If you run or manage a small or mid-sized manufacturing company, you know that you need to remain competitive and agile in today’s marketplace. Manufacturers often find themselves having to respond quickly to meet the demand for new products in short time frames. This becomes more important for small and mid-sized manufacturing companies whose success relies on their ability to meet small and custom orders from customers. To keep your operations running efficiently, the software you use is no small matter. It can mean the difference between success and failure of your business.
When it comes to management software, SMB manufacturing companies typically fall into three buckets. You may be currently relying on a legacy enterprise planning software system that requires a lot of workarounds and does not scale easily. You may be using an entry-level business management solution that consists of a lot of manual processes and third-party solutions. Or you might run a small warehouse and not have any dedicated software at all.
The fact of the matter is that no manufacturing business is too small for a solution that will help you become more efficient. That is the edge you need to succeed in today’s competitive market. You need a dedicated solution that can simplify every step of your operations, from creating customer quotes, assembling orders, to shipping it from your warehouse. And an enterprise resource planning software (ERP) system is the answer.
Manufacturing Functionality in Dynamics 365 Business Central
Dynamics 365 Business Central is an ERP system designed specifically for small and mid-sized businesses. It is designed to connect data from different business areas in your manufacturing company and store it in a central database. This allows your team to have all the information they need about quotes, production orders, and routing. This single source of truth also allows business owners and managers to get a complete 360-degree overview of your operations.
D365 Business Central is a cloud ERP solution (and a predecessor of Microsoft Dynamics NAV), and it offers an intuitive way to integrate and streamline every aspect of your manufacturing activities, from planning, scheduling, inventory, and distribution – thanks to some robust features.
Production Orders
Create and manage production orders. Several types of production orders are available including planned, firm planned and released. After you create one, you can calculate net requirements based on that order.
Production Bill of Materials
Create bills of materials and calculate standard costs. The production BOM allows for tracking input quantities by either quantity or dimension.
Version Management
Create and manage different versions of manufacturing bill of materials and routings.
Machine Centers
Add machine centers as capacities to the manufacturing process. It allows you to manage the capacity of a single machine or producing resource. You can store default information about manufacturing processes, and plan capacity more efficiently.
Capacity Planning
One or more machine centers can be attached to a work center to manage shift capacity. Changes in capacity for events, such as employee time off, can be processed easily and the production schedule updated.
Supply Planning
Plan material requirements based on demand. This includes automatic production orders and purchase orders, action messages for quick balancing of supply and demand, and support for bucket-less and bucketed material requirements planning.
Agile Manufacturing
This enables you to run the Agile Manufacturing, Supply Planning, and Capacity Planning modules.
Finite Loading
Manage finite loading of capacity-constraint resources. It also enables the system to calculate CTP (capable-to-promise).
Sales and Inventory Forecasting
Get deep insights into potential sales and expected stock-outs. The intelligent system leverages historical data to help you manage stock. Based on the forecast, the system can help create replenishment requests for vendors.
Standard Cost Worksheet
Allows company controllers can maintain accurate inventory costs. Work with standard cost updates in Business Central in the same way you would in an Excel spreadsheet. Prepare for cost updates without changing data until you’re ready.
Assembly Management
Specify a list of sellable items, raw materials, subassemblies, and resources as an assembly bill of materials that make up a finished item or a kit. Use assembly orders to replenish assembly items. Capture customer requirements for the kit’s bill of materials directly from sales quotes, blanket orders, and order lines in the assembly-to-order processes.
Dynamics 365 Business Central’s manufacturing functionality is easy to use, easy to learn, and is extremely flexible. It can also be implemented relatively simply and expanded further down the line to include more advanced features, as your business needs evolve.