestions in the planning worksheet. That way, customers can create production orders. When they complete them, they can output the items into inventory. Then, these items can be used by the job journal to consume those manufactured items. Thus, the cost for making those items get associated with the project. However, customers that build bespoke items do not necessarily need to work with production orders. Ken not only points out to assembly orders. He also positions them as "manufacturing light" and precisely describes the sweat spot for assembly orders as follows: So ultimately, Ken recommends that manufacturers with a project-type of delivery look a jobs and either production orders or assembly orders. He is also very clear about the fact that manufacturing allows taking into account much more parameters for both planning and scheduling. Interestingly enough, this brings us to the Business Central function called capacity constrained resources. Ken shows a very pragmatic approach to when and how to use this function. However, other than many other folks I spoke about it before, he manages to discover and justify a place for that function. This pragmatism truly inspired me, and we kept going for more pragmatic scenarios of using and implementing Business Central jobs, manufacturing, and assembly. Ken coined the phrase "crawl, then walk, the run" and agrees that we currently observe a paradigm shift in implementing EPR projects.

Two weeks ago, I met Krzysztof Bialowas from Poland who not only is the Dynamics Business Central Team Leader from the Danish company Dynaway. Krzysztof is also a Microsoft Most Valued Professional (MVP) and the inventor of the famous Dynamics bearings. Before the show, we figured out that we share a passion for football (some people dare call it soccer), but decided to keep that part out of our conversation. Instead, we did what is expected in the Business Central manufacturing and chatted about, well, Business Central and manufacturing. The conversation quickly became very hands-on and practical. Krzysztof had a lot of real-life experiences to share. Hence, this episode is full of Business Central manufacturing tips and best practices. From Krzysztof's experience, the ideal approach to implement Dynamics 365 Business Central manufacturing is to start with understanding the production processes. Once (fully) understood, they can get mapped in the ERP system. For him, gaining an understanding of the production processes is so crucial that he highly recommends starting any manufacturing project with a factory visit. If this isn't possible due to travel regulations, partners and customers should make sure to involve a variety of people in the remote consulting meetings. A Business Central manufacturing project is likely to fail if only the management team is involved. Instead, Krzysztof advises compensating for the missing factory visit by having meetings with the shopfloor operators. Talking with them helps best to get a comprehensive understanding of the production processes. Once the processes are understood, a system such as Dynamics 365 Business Central can get successfully implemented. Then it unveils all its advantages for the customers. One fundamental advantage of Business Central is that it is not solely designed for manufacturing. Instead, it is designed all about finance. Business Central allows manufacturers to integrate the shop floor processes with all financial processes. This goes from automatically registering time and quantity on production orders with PLC devices to automatically sending invoices after the successful shipment to the client. With that degree of integration between production and finance processes, manufacturing customers can significantly reduce any sort of manual work. When implementing Business Central for a new client, Krzysztof favors a staged approach. He is against doing everything at the same time. Instead, he always would start with implementing the warehouse as this is the place, where production starts (with all the raw material) and where it ends. Starting with the warehouse helps to layout bot the structure and the flow of the items. Once this is in place, manufacturing can get implemented as well. After that, customers should first work with the system. They should understand how planning and scheduling, and hence the entire system works. This level of understanding is crucial for then starting to integrate external services and automate processes. It is step by step. From the above, I was under the impression that "doing it all once" would be the biggest mistake that manufacturers can make when implementing Business Central. However, Krzysztof surprised me by pointing the most critical point of failure in implementing Business Central manufacturing. This is the transition period from the previous system to Business Central (btw: Typically, Business Central isn't the entry-level ERP system for most manufacturing companies. This was empirically proven by our State of Business Central and Manufacturing Report).

I met again with Robert Jolliffe for the Business Central Manufacturing Show. He is our first guest, who is on the podcast for the second time. Robert is President & CEO of Sabre Limited in Canada. He has been an ERP consultant for 25 years and holds a Microsoft Engineer designation. In this episode, Robert shares why Dynamics 365 Business Central is the right system for engineering-to-order (ETO) companies. Of course, he does this thoughtfully and points out what makes ETOs so special. This question of what characterizes an ETO also marks the starting point of the conversation. According to Robert, ETO’s normally have more engineers than "typical" shop workers. This means that those companies are more engineering-heavy. These engineers are highly technical people, thus managing human resources is much more important than in production or manufacturing, where you would see a lot more scheduling of machines and equipment. When we try to understand this in the context of Business Central, Robert explains that the ETO does not typically have any predefined routings nor bills-of-materials (BOMs). BOMs are made even after quotation when the order from the customer has been received already. This is because every final output is a highly customized product with a very low quantity. Oftentimes, the batch size is one. As a consequence, material requirements planning (MRP), inventory control, and safety stocks, which are the backbone of "typical" manufacturing companies are not important for an ETO. Most of the time, materials are just purchased for a specific project. Hence, data is much simpler and more abstract compared to the data required in a non-ETO manufacturing company.

I met Matthew Kiernan, Business Applications Director at Bam Boom Cloud in the UK. The conversation turned into the next episode of the Business Central Manufacturing Show. When we met before the show, Matt said: "The manufacturing end of Business Central, although can be complicated, doesn’t need to be super scary." I picked up that statement and opened the conversation with the WHY question. Well, the remaining 30+ minutes just flew by and Matt managed to demystify Dynamics 365 Business Central. This went as far as transferring the concept of an MVP (minimal viable product) from software product development to ERP implementation. Matt started the demystification of Dynamics 365 Business Central by nailing a benefit that each customer gets from just get going with the standard version. This is the ability to gather information and learn from it. This ability translates into making data-driven decisions. Matt pledges for an MVP (minimum viable product) approach to the ERP implementation. From his experience, this approach is the best to deal with changing requirements: Avoid serving all initial requirements from the beginning. Instead, start with the standard Business Central system, use it and gain experience. Based on these experiences, refine the requirements and implement apps (or do customizations) to close "experience-based gaps".

The Business Central Manufacturing Show is back. This podcast started as something I would call a “first COVID lockdown project” in spring 2020. Six months ago, I lost a bit of traction, then got distracted and the podcast came to an unplanned stop. However, we analyze our marketing data. Here is the finding. We stopped the podcast. We stopped to promote it. Nevertheless, the episodes that we recorded got listeners. Week, by week. So: what is more inspiring than creating content that has, well, a "fan base"? Here we are again. We decided to make the podcast a natural part of our monthly Marketing plans. Thus, we aim for one episode a month for the time being. For my first new episode, I met Antonio Checa from Spain. And we had a great conversation on how to jumpstart Business Central production scheduling. In our conversation, we flew the full circle. We started high-level (why Business Central manufacturing). Then drilled into the details (down to why setup optimization is like finding money). We concluded on a high level again with the question if Microsoft is the Empire or the Alliance. Antonio's experience with new manufacturing customers is that they rarely come especially for the Business Central manufacturing module. Instead, they come for the entire solution and platform. Especially, the seamless integration with the Office product family is attractive to them. Typically, they share one big issue. They have an accounting system and a lot of function-specific "island solutions". It is no surprise that the latter oftentimes are made with Excel. With this, these manufacturers have a lot of information that is disconnected. The challenge is to bring all these information sources into this one Business Central platform. Antonio's advice is not to oversell Business Central. You run danger to do so if you work with the assumption that the customer is always right. The result of this is a lot of customizations and big projects (which too take long to deliver fast results). Instead of this, the first concrete tip for jumpstarting Business Central manufacturing is: stick to the standard. After that, Antonio reveals what he calls the "David Copperfield" trick: He shares concrete steps on how to implement Business Central manufacturing. Second concrete advice: do not go for heaven. Start with the financial and the billing system. Live in 2 months. Then add purchase automation with the purchasing part of the planning worksheet. After that, turn the paper-based warehousing processes into processes based on state-of-the-art technology. Now, look at implementing standard Business Central manufacturing. This allows you to use the planning worksheet in full swing. Once this is done, the scene is set for finite capacity scheduling. This triggered me to ask for the conditions that should be met to make this last step. Antonio called this the "one-million-dollar question" and surprised me with this answer. The third concrete advice for jumpstarting Business Central manufacturing is: you need to have a smart guy. This person should be familiar with both how Business Central works and with how the shopfloor works. I was truly pleased that Antonio brought the "human factor of scheduling" into the discussion. It made me ask what I sense was the "true one-million-dollar question": Should the final scheduling decision be made by the algorithm or by the person working with the scheduling software? Antonio picked it up and developed compelling thoughts on the importance of scheduling parameters and the need to continuously tune them. That brought him to the fourth piece of advice for jumpstarting Business Central production scheduling: do not blindly rely on algorithms.

This week’s episode is a special edition of the Business Central Manufacturing Show. Last week, hosted our online event called “next by NETRONIC – session 2”. The idea of the “next” events is to talk about topics, not about products as well as to discuss with each other rather than to have a 1-way demo. Hence, last week’s event was a panel discussion in which we looked at the constant battle between production planning and scheduling. The discussion was led by Martin Karlowitsch, and his guests were experienced Business Central manufacturing experts. If you took some time to attend our event – a big thank you from all of us at NETRONIC, if not then please enjoy this podcast. The panelists were first Peik Bech-Andersen from Denmark, who is the author of the book “manufacturing with Dynamics NAV” and who has been working with NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central since 1984. Second, we welcomed James Crowter from the UK, who is a Microsft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) and Managing Director of Technology Management. Third, they were joined by Mike Fontaine from Canada, who is a solutions expert with 20+ years of ERP software and manufacturing experience from VOX ISM in Canada. The expert panel started by discussing if they agree with the general existence of a constant battle between production planning and scheduling. There was a consensus from our panel that this battle does exist and that it is something that isn’t as simple as one usually thinks. Understanding the material requirements planning and getting it right, requires a lot of fine-tuning. Especially when taking into consideration the different policies that exist within a company. Oftentimes, when the material requirements planning is not done correctly, you see a lot of confusion and sometimes you will even see customers moving back to using Microsoft Excel. If this happens, planning and scheduling no longer are aligned … and the battle kicks in. Preparing for the event, we sent out a questionnaire to everybody who registered. The majority of the Dynamics 365 Business Central customers who attended said that only one person handles both: planning and scheduling in their organizations. James assessed that it might cause problems if only one person is handling both parts of the business. The organization would become too dependent on that one person, which might cause some issues later on. Peik put this into perspective when he mentioned the only way to eat an elephant is when you take small bites. He said that he’s seen a lot of success from companies that divide responsibilities between MPS and MRP since they are split up into manageable sizes. In terms of the tools used to manage planning and scheduling, we heard a lot of feedback not just from our customers and partners, but also from our panel. Despite the abundance of ERP software, we still see a lot of companies using Excel. The panel shared their views on Excel, and why it remains popular, and why they advise against it. James explained the importance of planning and scheduling by saying that getting it right is the “Holy Grail” for most manufacturing companies. Getting customer satisfaction by having the right inventory at the right place at the right time, is exactly why manufacturing companies invest in ERP systems. According to Mike, it is software such as Business Central that can help customers with their planning and scheduling, specifically balancing their sales forecast, inventory, machines, and manpower. With the rise in popularity of the cloud subscription option, BC is so much more affordable for small manufacturers these days.

We continue our podcast episode by going north of the border. From Wisconsin, we now head to Montreal, Canada where we had the chance to talk to Trevor Moore, the Product Director of ERP Solutions at Gestisoft. Trevor started his career in the manufacturing industry, where he implemented full ERP systems in two different companies as a production scheduler. Given his experience on the end-customer side, he ventured into the NAV world where he now has a 20-year track record of successfully implanting ERP systems to around 100 companies (mostly manufacturing). Our conversation mainly centered around all aspects of how to right-size a manufacturing ERP solution for each client. Watch our Business Central Manufacturing Show overview site to see all episodes at one glance.