You can install this extension for Free from the AppSource here: Naviona Configuration Audit And here is my story behind this extension: 20+ years ago I was working at Tectura in Copenhagen, it was a fairly big office with something like 120 employees. About one third were Navision consultants, one third were Axapta consultants and one third was a mix of infrastructure, BI, etc. In the Axapta department there was a person named Alan. Alan was a very positive and likable person, his ‘claim to fame’ was that he had created some kind of report that could be run against...
The development of the Copilot Inventory Queries extension that I described in my previous blog posts has inspired me to apply the same concept of using Copilot (or actually Azure OpenAI) to enhance the other extensions that we use. This blog post is an example of an application that hopefully can inspire others to apply AI to their Business Central extensions. In this case we have an extension called Planning Parameter Worksheet that allows Business Central users to set up rules and have the system suggest the planning parameters to use for each Item or Stockkeeping Unit. This is a...
This is a continuation of my last post where I described the Copilot Inventory Queries extension that I developed (available for free in AppSource). I have now taken that concept and applied it to the Planning Worksheet in Business Central. With this you get a Copilot user interface that can help explain the suggestions created by the material planning (MRP). I created this in a way that the AI model includes all the suggestions for the same item number, location and variant code for each query. So, if the plan makes multiple suggestions for the same item, you have the...
As we all know, Microsoft is adding Copilot features to everything these days. Every new version of Business Central has more Copilot than the last version and soon there is not a single place in the application that does not have a Copilot feature. This is great and most people are excited about it. The Copilot features and the underlying AI capabilities are what get people talking when we present Business Central to customers. Most of what I work with are manufacturing companies and almost all of them have their own AI initiatives, sometimes those are just around being creative...
Most of us that’s been programming in Dynamics NAV for a while are aware of the Excel Buffer table. It is a super useful table that can be used to create and read Excel files from C/AL code. This table have been around as far as I remember, and now it has some siblings, the XML Buffer and CSV Buffer tables. The concept is the same, a table with functions to create or read files, this time XML/CSV files instead of Excel files. Just like with the Excel Buffer table, the XML buffer and CSV buffer table should be used...
Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2017 was released last week. I have installed it and poked around in the new functionality a bit and there are some awesome improvements and new features. 🙂 Through this blog post I share some of my thoughts on some of the new functionality. The look and feel when first launching the windows client is more or less the same as with version 2016, and I was happy that it could co-exists with all my older installations of NAV (always interesting when installing a new version). Below are some of the new functionality that I have looked...
This blog post is to describe how fields can be added to the Item Tracking Lines in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. Adding additional fields to this page is a common requirement; it could for example be to add a vendor lot number, some quality measurements, a manufacturing date or any other type of property that should be stored against an inventory lot or serial number. When you first look at it seems like a simple modification but it is actually a bit (or a lot) more involved than just adding the field to the table and the page. The Item Tracking...
One of the cool new features in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 is the options to use Events. Through events you can create functions that are published and subscribe to them in other objects. The great part here is that Microsoft have incorporated a long list of published functions as part of the standard application which can be subscribed to in custom code. This will simplify maintaining and upgrading the objects since modifications can be done completely separated from the standard objects. To demonstrate this new feature I have programmed a simple field level security add-on (maybe add-on is the wrong...
If you have a relative large number of items to plan it could take a while to run the MRP calculations in Microsoft Dynamics NAV, an hour to do a full calculation is not uncommon, especially if you have been using the system for a while. In order to not have the MRP calculations to interrupt with the daily operations (such as posting orders) you typically want the calculations to take place during the night. This is a very common requirement and in fact a lot of people I talk to are surprised that this is not something Dynamics NAV...
The 2016 version of Microsoft Dynamics NAV comes with a new C/AL editor. This is a big step forward for people that are writing code within Microsoft Dynamics NAV. The C/AL editor have, in my mind, always been much behind other code editors in terms of usability, but with the 2016 version Dynamics NAV catches up a bit. This blog post is about the new features you will find when you start writing code in Dynamics NAV 2016. The first thing that you will notice when you open the C/AL editor is how the functions looks with their colors etc. and that there...