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The Dynamics 365 2020 wave 1 has brought new enhancements throughout the Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management in the sectors such as planning, asset management, IoT intelligence, salesand procurement,warehouse managementandin manufacturing, making the D365 supply chain management more reliable, user-friendly and high performing.
Here in this blog we’d introduce you to the new features of supply chain management of a few sectors, you can find out about all the features of D365 SCM in our subsequent blogs.

Asset Management

1) Production scheduling based on asset availability

This feature allows to have a complete view of manufacturing resources as it could be integrated with planning engine and services, it helps to gauge the production scheduling. With this feature one can now schedule the production process based on factors such as maintenance, material availability, requirement etc.

2) Fixed asset integration with asset management lifecycle
This functionality aligns the end-to-end process flows by being able to integrate Fixed Assets module with asset lifecycle.

It empowers customers to install or take charge of assets by building the seamless process flows between the Fixed Assets and Asset Management modules. Any financial impacts that occurs to an asset during the maintain phase will traverse to the Fixed Asset module for required actions.

3) Visual scheduling for work orders

This feature enables users to visually schedule the maintenance work orders using the Gantt chart.

4) IoT integration with asset management maintenance

This features allows the user to generate maintenance requests in asset management in case if any unforeseen even occurs such as production delay or equipment shutdown in IoT intelligence.

5) Integration with new Project module changes relating to project type 

By being able to integrate with the project module changes this feature provides tighter interfacing thus providing enhanced controls over finances, maintenance costs and to invoice work orders.

6) Multiple inventory asset representation

This new functionality allows customers to create as many inventory representations as required. Inventory accounting in dual currency and inventory accounting in dual valuation is supported. Several ledgers can be created for a legal entity since multiple inventory representations can be obtained. Also the field ‘Convention’ holds any number of accounting policies that could be associated with one or more ledgers. Also, the multiple inventory representations support multiple inventory accounting policies , it also has an enhanced feature that allows the user to track back the audit to it’s original document.

Inventory

7) On-hand services

This feature provides a separate micro-service that provides real-time access to inventory information but without adding extra load and unaffecting the performance. External systems can access this on- hand service through RESTful APIs that enable on-hand information on given sets of dimensions to be queried, and that enables retrieval of a list of available on-hand positions.

Manufacturing

8) Improved job card device

Job card device is now equipped with the features that were previously available only on job card terminal, example, improvements in the user interface of the Report progress dialog box, will now provide more insights to the floor workers. This could equip the shop floor workers to improve efficiency and reduce error.

9) New data entities for the manufacturing area

Data could be now extracted for building analytics and visualization from the new data entities feature, this is going to open up different prospects for the users. D365 2020 wave 1 allows to collect new data entities for the manufacturing area, they are-

• Capacity reservation – allows users to export capacity reservations
• Batch order formula lines – allows users to import and export batch order formula lines
• Batch order co- and by- product – allows users to import and export batch order co- and by- products.

• Production route transaction – user can export production route transaction.
• Production jobs – Allows user to export production jobs.
• Indirect activities (JmgIpcActivity) – user can import and export indirect activities.
• Indirect activity categories (JmgIpcCategory) – user can import and export categories for indirect activities.

10) Manufacturing intelligence

This new feature helps on answer the crucial questions like “Are we going to meet our goals today?” and “Is my production line healthy?” This feature provides a Production Insights dashboard for production managers  and executives, such as,

Insights on the current performance and industry standard measures for Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE), with timelines and trends in context, augments the supervisor’s knowledge with data insights to recommend actions.

New Features of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management 2020 wave 1

Find the details of the new features of 2020 wave 1 on IoT intelligence, planning, portals and warehouse management of SCM.

IoT intelligence

11) IoT intelligence core insights

Delayed orders: 2020 wave 1 brings in new features to tackle delayed orders, it enables notification services and actions for delayed production orders and for its impacted operations. Enables users to take relevant business actions for delayed orders, including the ability to view impact or create a maintenance request.

Equipment down: Provides notification services and actions for managing equipment-down scenarios. Users are equipped with features that helps to define metrics for machine-down thresholds and notifies users during such scenarios. Enables users to take relevant business actions for delayed orders, including the ability to view impact or create a maintenance work order.

Quality anomaly: Provides notification services and actions for managing quality anomalies. Users are equipped with features that helps to define quality attributes for products and get notified when exceptions to these attributes occur.

Automated inventory updates: Provides automated inventory updates and the ability to define batching rules.

No-code capability: code-free method for users to connect their machines to IoT intelligence service.

Planning

12) Master planning includes items with on-hand inventory when pre-processing filters are enabled

Once the new feature, Include items with on-hand when pre-processing filters is enabled in Feature management, it ensures that items with on-hand inventory will always be included in the master planning run when the Pre-processing: Automatically filter by items with direct demand setting is enabled on the Master planning parameters page.

Portals

13) Customer self-service experiences

To give the customers a sense of self service experience, the customer portal template is introduced into D365 SCM environment. It is a Power Apps portals template available in the Power Apps template gallery allowing companies to create an externally facing website linked to the SCM.
Though it doesn’t provide end-to-end solution, it helps companies bring dual-write, Power Apps portals, and Supply Chain Management together to create a self-service experience for the customers.

The feature provides following functionality:

• View order history

• View account information

• Create orders

• Preconfigured web roles and entity permissions for Power Apps portals users.

Warehouse management and transportation

14) Catch weight product processing

This feature provides a catch weight tag that captures the weight of the particular unit. This feature cancels out the reductant process of weighing the product multiple times, and instead weigh the product only once—at the time of receipt. This feature is beneficial for products that don’t change weight over time (such as frozen shrimp) and products that have a handling unit of measure that is shippable (such as a box of shrimp). The user scans the catch weight tag to identify the weight at the time of picking or packing based on the product configuration, also, the invoicing will be done based on the captured catch weight tag.

15) Inbound and outbound logistics improvements

These previously existing features are now available for the customers to include these features in production environment through Feature management

Inbound:

• Quality check – Allows to do quality checks right at the time of receiving to the inbound dock area.

• Put away clusters – This features allows to segregate multiple license plates at once and put away to different locations.

Warehouse operations:

• Packaging product dimensions – This allows users to have different sets of dimensions for items with nested packing

• Local utilization – This serves as a tool for warehouse managers to easily view and filter the volumetric utilization of location across the warehouse.

• Location license plate positioning – In a multi-pallet location, this allows the user to see where the LP is located. It adds a sequence number to the plate for each licensing put to a location.

• Location product dimension mixing – This new location profile functionality allows you to decide whether configurations, colors, style, and sizes can be mixed on a certain location (profile) or if only one or a combination of some of those dimensions can be put to the same location.

• Flexible warehouse-level dimension reservation – This enhancement introduces flexibility in the inventory reservation policy to allow businesses who sell batch-tracked products and run their logistics as WMS-enabled operations.

Outbound:

• Small package shipping – helps for setting up carrier login credentials, printing labels received back from carrier web services, charging freight to customer third-party accounts, additional freight terms, and additional accessorial delivery types.

• System-directed work sequencing – this setup offers the ability to sort and filter which work orders the system will present to the user for execution.

• Wave load building – Advanced load building allows the wave to assign the shipment to an existing load.

• Warehouse slotting – Warehouse slotting allows you to create replenishment work at any time based on order demand.

• Wave label printing enhancements:

Allows labels to be printed according to number of cartons on a single work line, without using the containerization feature. Includes enumeration of the labels, support for reprint of labels, voiding of labels, clean-up of wave label history.

16) Mass deployment for Warehouse mobile app

The feature allows users to silently perform a mass deployment of the connection settings for the Warehouse mobile app. Customers can choose the deployment tool of their choice (such as Microsoft Intune) to deploy and service warehouse mobile devices.

17) Enhancement to use existing catch weight tags with warehouse management

This feature adds support for using a mobile device to report a production order as finished when catch weight tags have been registered in advance for the appropriate order.

Use the Mobile device menu items page to add this feature to any mobile-device menu item that uses the Report as finished and put away work creation process.

18) Warehouse management – inbound load management enhancement

The feature gives a new association of the purchase order inventory transactions with the load ID when receiving from the Warehouse Mobile device. Also has an update to the inbound load warehouse handling operations called as “Multiple product receipt postings per load.” this allows multiple product receipt postings for the same load. Wearhouse managers can now keep the load open even after running the product receipts, this allows multiple quantity register for the same load. These enhancements will allow ISVs to build more robust solutions when integrating with the load entity.

Trade and source

19) Enterprise scale – purchase system performance

Based on the customer feedback on purchase order processing scenarios, some key improvements have been made to system performance which helps customers who are dealing with a large volume of purchase orders in different scenarios.

20) Enterprise scale – sales system performance

Same way there are a few key improvements done to the system performance which can assist customers dealing with a large volume of sales orders. These improvements help in both manual entry order and import scenarios.

Find more about the new features of Trade and Sources on our next blog.

New Features of Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management 2020 wave 1

In the final part of our three part blog on Dynamics 365 SCM 2020 wave 1, we introduce you to the new updates on trade and source features of SCM

Trade and source

21) Calculate PO delivery date based on lead times and working days (public sector)

One can now use this feature to automatically calculate the delivery date considering the vendor’s lead time and organization’s working-days calendar. This option allows to enter Vendors lead time for each line and taking working days into account a delivery date is generated from the confirmation date. After the admin enables the feature, the admin must enable the functionality using the procurement and sourcing parameters.

22) Country of origin enhancements

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management includes a related field on the product master document on country of origin, this enhancements will build on that existing capability. These enhancements will provide the capability for the procurement organization to document this information. They can then use this information to prepare shipping documentation.

23) External catalog enhancements

With the new catalog enhancements, the procurement organization can enable the logging feature that captures common issues that might require changes to external catalog parameters this solves the issues involved in merging external catalog.

24) Hazardous materials product information management

This enhancement brings an additional field that is used to store data related to the item descriptions, this helps during shipping regulations on the dangerous-goods lists.

25) Hazardous materials shipping documentation

An additional documents is introduced that can be used in the warehouse to manage shipments that contain hazardous materials. The new documents are an enhanced bill of lading, CMR document, multimodal dangerous goods document, enhanced packing list, and Verified Gross Mass (VGM) document. These documents will work much like the existing bill of lading. The operator can generate the data for the document and then edit as needed to include external data or adjustments needed to represent the shipment.

26) Miscellaneous charges enhancements

This enhancement gives the sales entry operators the ability to allocate sales header charges to sales lines. Additional sales charges has the ability to set up from and to amounts. This is being made available on purchase orders to allow scenarios for charges to be assigned based on the value of the purchase order.

27) Purchase order delivery via cXML

The manual communication of the purchase order from the employees of the organization to the vendor is now simplified by the added support for the cXML purchase order request message. You can enable vendors for this feature if your supplier supports receiving the purchase order. The procurement team can enable background processing for the purchase order sending the order, and they can monitor the acknowledgment of purchase orders.

28) Sales process control via enhanced order holds

In a usual B2B scenarios, the processing between intra-departments of an organization consumes time, the new feature equips the company to reduce the time consumed in this process. With this enhancement, users can use status indication processes to enable communication of the order status and requirements for follow-up activities to control the order. The status information is visible on the warehouse release and shipment, enabling the communication of status information between the sales representatives and the operational fulfilment teams.

29) Delegation of multiple purchasing work items

Handing over the work to a colleague is made easier with this feature that enables users to delegate multiple work items to another user in one action on the Work items assigned to me page.

30) Sales order operator efficiency – distribution

Sales order management efficiency is important for distribution businesses that need to process and manage large volumes of sales orders. The enhancement has made improvements that reduces the number of steps needed to perform actions around, quick order entry, order editing, inventory availability, and item searching.

The eExtensibility feature is not yet supported for report objects in Business Central. But, now  So now we can substitute reports from the Base application with Custom reports.

To substitute a report, we have to create a method and subscribe it to the OnAfterSubstituteReport event published by Codeunit 44 – ReportManagement.

This method replaces the report specified by the ReportId with the one given by the NewReportId parameter.

In this example the “Customer – List” report will be substituted for “My New Customer – List”

When the “OnAfterSubstituteReport” event is raised, the event subscriber method is called, and the replacement takes place.

Source https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamics365/business-central/dev-itpro/developer/devenv-substituting-reports

In this final part of our three part blog on Dynamics 365 SCM 2020 wave 1, we introduce you to the new updates on trade and source features of SCM, to know more about all the features refer our previous blogs.

Trade and source

1) Calculate PO delivery date based on lead times and working days (public sector)

One can now use this feature to automatically calculate the delivery date considering the vendor’s lead time and organization’s working-days calendar. This option allows to enter Vendors lead time for each line and taking working days into account a delivery date is generated from the confirmation date. After the admin enables the feature, the admin must enable the functionality using the procurement and sourcing parameters.

2) Country of origin enhancements

Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management includes a related field on the product master document on country of origin, this enhancements will build on that existing capability. These enhancements will provide the capability for the procurement organization to document this information. They can then use this information to prepare shipping documentation.

3) External catalog enhancements

With the new catalog enhancements,the procurement organization can enable the logging feature that captures common issues that might require changes to external catalog parameters this solves the issues involved in merging external catalog.

4) Hazardous materials product information management

This enhancement brings an additional field that is used to store data related to the item descriptions, this helps during shipping regulations on the dangerous-goods lists.

5) Hazardous materials shipping documentation

An additional documents is introduced that can be used in the warehouse to manage shipments that contain hazardous materials. The new documents are an enhanced bill of lading, CMR document, multimodal dangerous goods document, enhanced packing list, and Verified Gross Mass (VGM) document. These documents will work much like the existing bill of lading. The operator can generate the data for the document and then edit as needed to include external data or adjustments needed to represent the shipment.

6) Miscellaneous charges enhancements

This enhancement gives the sales entry operators the ability to allocate sales header charges to sales lines. Additional sales charges has the ability to set up from and to amounts. This is being made available on purchase orders to allow scenarios for charges to be assigned based on the value of the purchase order.

7) Purchase order delivery via cXML

The manual communication of the purchase order from the employees of the organization to the vendor is now simplified by the added support for the cXML purchase order request message. You can enable vendors for this feature if your supplier supports receiving the purchase order. The procurement team can enable background processing for the purchase order sending the order, and they can monitor the acknowledgment of purchase orders.

8) Sales process control via enhanced order holds

In a usual B2B scenarios, the processing between intra-departments of an organization consumes time, the new feature equips the company to reduce the time consumed in this process. With this enhancement, users can use status indication processes to enable communication of the order status and requirements for follow-up activities to control the order. The status information is visible on the warehouse release and shipment, enabling the communication of status information between the sales representatives and the operational fulfilment teams.

9) Delegation of multiple purchasing work items

Handing over the work to a colleague is made easier with this feature that enables users to delegate multiple work items to another user in one action on the Work items assigned to me page.

10) Sales order operator efficiency – distribution

Sales order management efficiency is important for distribution businesses that need to process and manage large volumes of sales orders. The enhancement has made improvements that reduces the number of steps needed to perform actions around, quick order entry, order editing, inventory availability, and item searching.

Wave 1 brings in a number of new features in SCM, here are the details on IoT intelligence, planning, portals and warehouse management of SCM.

IoT intelligence

1) IoT intelligence core insights

Delayed orders: 2020 wave 1 brings in new features to tackle delayed orders, it enables notification services and actions for delayed production orders and for its impacted operations. Enables users to take relevant business actions for delayed orders, including the ability to view impact or create a maintenance request.

Equipment down: Provides notification services and actions for managing equipment-down scenarios. Users are equipped with features that helps to define metrics for machine-down thresholds and notifies users during such scenarios. Enables users to take relevant business actions for delayed orders, including the ability to view impact or create a maintenance work order.

Quality anomaly: Provides notification services and actions for managing quality anomalies. Users are equipped with features that helps to define quality attributes for products and get notified when exceptions to these attributes occur.

Automated inventory updates: Provides automated inventory updates and the ability to define batching rules.

No-code capability: code-free method for users to connect their machines to IoT intelligence service.

Planning

2) Master planning includes items with on-hand inventory when pre-processing filters are enabled

Once the new feature, Include items with on-hand when pre-processing filters is enabled in Feature management, it ensures that items with on-hand inventory will always be included in the master planning run when the Pre-processing: Automatically filter by items with direct demand setting is enabled on the Master planning parameters page.

Portals

3) Customer self-service experiences

To give the customers a sense of self service experience, the customer portal template is introduced into D365 SCM environment. It is a Power Apps portals template available in the Power Apps template gallery allowing companies to create an externally facing website linked to the SCM.
Though it doesn’t provide end-to-end solution, it helps companies bring dual-write, Power Apps portals, and Supply Chain Management together to create a self-service experience for the customers.

The feature provides following functionality:

• View order history

• View account information

• Create orders

• Preconfigured web roles and entity permissions for Power Apps portals users.

Warehouse management and transportation

4) Catch weight product processing

This feature provides a catch weight tag that captures the weight of the particular unit. This feature cancels out the reductant process of weighing the product multiple times, and instead weigh the product only once—at the time of receipt. This feature is beneficial for products that don’t change weight over time (such as frozen shrimp) and products that have a handling unit of measure that is shippable (such as a box of shrimp). The user scans the catch weight tag to identify the weight at the time of picking or packing based on the product configuration, also, the invoicing will be done based on the captured catch weight tag.

5) Inbound and outbound logistics improvements

These previously existing features are now available for the customers to include these features in production environment through Feature management

Inbound:

• Quality check – Allows to do quality checks right at the time of receiving to the inbound dock area.

• Put away clusters – This features allows to segregate multiple license plates at once and put away to different locations.

Warehouse operations:

• Packaging product dimensions – This allows users to have different sets of dimensions for items with nested packing

• Local utilization – This serves as a tool for warehouse managers to easily view and filter the volumetric utilization of location across the warehouse.

• Location license plate positioning – In a multi-pallet location, this allows the user to see where the LP is located. It adds a sequence number to the plate for each licensing put to a location.

• Location product dimension mixing – This new location profile functionality allows you to decide whether configurations, colors, style, and sizes can be mixed on a certain location (profile) or if only one or a combination of some of those dimensions can be put to the same location.

• Flexible warehouse-level dimension reservation – This enhancement introduces flexibility in the inventory reservation policy to allow businesses who sell batch-tracked products and run their logistics as WMS-enabled operations.

Outbound:

• Small package shipping – helps for setting up carrier login credentials, printing labels received back from carrier web services, charging freight to customer third-party accounts, additional freight terms, and additional accessorial delivery types.

• System-directed work sequencing – this setup offers the ability to sort and filter which work orders the system will present to the user for execution.

• Wave load building – Advanced load building allows the wave to assign the shipment to an existing load.

• Warehouse slotting – Warehouse slotting allows you to create replenishment work at any time based on order demand.

• Wave label printing enhancements:

Allows labels to be printed according to number of cartons on a single work line, without using the containerization feature. Includes enumeration of the labels, support for reprint of labels, voiding of labels, clean-up of wave label history.

6) Mass deployment for Warehouse mobile app

The feature allows users to silently perform a mass deployment of the connection settings for the Warehouse mobile app. Customers can choose the deployment tool of their choice (such as Microsoft Intune) to deploy and service warehouse mobile devices.

7) Enhancement to use existing catch weight tags with warehouse management

This feature adds support for using a mobile device to report a production order as finished when catch weight tags have been registered in advance for the appropriate order.

Use the Mobile device menu items page to add this feature to any mobile-device menu item that uses the Report as finished and put away work creation process.

8) Warehouse management – inbound load management enhancement

The feature gives a new association of the purchase order inventory transactions with the load ID when receiving from the Warehouse Mobile device. Also has an update to the inbound load warehouse handling operations called as “Multiple product receipt postings per load.” this allows multiple product receipt postings for the same load. Wearhouse managers can now keep the load open even after running the product receipts, this allows multiple quantity register for the same load. These enhancements will allow ISVs to build more robust solutions when integrating with the load entity.

Trade and source

9) Enterprise scale – purchase system performance

Based on the customer feedback on purchase order processing scenarios, some key improvements have been made to system performance which helps customers who are dealing with a large volume of purchase orders in different scenarios.

10) Enterprise scale – sales system performance

Same way there are a few key improvements done to the system performance which can assist customers dealing with a large volume of sales orders. These improvements help in both manual entry order and import scenarios.

Find more about the new features of Trade and Sources on our next blog.

Power BI is an excellent tool for anyone, but it is definitely the best choice for users of Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Business Central, here is why.

Familiar interface and features

Because power BI was built by Microsoft, it has many of the underlying features that microsoft users already know and understand. it is familiar because of its user interface, so it has the same look and feel as all the other microsoft productivity tools you use.

Easy-to-use language for building visualizations

The primary competitors for power bi are Tableau and Qlikview. they are relatively easy to use, but they require users to learn their proprietary languages. in order to build a visualization in tableau for instance, you need to be able to understand that proprietary language. but, if you can write an excel function, you can use power bi. in addition, connectors are included for big data, sap, oracle, and most of the database providers.

Easy to deploy

With Dynamics NAV or dynamics 365 Business Central, there is minimal “implementation”, you can be up and running in a day. other products, however, require some amount of implementation; you or someone on your behalf would need to build the dataset. with power BI, anyone can get you up and running.

Cost-effective without compromising on features and usability

the power BI app is part of Microsoft Office 365, which means any user of office 365 can add the app to their subscription. There are three levels of licensing for power bi: free, pro, and premium. the free version is an individual license, it can only be used by the individual user. it’s a great way to try out power bi, but to get the benefits of a true bi tool, you need access to data across the organization, and the appropriate people need to be able to share that data. That is why Microsoft offers the pro and premium options, depending on your needs. Regardless, all options are very reasonably priced.

Often, we get this question from our customers: if power BI can be free or very low cost, is it really as good as the competition? it is understandable to be wary of a lower-priced option. In the case of power BI, however, you are not compromising. Microsoft is simply in the position where they can sell power BI at a price point that makes it accessible to anyone. Make no mistake: power BI is better than its more expensive competition. power BI can do all the same things the others can and more, and microsoft is willing to put their money where their mouth is so you can try it, risk-free.

Taps into the power of artificial intelligence and machine learning

power BI has visualizations that utilize both artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ml)—specific visualizations that can pinpoint causes for certain scenarios within the data. these show the power of Microsoft’s AI/ML capabilities in a snapshot. Since power bi is built on the azure platform, you can use the dataflows to pull information from data sources and map the data to the common data service. The dataflows are stored in the azure data lake gen2 storage containers and as such can be used with azure machine learning.  With relative ease, any company can quickly start using Microsoft’s ML tools and begin taking advantage of AI.

Offers visualizations, not just reporting

Power BI is not a replacement for your reporting system; it is a supplement that you will find very valuable. approximately 65% of the world’s population are visual learners, meaning that they process information better looking at it graphically that is why using power bi to visualize your data is so powerful. For example, showing people where your company has been and where it is going—based off your data—is much more impactful than a report.

Power BI is about making information very readily available to your executive team so they can make decisions faster, be more agile, make changes, and see how the business is actually running versus waiting two or three days for your accountant produce a spreadsheet. power bi gives you information in as nearly real time as it gets because data is refreshed periodically.

Easy and inexpensive to build a proof of concept

If you are on the fence about whether you need a bi tool or you are in a position of needing to sell the idea to your executive team, it would be wise to build a proof of concept. the problem with other bi tools is that they require you to go to the manufacturer or one of their vendors to have them build a proof of concept for you. if you want to use your own data, it will likely cost you because you are going to have to get a consultant involved from that company. In addition, you will only get a partial dataset. in other words, getting a proof of concept can get expensive and involved.

with power BI, on the other hand, a proof of concept typically takes only one to two weeks, and the cost is essentially free other than the time it takes you to build the proof of concept because power bi for an individual can be downloaded for free. the built-in apps in business central connect to your database, and you only need to spend a minimum amount of time to transform it, build some reports, and create a dashboard to make your case.

Well the answer to it is more than just a mere yes or no. Though the decision is mostly dependent on individual business environment there are a certain broader aspect that could help the business organization arrive to a decision.

Dynamics 365 Business Central is a business management solution designed for small to medium sized businesses. It is built on the powers of NAV and in addition to it, it brings the latest cloud ERP solutions equipping the businesses to move its business process as smoothly as possible.
Business Central has been around in the market for almost a year and a half now, initially there wasn’t much disparities with NAV but with its back to back updates of 2019 wave 1, wave 2 and 2020 wave 1 it is going to be difficult to castaway the idea of upgradation. Here are some of the major decision-making points to help you understand.

1) How old is your version of NAV? 

The older your NAV system is, the bigger the changes needed to upgrade. There have been multiple versions of it and major changes to the product, from 2009 Dynamics NAV till Business Central 2020 This means that upgrades from very old systems actually require multi-stage upgrades but if you are on a 2013 or later system there is a bit more flexibility on how you can get to Business Central

2) Is your data all over the place?

Businesses that are there from a long time, say 10 to 20 year, will typically be dealing with a lot of data that could be creating a mess in the database, there are chances of holding on to the information or data which are of no use in the current times, there are good chances of having redundant information and data being stored in the wrong places. With an upgrade it is possible to keep the required data and cleanse off the rest. This will mean that utilising modern options will yield better results.

3) Growing infrastructure cost

Many companies would be still sticking to traditional on-premise ERP system, spending years in investing its infrastructure, customizations, training, testing, and upgrades making the system to fit ones need, but sticking to such a traditional business management solution could be impacting on overall productivity. Also, there could be problems such as rising costs, decreased employee productivity, increased downtime, data loss, security issues, inaccurate decision making, and so on. And at this point, one must surely be considering for an upgrade.

4) Slow performance issues

the performance of NAV could look deteriorated with increasing amount of data; the traditional coding might take its own time in data retrieval or in conducting a task-based operation.  Having older versions means, It is impossible to set a breakpoint in the debugger before the debugging process halts itself. It is impossible to step over a function and the tables system inside NAV are also not so powerful, however the business central as fixed these issues successfully

5) To keep up with technology and utilize the most

Getting on to the new versions requires revamping a lot of traditional structures of a company and also due to the cost involved in such upgradations one may restrict themselves from upgrading but this leaves the customers behind the time. Unless they invest in a full re-implementation or they have to find workarounds. Encouraging users to stay on the latest versions will help businesses stay up to date with the latest technology in an ever-accelerating capability race

Like we said before, these are some of the broader aspects that determine the need to upgrade for the latest version, and if you think you need more insights into the process with respect to your business we would be more than happy to assist, contact us on http://www.allgrowtech.com

Category: all blogs, ERP, Dynamics 365 Business Central, Business Central 2020 wave1.

The 2020 wave 1 brings in a wave of new features and updates to meet the needs of the ever-changing business landscapes of the current world, it offers you with a more user-friendly environment and addresses to the niche. The new innovations across the Dynamics 365 applications including Marketing, Sales, Customer Service, Field Service, Finance, Supply Chain Management, Human Resources, Commerce, and Business Central provides you with significant capabilities to transform your business.

As it marks the official start of the 2020 wave1this month, we’d like to throw some light on a few of its features (fast tracks) that are available.

1) Enhanced mobile accessibility related to device orientation.
This enhancement makes access to information in FactBoxes reachable on phones and tablets too by displaying a small chevron (either on the side or at the top of the page), allowing the user to “pull” the related information onto the screen. In previous releases, this action was only available with certain screen orientations. Now, it is available everywhere on any device.

The navigation controls have been moved to the left pane, allowing users to quickly jump to a different page and get started with tasks on tablets. In previous releases, this was hidden under a menu. The change also allows users and administrators to personalize a Role Center with richer navigation by adding more elements to the Home group (for example, by bookmarking them)

2) Loss prevention

The Microsoft Dynamics 365 Fraud Protection deals with payment fraud and related issues in e-commerce. It allows merchants to bring down the fraud loss and improve the online shopping experience for its customers. leveraging the power of artificial intelligence, loss prevention lets the merchants stop retail losses. With historical transaction data captured, it lets to detect anomalies in business scenarios that can be abused, such as product returns and discounts. When there are deviations from the normal behaviour in the merchant’s ecosystem, merchants are alerted.

3) Compare items price storage

View comparison chart, filtered by item with breakdown by Cost group type and Cost group 

Compare item prices storage details, filtered by item with a breakdown by Cost group  Compare item price reports come to use when there is large number of lines in the output. This feature lets you sort and filter results of high quantity data such as, for example, requesting a comparison of the current active standard cost against next year’s pending standard cost for around 80,000 items. This new functionality for comparing item price storage, you execute the “Compare item price” report, with a unique name specific for execution, and the results of the report will be stored under this name, it also lets data available for use with external applications.

4) Search in menu

Find function in the Business Central Role Explorer 

Finding a report is going to be easier with the option of ‘find a function on the role explorer’ now. Instead of manual navigation, one can use this feature by a keyword to locate it, the feature highlights all the records that exist by the keyword.

5) Receive more items than ordered 

Shows over-receipt codes with over-receipt tolerance field highlighted 

Shows over-receipt on purchase order line 

Without having to take the approval for a new purchase order, the warehouse workers can now carry out and handle the extra goods whilst cutting the lengthy process in times of  vendor discount or when good are available for cheaper cost. By setting up the over receive policy and over-receipt tolerance%  one can receive the more goods than ordered. The feature triggers the reapproval in such cases, if needed.

6) Disable export of data to Excel 

Users can now set limits on people who can export the data on to excel sheets. With the previous options of edit in excel and open in excel the new feature lets you control over data exports on to excel, the default option of exporting data is now controlled by administrators allowing the organization to get stricter controls over the data.

7) Enhanced customer and vendor document layout

Document Layouts page for customers 

The painstaking job of sending separate documents to different customers & vendors is now taken care by the new feature which lets you set up specific contact to use with specific documents. This feature lets you to select specific document layout for specific company contact so that only the corresponding documents could be directed to the right contact.

8) Long-running operations can be cancelled

Cancelling a report 

The new feature lets you cancel the processing of bulky operations. A cancel option is available on the progressing pop up window which lets you halt the process if needed.

9) Use resource in purchase documents

Purchase invoice with resource lines 

Resource feature could be now used as a line type in purchase document letting you keep track of the outsourced or externally hired activities and jobs. One can add resources on purchase orders, invoices, and credit memos and post purchase transactions.

10) Print to attachment 

Shows Attach as PDF action on Sales Orders list page 

Another feature that is going to be helpful is ‘attach as PDF’, this lets you to have the printout of the previous version when the document is going to the next step of the process, it is particularly helpful when a document is going through multiple steps.

These are some of the features highlighted in the blog, to read more, one can access the complete document of 2020 release wave 1 on Microsoft website.  The production deployment for the 2020 release wave has begun and the regional deployments will start on May 1, 2020. However, the preview of the features are already available and one can get ready with confidence knowing the features that could enabled the business.

With all the efforts put into the business, deciding to change the business model itself could be a big step, and upon that deciding to stick to which streamline process might look like a more tedious decision to make. It is essential to know which type of system, such as, ERP or CRM is needed for your business. To some level, ERP and CRM software address similar challenges but each has distinct strengths in certain areas.

Factors that will influence your decision include the type of business you have, the size of your company, the types of products and services you provide, and the complexity of your business. Let’s walk through the basics of each solution and know how to decide which one might be the right fit for your company.

About ERP Software

Large product manufacturers and distribution companies will typically lean more toward implementing an ERP solution. They need ERP features that will help them decrease production time, manage inventory levels, minimize the time required to fulfil and ship orders, comply with financial and regulatory requirements, and gain critical operational insight to improve profitability.

ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) software is designed to handle a business’s operations. Cloud-based ERP software provides a centralized database so a business’s many departments and locations can access up-to-date information in real time from anywhere, anytime.

ERP solutions, like Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, manage a variety of systems and processes such as: accounting, inventory & operations, human resources & payroll, workflow automation, reporting & dashboards. The primary advantages of an ERP solution are that it gives a company’s separate business units a way to operate cohesively, work more productively, identify issues more quickly, and make improvements proactively.

About CRM Software 

Professional services companies, non-profits, and other organizations that primarily provide services usually have a greater need for CRM than ERP. With a focus on increasing sales and delivering a fine-tuned customer experience, they can benefit from CRM features and leveraging customer data for retention and repeat business. While they may need some features to help with the operational aspects of their business, those needs most likely can be managed through a project management or accounting solution.

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software is built to manage sales, marketing, and customer service processes. Cloud-based CRM software provides a centralized database for all prospective and existing customer data. It enables sales, marketing, and customer service teams to view and update information in real time from anywhere.

The primary advantages of CRM software, like Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, include more control over managing the customer experience and access to up-to-the-minute customer data. CRM solutions enable sales, marketing, and customer service teams to coordinate their efforts and seize opportunities to gain new customers and keep existing customers satisfied.

Conclusion

To sum up, ERP software may be ideal if your company mainly wants to manage financials, inventory, and production and if only needs basic sales management features. CRM software may be ideal if your company primarily wants to find prospects, track leads, and maintain contact with customers through automated marketing. But an integrated solution with both ERP and CRM may be ideal if your company needs to be able to manage financials and optimize operations and f it needs a full suite of sales and marketing management capabilities to streamline business processes across your entire organization.

However, if you think you’d need more information on this, contact us on contact@allgrowtech.com and our group of professional will assist you decide according to your business need.

The idea of jumping into a new ERP might takes quite a bit of strategy to transition from a well-trusted legacy system to a new ERP software. But that could not be quite a good reason to give up on implementing  a new ERP system and here is why.

1) Improper design of the process flow

The result of bad process design can lead to mismanaged data, inventory errors, schedule delays, work-overload and much more. Having an effective ERP software means refining and redesigning the business processes and procedures. 
When a business has defined tasks, they can begin to develop data that can lead to more effective decisions and a heightened improvement in their overall operations. This type of decision can have a major ripple effect of productivity and efficiency within your organization.

2) Data mismanagement

Data management is gets increasingly difficult with growing companies, the data keeps adding and might go out of hand if not managed in the early stages. ERPs have been described as programming languages designed for big data. They can improve the overall flow and internal documentation process of your business. In addition, it can automate just about all of the associated data you need to manage. 

3) Communication across the departments 

When there is communication involved with different sectors of business, ERP creates seamless integration actions which would otherwise be difficult to create. Without an ERP model employees would be lost in the stage of data translation this can be time consuming, and illogical in the amount of money and energy spent. An ERP, like Microsoft Dynamics, is the type of system you want to implement if you intend to minimize compatibility issues and drive your business towards expansion.

4) Complex inventory system

Nobody wants a complex inventory management system. When it comes to backordered items, orders waiting for credit card approval and specialty orders, things can get very confusing fast. To keep track of items being stocked, shipped and delivered itself could get tedious ERPs can make a world of difference in such scenario it makes managing departments, products and employees easy. It gives businesses the ability to track numbers, inputs, and necessary information with ease. It also enables well-defined and seamless workflows that can be cross-referenced by many different departments.

5) Business growth

There will always be problems. That’s just the way the world works. The key for achieving business goals is to minimize the possibilities for further errors. ERP solutions were created to enhance and optimize business, people process and technology. A cloud based ERP solution such as Microsoft Business Central are designed to improve efficiency.

Well, if you have now made up your mind to for such an ERP implementation process or a data migration project, it is time we talk! Contact us on contact@allgrowtech.com The specialists on our project team have dealt with number of successful ERP on premise and cloud ERP implementations. If you have any questions about data migration, selecting an ERP we are here to help you out.

With the Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central 2019 wave 2 release, Microsoft made available a new data type – Enumeration (Enum) in Business Central.

An enumeration type, also known as an enum in programming, Enum is a list that consists of a set of named constants. It can be used as table fields, local and global variables, and parameters.

Enum was introduced earlier but from new version i.e. Business Central 2020 wave 1 release onwards most of the option fields are available as extensible enum. Enum replaces the old Option data type and from now on, during development, instead of creating a new Option field we must create a new Enum.

Enums are more readable, reusable, and extendable compared to the Options data type

• Declaration of an enum

To declare an enum in AL you must specify an ID and a name. Enums are pure metadata and can’t contain any kind of code.

• Enum extension object

Enums can be extended in order to add more values to the enumeration list in which case the Extensible property must be set to true.

For example: We need to extend or adding one more value in “Service Item Status” enum.

After extending enum, Publish the extension files.