Dynamics 365 Business Central is a comprehensive end to end business management solution that will help you make better decisions, streamline your process and drive business efficiencies. First launched for Windows as Navision in 1995, it is used in over 110,000 companies worldwide and is the leading mid-range ERP platform.
Manage your entire business
Run a business from the environment that suits you. Business Central gives you the full ability to run your business either on-premise, in a hosted environment or in the cloud.
Supporting your international ventures. With multiple currencies, local regional rules, multi-company consolidation and the ability to choose from 25 languages, they system allows you to operate in a global environment.
Information when you need it. Whether on a desktop, a tablet or a phone, Business Central makes accessing your business system simple. Integration with Office 365 offers allows you to work in Business Central directly from other Microsoft products such as Outlook and Excel.
Share data safely. Transfer your data with ease. Business central eradicates the complexities of migrating data by making it simple to import, export and update large volumes of data. Microsoft datacentre encryption keeps your data safe.
Business Central brings financial Control
Every transaction at your fingertips. Every financial dealing is laid out clearly within the General Ledger. Using Business Central’s ‘Dimensions’, transactions can be filtered, sliced and diced, helping you to analyse data such as revenue, profit and costs.
Insights. Business Central’s ‘Insights’ offer real time tips to help you understand your business. Graphs, charts and highlight details of the top transactions. Change the timeline or the chart timescales to see data the way you want to see it.
Business Central combines with Power BI to offer a powerful way to understand your business. Combine data from Business Central with external sources to take your understanding and decision making to a whole new level.
Supply chain and Inventory
Supply chain features include Purchase & Payables, Sales & Receivables, Order Management, Special Pricing, Sales/Purchase Invoicing and Requisition management. Inventory management includes Item Budgets, Item Categories, Item Attributes, SKUs, document management and much more
Purchase optimisation. With built-in business intelligence, you can predict that you need to replenish and when. Furthermore, you can predict when demand will change and prepare for it. Track trends, identify problems and make smarter purchase decisions.
Pay at the right time. With Business Central you can be notified of the best time to pay vendors. This will allow you to Increase your discount rate, avoid penalties or interest and improve supplier relationships.
Projects, Jobs and Resources
Plan and manage Projects. Jobs allow the user to schedule your company’s resources, be it people, time or items. The Project Manager role centre gives an overview of projects and easy access to common tasks.
Capacity planning and monitoring. Not only can you plan capacity and sales, but you can now view usage statistics and resource profitability. The system can monitor resource usage in order to produce a comprehensive overview of your capacity for each resource including insight into the resource’s availability and forecasted costs.
Flexible invoicing. When it comes to invoicing the customer, you can manage both fixed-price jobs, with stage billing, and time-and-materials jobs. You can even combine the two, with everything visible in the Job card.
Dynamics’ innovative warehouse management system
Working at maximum capacity. Business central’s warehouse management system allows you to flexibly define the requirements of your warehouse, from simple bins to complex put-away and picking. map the warehouse contents by utilising bins. Utilise templates to gain an insight in where best to store items.
Movement recommendations. Optimise space and picking processes, leading to faster purchase receipts, sales shipments and overall greater stock management within the warehouse.
Realise your stock levels. Take advantage of comprehensive stocktake and cycle counting to monitor stock levels.
Serial and lot tracking is fully supported within the warehousing module.
Manufacturing capabilities
Improve your stock levels all year round with material requirements planning to maintain stock levels within the business.
Create adjustable manufacturing processes with work centres and machine centres. Individualise your approach to warehousing by defining a work centre’s opening hours, efficiency and capacity. Alongside that, customise your routings to define whether multiple manufacturing steps can take place at at time.
Take advantage of the system’s subcontracting capabilities and pass parts of your manufacturing process onto your predefined vendors.
Increase your flexibility and keep your item list concise using BOM versions and item variants.
Essential or Premium licenses
Produce goods in a way that suits you. Microsoft Business Central has two licensing options. The ‘Essential’ license brings the ability to utilise assembly orders. If your business processes look more to assemble a kit of parts rather than create an item, this could be for you.
The ‘Premium’ license offers that and a whole lot more. You’re granted full control over your manufacturing and its costing. Control your routing times to the minute, subcontract necessary manufacturing processes and utilise order promising to streamline your manufacturing process from the point of receiving a sales order, to creating the goods and getting it to the customer efficiently.
To learn more about some of the new features introduced to Business Central, why not take a look at some of our other posts.