The Scenario to Solve Here’s a scenario I’ve seen play out more times than I can count: A planner runs Calculate Plan on a Monday morning. The worksheet populates with 200+ action messages. Maybe they’re tired, maybe they’re in a hurry, but they select all the lines and hit “Carry Out Action Message”. Twenty minutes later, the purchasing manager is looking at 75 new purchase orders—some for long lead-time items, some to vendors that haven’t been qualified yet, and at least a few that duplicate existing open orders. Cue the panic, the finger-pointing, and the Monday afternoon spent manually deleting...
The Problem: Large ERP Methodology for Smaller Companies I’ve been implementing Business Central (earlier Microsoft Dynamics NAV) for larger and more complex manufacturing companies for the last 20+ years. It has almost exclusively been implementation where custom tailored processes where combined with industry best practices. Each project typically follows an established path taking the customer through Discovery, Analysis, Design, Development, Deployment and ending with post go-live Support. This method works well for larger companies but has proven hard to apply to smaller companies. From time to time I run into someone with a small company that wants to transition to...
I’ve been implementing Business Central (and Dynamics NAV before that) for manufacturing companies for over two decades now. And in almost every single implementation, at some point during the requirements workshops, someone from quality or operations asks: “Can the system handle quality inspections?” The answer used to be: “Not really, not out of the box. We’ll need an add-on for that.” Well, that changes with Business Central version 28. Microsoft has added native quality management functionality, and from what I can see in the early access preview, it’s not just a checkbox feature—it actually looks great 🙂 , it is...
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...
10+ years ago I created a Record Deletion tool for Dynamics NAV that I published here on my blog. It was a tool that could be used to clean up test transactions in a company in Dynamics NAV, and it quickly became very popular. People have reach out to about getting this tool available for Business Central (I also think some have done the work of converting this tool into a BC extension themselves). So here we go; it is now available via AppSource and can be accessed for FREE here: Record Deletion Tool for Business Central The functionality is...
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...
One of the new super useful features in Microsoft Dynamics NAV 2016 is the capability to record table data permissions by simply going through the process in the application. For those of you that have been implementing NAV/Navision when the classic client was around are probably familiar with this process since the classic client came with a client monitor which results you could turn into permissions quite easily. I did this all the time in the ‘old days’, but since the replacement of the classic client I have not found a good way of recording permissions until now. So, for...
