I’ve been watching companies buy expensive third-party mobile applications for Business Central for years now, and I keep asking myself: why? I get it—old habits die hard. For decades, if you wanted warehouse staff scanning barcodes or shop floor workers capturing production data on a tablet, you had to buy something from an ISV. That’s just how it was. But somewhere around Business Central version 23, that stopped being true. Microsoft gave us native barcode scanning, tablet support, and AL extensibility in the standard mobile app—and most people are still acting like it’s 2015. I just came back from the...
I’m excited to share a case study that really captures what I love about working with Business Central in high-volume manufacturing environments. World Emblem has been a Naviona client since 2017, and watching them grow from Dynamics NAV through multiple Business Central upgrades while quadrupling their revenue has taught me a lot about what it takes to scale an ERP system alongside a fast-moving business. The case study attached to this post tells their story, but I wanted to add some context about why their approach worked and what other BC users can learn from it. Because the real story...
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...
