This is a bit of a continuation of the post related to the Business Central Mobile App that I wrote a couple of weeks ago. It is to provide some inspiration for development for the mobile app and maybe also to promote our Shop Floor App that we think is the best. 🙂

Real-Time Scanning, Time Capture, Posting, and Labeling Without Leaving BC

I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched great plans fall apart on the floor because data showed up late. Paper travelers, keyboard re-entry, and “I’ll post it later” are the usual suspects. Over the last couple of years, Microsoft made the Business Central mobile app surprisingly capable—barcode scanning, tablet layouts, AL hooks—so we built on that momentum.

Our Shop Floor and Warehouse Mobile solution lets operators and warehouse staff capture what actually happened, when it happened, directly into Business Central. No extra systems to reconcile. Just clean, real-time transactions tied to your BC data model.

What Microsoft added that makes this work

• Native barcode scanning in the Business Central mobile app (camera or dedicated Android scanner) with AL APIs and support for common 1D/2D barcodes.
• A strong manufacturing and warehouse foundation—production orders, output/consumption posting, and warehouse documents—that can now be extended with task-focused mobile pages instead of separate apps.

What we built

We packaged a set of task-first mobile pages and flows—built entirely inside Business Central—for shop floor execution, warehouse processing, barcode capture, and rule-based label printing. Operators can start or stop operations, post output and consumption (including scrap), and capture downtime. Warehouse users can receive, pick, move, count, and adjust inventory. Everything posts directly to BC in real time, with optional label printing via BarTender Cloud.

Shop Floor Task Lists by Device or User

The application allows configuring tasks lists per device so that devices in the different areas of your plant shows the tasks that are upcoming in that area. An area can be a work center group, a work center or a machine center, and the tasks displayed can be setup to show based on start dates, production order status, previous operation status, etc.. this makes it a true task list that is simple and user friendly. Such a task lists with its related functions on a tablet looks like below as an example. Note that the task list is not the same as just the operation on a work/machine center, its is a true workable task list.

Shop Floor Time Capture

As you see from the screenshot above, it has features to track actual times by starting and stopping operations. This time capture feature is something that many of our customers are using, it allows to gather actual times in an easy and accurate way. The actual times can be used for posting output and/or for comparison with the posted or expected times from the routings. The starts are stops are recorded in a Time Entry table and can include employee ID, etc.. We then took this data and built a Power BI App that provides insight into the capacities by combining it with the standard Business Central capacity allocation, calendars, etc..

Smart Barcode System

The Shop Floor and Warehouse Mobile application we created have some of our ‘all time hits’ built in, one of those are smart barcodes placed on printouts such as the job card (and even labels) that allows for performing actions just be scanning a barcode. This is a super efficient and accurate way of performing tasks, it completely eliminates the risk of someone starting a task on the wrong order. It is a process that I have used for 20+ years, I wrote about this specific way of doing it in my Shop Floor Barcode System post back in 2014, already back then it was 9 years old. This was created 2005, 21 years ago and it is still being used. Quite amazing I think. 🙂

The concept is that the ‘smart barcodes’ from the printouts are scanned and the system does the task, the below is a job card example with barcodes like this. One barcode to start the operation, one to stop the operation, one to post output, etc.. Typically we spread out the barcodes a bit to make them easier to scan.

You then ask, but what about if you use the task list in a tablet, then you don’t necessary have a job card printed? That’s correct, this is an alternative way to do it paperless. My experience is that sometimes people still like to have a printed job card, the main reason for this is to have something that travels with the product through production, so you can easily associate the products with the job. With this method you just need a handheld scanner to scan the barcode in, something like below works perfectly fine (as long as it runs Android).

BarTender Integration for Printing Labels

A Shop Floor solution would not be complete without label printing. We first did label printing using native Business Central reports, both with RDLC and Word layouts. It works great, you just need to live with the limitations of RDLC (not being able easily print vertically and horizontally at the same time, etc..). For on-prem installations we built a way that sends the print request from the scanner/tablet to the server that does the printing on the label printers, this eliminated the need to install label printers on the devices, for cloud environments you need to have something like a print node integration to make the printing this way.

Then came the BarTender integration, this is to me the best way to print labels from Business Central (and probably other cloud applications). You basically design your labels in BarTender, you place them in an online folder dedicated to BC usage, then you map the data in BC with the field on the labels. Below is an example of a label in BarTender cloud.

The different fields from the above label is then mapped to data in Business Central through the BarTender integration we build.

We also created a setup table where you link the label format to the items, printers and devices.

With this concept, printing labels from Scanners, Tables or the Windows client is as easy as just selecting a print option, BC will then gather the data, send the request to BarTender cloud and BarTender Cloud will send it to the label printer using the right format.

This is the superior way of printing labels from Business Central!

Warehouse Documents

Our Shop Floor solution is named ‘Shop Floor and Warehouse Mobile’, so it obviously also do the warehouse documents. Such as warehouse receipts, put-aways, warehouse picks, warehouse shipments, inventory adjustments, counts, etc.. The one piece that is a bit unique is that we are using the assignment of the documents to show/hide the documents on the different devices, so if a device have selected a pick it will get assigned to it and is then hidden from the other devices, this works well and prevents users from working on the same documents. The full table role center looks like below.

Some of the Benefits of this Application

• Accuracy at the source: Scans and taps beat handwritten notes. You reduce posting mistakes, duplicate work, and timing gaps that distort planning and costing.
• Real-time visibility: Production progress and warehouse status update as work happens, so planners, buyers, and customer service stop guessing.
• Faster throughput: Barcode-driven flows shorten receiving, picking, and operation reporting. Less walking back to a terminal; more doing.
• Simpler stack: No separate WMS or MES database to integrate and maintain—everything lives in Business Central.
• Extendable: Customers and partners can extend this using familiar tools in Visual Studio, no need to learn separate third party application to do this. Use your favorite AI agent in Visual Studio to do it. Check out my Vibe Coding post.

A Summary of How it Works

• Built inside Business Central: The solution is an AL extension that provides role-tailored, touch-friendly pages for common shop floor and warehouse tasks. Since it uses BC’s standard mobile app, it respects your master data, permissions, and posting routines.
• Scanning options:
  • Use the device camera for quick, ad-hoc scans.
  • Use dedicated Android scanners for high-volume work. Devices send barcode data directly into Business Central’s mobile app, triggering the right task logic.
• Shop floor execution: Start and stop operations, register downtime, and post output or consumption—including scrap—against production orders, with comments and links where they’re needed.
• Warehouse processing: Process warehouse receipts, picks, transfers, shipments, physical counts, and adjustments using barcode-driven validation.
• Label printing: Rule-based label printing through BarTender Cloud for inventory, shipping, and manufacturing labels—configure once and print from the device.

Try it Today

• Install the free trial from AppSource and connect to your Business Central environment.
• Walk through setup for Mobile Profiles, Mobile Manufacturing (including Time Capture), and Mobile Warehouse. Most of this defaults at installation.
• In a sandbox, validate your flows:
  • Receiving and put-away with barcode capture and label printing.
  • Operation start/stop with output and consumption posting plus a quick inventory count.
  • Pick with barcode scanner, take an image at the time of shipping.

If you’re still juggling re-entering data in the shop floor or warehouse, this solution is a quick win with a light footprint. Start small, prove a few high-volume flows in a sandbox, and scale from there.

Some Videos to Watch

Below are some videos that presents this. Feel free to reach out there are any questions. I hope you found this useful, or at least it provided some inspirations. 🙂