Getting the most from Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

Posted 29th June 2023

7 Areas to Focus and Drive Greater Efficiencies and ROI From Your ERP Solution

Thanks to the latest innovations in technology, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central has proven itself rich in functionality and an important tool for managing your business processes and achieving much needed efficiencies. With continuous performance improvements, companies of all sizes are able to leverage this all-in-one enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution as a cloud or on-premise solution, providing the following functional areas as standard:

We understand the importance of getting the most from your ERP solution and our BCN experts are always on hand to help your business get the best from your solutions. We have highlighted seven areas of focus that can help you drive greater efficiencies and ROI from your ERP solution.

1. BUSINESS PLAN & SOLUTION ALIGNMENT

Is your solution working optimally for you?

When we talk with new engagements, we often find the system use is outdated and hasn’t kept pace with the business or processes in place and manual workarounds or third-party solution have been added to try and make things work. This is usually down to one of several things:

A painful historic implementation (if it ‘aint broke don’t touch it!)
The business doesn’t see the value in continuous improvement.
The knowledge has been lost on how the solution works due to staff turnover, retirement, lottery wins etc.
No system ownership.
Some (or all) of the above

If this sounds familiar do not fear, this can be overcome – with internal ownership, willing to change and a plan of action. The team at BCN can support you on this journey.

2. BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE & REPORTING

Another area that our project engagements uncover is a lack of visibility or real time information across the business to make meaningful decisions quickly. A symptom of this is the manual processing of data held or processed outside of the system. Business Intelligence tools such as Power BI, Jet Reports/ Analytics and others are a useful addition to specific teams in a business and provide a real view of what is happening and the ability to make quicker decisions faster to mitigate any impacts or concerning trends on the horizon.

Business Central contains a host of features to help you gather, analyse, and share your company data. Businesses collect data through their routine operations, providing decision-makers with valuable business intelligence (BI) about the company’s sales, purchases, operating costs, staff wages, and budgets.

Find out how some of our clients were able to negotiate better container rates with evo-supply and business intelligence.

BCN’s Supply Chain Management Solution – Evo-supply

Dynamics 365 Business Central – Business Intelligence

3. FIXED ASSETS

One often overlooked area to manage and maintain company assets is within the fixed asset register in Business Central. Often this is held outside of the solution but is vital to build efficiencies in the organisation. You can calculate the asset(s) across multiple depreciation books to review if you should sweat the asset(s) for longer or replace sooner. This can them be viewed more accurately in the P&L should you look to sell the asset(s) or purchase further assets. The best part is that you can configure this yourself within the system.

4. INTEGRATE VS INTERFACE

One area for building further efficiencies, especially if you are looking at scaling your operation is Webservices vs flat file transfers.

Webservices (specifically APIs) are a great way to push or pull information from across your digital estate in a live format. The benefits here can span real time data views, stock movements and pricing on the website and trade portals from Amazon to Zalando and almost everything in between.

View our latest integrations for evo-supply SaaS

5. OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION (OCR)

This is not a new technology, however the pace of improvement over the last few years has increased the applications and efficiency rates substantially.

Making use of OCR technology, you can create a document record in Business Central by registering any files or paper copies you receive from your business partners. For instance, a purchase or sales invoice, credit memo, or journal line.

The incoming document features in Business Central mean you can upload the received files or taking a picture with the device’s camera OCR to create entries to represent the external documents. Using an external OCR provider to create electronic documents from PDF or image files, you may subsequently convert them to records inside Business Central.

Feature also allow users to create incoming document records in Business Central directly from emails sent by vendors using the Outlook add-in.

6. LATEST VERSION

Upgrading to the latest version of Business Central has many benefits.

Since version 13 Business Central has grown and matured as product and Microsoft have delivered what they promised of a rebuilt, optimised and truly scalable business platform. We are now many versions on (22.05 at the time of writing), and the solution upgradability form Version 14 on makes painful or costly upgrades a thing of the past.

If you are looking at updating your Business Central (or NAV solution) click the link to learn more.

Planning your upgrade

7. TRAINING

Education and training is paramount with any ERP solution to maximise its potential.

It all starts with the learning curve to successful adoption for all users. Training should be a priority, not an afterthought or a nice to have. Ensure all colleagues are up to speed with the latest developments across the Microsoft and related suite of solutions.

And remember, forging a strong partnership with a solution provider, that fully understands your business and its processes, is essential for delivering what is needed to achieve business success and all-important ROI.

With over 20 years of success as a Microsoft Business Partner, BCN have enjoyed great success, in partnership with clients, delivering outstanding results. If you are ready for building stronger business, we would like the opportunity to support you in your journey!