Business Central – an ERP system

Business Central is an integrated set of business applications that are designed to service a wide variety of business operations. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is an ERP system. An ERP system integrates internal and external data across a variety of functional areas, including manufacturing, accounting, supply chain management, customer relationships, service operations, and human resource management, as well as managing other valued resources and activities. By having many related applications well integrated, a fully featured ERP system provides an enter data once, use many ways information processing toolset.

Business Central ERP addresses the following functional areas:

• Financial Management (for example general ledger, accounts payable, and accounts receivable)
• Supply Chain Management (for example sales orders, purchase orders, shipping, inventory, and receiving)
• Relationship management (for example vendors, customers, prospects, employees, and contractors)
• Manufacturing (for example MRP, sales forecasting, and production forecasting)
• Other critical business areas (for example human resource management, project management, warehouse management, marketing, cash management, and fixed assets)
• A complete set of development tools that allow the application to be customized and expanded for specific industries, and even individual businesses.

These are not the only functional areas Business Central addresses, but the main ones. New areas are being added all the time, and many extensions are being produced that address more niche business needs.

A good ERP system, such as Business Central, is modular in design, which simplifies implementation, upgrading, modification, integration with third-party products, and expansion for different types of clients. All the modules in the system share a common database and, where appropriate, common data.

The following groupings of individual Business Central functions are based on the Search menu structure, which is supplemented by information from Microsoft marketing materials. The important thing to understand is the overall components that make up the Business Central ERP system:

Figure 1.1 – Fully integrated functional areas of Business Central

Business Central has a web browser role-tailored user interface (UI). In Business Central, there’s a universal web-based client that can be used on personal computers, tablets, and other mobile devices.

As illustrated in Figure 1.1, Business Central is a fully integrated system that has multiple functional areas. Let’s take a closer look at them.

Financial management

The foundation of any ERP system is financial management. Irrespective of the business, the money must be kept flowing and tracked. Business Central’s financial management module contains tools that can help you manage the capital resources of a business. These include all or part of the following application functions:

• General ledger: Managing the overall finances of the firm
• Cash management and banking: Managing the inventory of financial assets
• Accounts receivable: Tracking the incoming revenue
• Accounts payable: Tracking outgoing funds
• Analytical accounting: Analyzing the various flows of funds
• Inventory and fixed assets: Managing inventories of goods and equipment
• Multicurrency and multilingual: For supporting international business activities

Business Central is not just a financial system – it is the basis for all other functional areas. The main areas related to inventory consist of making goods, moving goods, and servicing goods. Other areas that don’t focus on inventory are project management, managing employees, customer communications, and internal reporting.

Manufacturing

Business Central manufacturing is general-purpose enough to be appropriate for Make to Stock (MTS), Make to Order (MTO), and Assemble to Order (ATO), as well as various subsets and combinations of those. Although Business Central is not particularly suitable for most process manufacturing and some of the very high-volume assembly line operations off the shelf, there are third-party extension enhancements available for those applications. As with most of the Business Central application functions, manufacturing can be implemented either in a basic mode or as a fully featured system. Business Central manufacturing includes the following functions:

• Product design (Bills of Materials [BOMs] and routings) for the structure management of product components and the flow management of manufacturing processes
• Capacity and supply requirement planning, for tracking the intangible and tangible manufacturing resources
• Production scheduling (infinite and finite), execution, and tracking quantities and costs, plus tracking manufacturing resources’ planned use, both on a constrained and unconstrained basis

Supply chain management

Some of the functions that are categorized as part of Business Central’s supply chain management (SCM), such as sales and purchasing, are actively used in almost every Business Central implementation. The supply chain applications in Business Central include all or parts of the following applications:

• Sales order processing and pricing: To support the heart of every business
• Purchasing (including requisitions): For planning, entering, pricing, and processing purchase orders
• Inventory management: For managing inventories of goods and materials
• Warehouse management including receiving and shipping: For managing the receipt, storage, retrieval, and shipment of material and goods in warehouses

As a whole, these functions constitute the base components of a system that’s appropriate for distribution operations, including those that operate on an ATO basis.

Business intelligence and reporting

Although Microsoft marketing materials identify business intelligence (BI) and reporting as though they’re separate modules within Business Central, it’s difficult to physically identify them as such. Most of the components that are used for BI and reporting purposes are (appropriately) scattered throughout various application areas. In the words of one Microsoft document, business intelligence is a strategy, not a product. The following functions within Business Central support a BI strategy:

• Standard reports: Distributed and ready to use by end users
• Financial reporting and analysis reports: A specialized report writer for general ledger data
• Queries, XMLports, and reports: The AL programming language supports the creation of a wide variety of report formats [SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS), Microsoft Word, and Excel], queries, XML, and CSV files
• Analysis by dimensions: A capability embedded in many Business Central tools
• Office 365 Interfaces: Including communicating Excel data either into or out of Business Central
• RDLC report viewer: Allows you to present Business Central data in a variety of textual and graphic formats, including providing user interactive capabilities
• Interface capabilities such as SOAP, ODATA, and REST web services: Technologies to support interfaces between Business Central and external software products
• Standard packages for Power BI: Integrated in the role center as well as dashboards

Relationship management

Business Central’s relationship management (RM) functionality is the little sibling of the fully featured standalone Microsoft CRM system and Dynamics 365 for Sales and Dynamics 365 for Marketing. The big advantage of Business Central RM is its tight integration with Business Central customer and sales data.

Also falling under the heading of the customer relationship module is the Business Central service management (SM) functionality. The following functionalities fall under RM and SM:

• Relationship management:
  • Marketing campaigns, to plan and manage promotions
  • Customer activity tracking, to analyze customer orders
  • To-do lists, to manage what is to be done and track what has been done
• Service management:
  • Service contracts, to support service operations
  • Warranty tracking for items and repair
  • Labor and part consumption tracking, to track resources that are consumed by the service business
  • Planning and dispatching, to manage service calls

Human resource management

The Business Central human resources module is very small, but it relates to a critical component of the business: employees. Basic employee data can be stored and reported via the master table (in fact, you can use the human resources (HR) module to manage data about individual contractors in addition to employees). A wide variety of individual employee attributes can be tracked through the use of tailorable dimension fields:

• Employee tracking: Maintain basic employee description data
• Skills inventory: Inventory of the capabilities of employees
• Absence tracking: Maintain basic attendance information
• Employee statistics: For tracking government and other required employee attribute data, such as age, gender, and length of service

Project management

The Business Central project management module consists of allocating, budgeting, and utilizing resources for projects that can be either short-term or long-term. They can be external (in other words, billable) or internal. This module is often used by third parties as the base for vertical market add-ons (such as construction or job-oriented manufacturing). This application area includes parts or all of the following functions:

• Budgeting and cost tracking, for managing project finances
• Scheduling, for planning project activities
• Resource requirements and usage tracking, for managing people and equipment
• Project accounting, for tracking the results

Now that we’ve learned about Business Central at a functional level, let’s switch to a developer’s perspective.