Stop running your factory on spreadsheets.
Manufacturing, Simplified.
At Simply BC, we know that manufacturing is the ultimate balancing act. You are constantly juggling raw material availability, machine capacity, and customer deadlines. If one ball drops, the whole schedule suffers.
Many manufacturers we meet are stuck in “Excel purgatory”—using a modern ERP for accounting, but relying on whiteboards and spreadsheets to actually plan production. We change that. We architect Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central to be the single source of truth for your shop floor, giving you the visibility to build smarter, not harder.
From “Make to Order” to “Make to Stock”
Whether you are kitting simple assemblies or managing complex multi-level Bills of Materials (BOMs), we configure the system to match your production reality, not the other way around.
- BOMs & Routings: Define your “recipe” and your method. We help you structure complex Bills of Materials and Routings so you know exactly what materials you need and how much time it takes to build—down to the specific machine center.
- The Planning Engine (MPS & MRP): This is the brain of the operation. Business Central calculates your requirements based on actual demand and forecasts. It tells you exactly what to buy and what to make, ensuring you have materials “Just in Time,” rather than “Just in Case.”
- Capacity Management: Avoid bottlenecks before they happen. We help you define realistic capacities for your Work Centers, so you can see when you are overbooked and adjust your schedule before you miss a deadline.
- Agile Manufacturing: Whether you do light Assembly (kitting) or full Production Orders with raw material consumption and output tracking, we implement the flow that fits your complexity.
Data-Driven Production
Manufacturing generates massive amounts of data. Microsoft’s Copilot and AI tools help you cut through the noise to find efficiency gains.
- Intelligent Demand Forecasting: Don’t build what you can’t sell. The AI-powered Sales and Inventory Forecast extension analyses historical sales trends to predict future demand, feeding directly into your production planning to prevent overproduction.
- Analysis Assist: deeply analyse your production costs without needing a developer. You can use natural language prompts like “Show me Scrap % by Machine Center for last month” or “Compare Standard Cost vs. Actual Cost by Item Category” to instantly identify where you are losing margin on the floor.
Visualising & Simplifying the Factory Floor
Microsoft Business Central provides a robust, world-class foundation for manufacturing. At simplybc.com, our goal is to tailor that power to fit the specific rhythms of your shop floor and planning department. We curate top-tier extensions to ensure that while the backend remains robust, the user experience becomes intuitive, visual, and highly efficient for your team.
NAVEKSA: Visual Clarity & Operational Focus
We enhance standard planning capabilities by introducing a visual layer that simplifies decision-making.
- For the Planner (ItemPlanning): Transform rows of data into a 360-degree visual dashboard. This tool unifies supply and demand on a single screen, allowing you to identify shortages and generate orders instantly—turning complex data into clear action.
- For the Operator (ShopFloor): We streamline the user interface to show operators exactly what matters: prioritised tasks and deadlines. It removes the noise, allowing your team to focus purely on production.
Insight Works: Real-Time Digital Precision
Move beyond the delay of paper tracking and bring your data into the present moment with Shop Floor Insight.
- Digital Execution: Modernise your workflow by replacing paper route sheets with barcode scanners and touchscreens.
- Live Visibility: When operators register time, scrap, and output in real-time, “Actual Cost” becomes a live metric rather than a retrospective guess. See profitability as it happens.
Dynamics 365 Business Central: Manufacturing & Assembly Overview
1. BOMs and Routings
The foundation of any manufacturing system is defining what you are making and how you make it.
- Production Bill of Materials (BOM): Create multi-level BOMs that include raw materials, sub-assemblies, and “phantom” items (items built and immediately consumed). Version management ensures you can track engineering changes (ECN) with specific start/end dates.
- Routings & Operations: Define the specific steps required to produce an item. You can set up serial or parallel operations, assign setup times, run times, and wait times, and link them to specific Work Centers or Machine Centers.
- Version Control: Both BOMs and Routings support full versioning, allowing you to manage seasonal recipes or engineering updates without losing historical data.
2. Capacity & Resource Management
Business Central allows you to model your shop floor digitally to optimise throughput.
- Work & Machine Centers: Define your production capacity at a high level (Work Centers, e.g., “Assembly Hall”) or a granular level (Machine Centers, e.g., “CNC Machine #4”).
- Calendars & Shifts: Manage shop calendars to reflect shifts, holidays, and maintenance downtime.
- Finite Loading: The system calculates available capacity to prevent overbooking resources, helping you give realistic delivery dates to customers.
- Subcontracting: Seamlessly manage external vendors. When a routing step requires an outside specialist (e.g., painting or galvanising), the system automatically generates the necessary Purchase Orders linked to the Production Order.
3. Production vs. Assembly: Choosing the Right Workflow
Business Central offers two distinct methods for building items. Choosing the right one is critical for accurate costing and operational efficiency.
| Assembly Orders (Kitting) | Production Orders (Manufacturing) | |
| Best For | Light assembly, kitting, gift packs. | Complex manufacturing, machining, processing. |
| Complexity | Simple: Combines items into a finished good. | High: Requires raw materials, labor, and machine time. |
| Resource Tracking | No specific resource tracking (fixed overhead). | detailed tracking of run time, setup time, and scrap. |
| Costing | Costs are rolled up from components. | Variances calculated (Actual vs. Standard). |
| Inventory Logic | Assemble-to-Order (build when sold) or Stock. | Make-to-Stock or Make-to-Order. |
4. Planning & Supply Chain (MRP & MPS)
Avoid stockouts and overstocking by letting the system calculate your requirements.
- Planning Worksheet (MRP): The engine that balances supply and demand. It looks at sales forecasts, actual orders, and inventory levels to suggest specific actions: Create Production Order, Purchase Raw Materials, or Transfer Stock.
- Order Modifiers: Fine-tune the engine with parameters like Minimum Order Quantity, Safety Stock, Dampeners (to avoid nervousness in the plan), and Lot-for-Lot policies.
- Forecasting: Input demand forecasts (Sales budgets) to drive long-lead-time purchasing before actual customer orders arrive.
5. Execution & Shop Floor Control
Once the plan is finalised, the system helps you manage execution and capture actuals.
- Consumption & Output: Record exactly what was used. You can use Flushing Methods to automate this:
- Forward Flush: Consumes material automatically when the order starts.
- Back Flush: Consumes material automatically when the item is finished.
- Manual: Requires users to scan/enter actual usage (critical for tracking variance).
- Scrap Management: Record scrap at the component level or the finished good level to maintain accurate inventory counts and costs.
- Traceability: Full support for Serial and Lot tracking from raw material receipt through to the finished good delivered to the customer.
6. Costing & Financial Integration
This is the “Architect’s Choice” feature—the tight integration with Finance.
- Costing Methods: Support for Standard, FIFO, LIFO, Specific, and Average costing.
- Variance Analysis: For Production Orders, the system calculates Material Variance (did we use more steel than planned?) and Capacity Variance (did it take longer than planned?). These variances post automatically to the General Ledger for deep financial analysis.
- WIP (Work in Progress): Track the financial value of unfinished goods on the shop floor in real-time.
Ready to Optimise Your Production?
You don’t need to rip and replace your processes to get better results; you just need a system that supports them. We bridge the gap between your back office and your shop floor.