Kapil Puvar - D365 Business Central Manufacturing

  If you have ever sat in a discovery workshop with an industries like industrial pump manufacturer, you already know the moment I am talking about. The production head opens his BOM file in Excel. You scroll down. And down. And down some more. For example, a single end-suction centrifugal pump has 150+ components — bolts, nuts, washers, gaskets, O-rings, dowel pins, retaining rings, shims, nameplates, grease nipples, foundation hardware — and roughly half of those line items repeat across every pump variant the company builds. Then the planner says the line we have all heard a hundred times: "Sir, we always use these hardware items together. Why should I plan them one by one every time?" This is the classic kit problem in many industry. And in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, the cleanest way to solve it is a feature that is criminally under-used — the Phantom BOM . Why a Kit (Phantom) Structure Is Required Here Before jumping into BC setup, let me...

  Quick reference Feature Wave GA Date BC Version Location-based capacity and overhead posting Wave 1 2026 April 2026 BC 28 Introduction If you run manufacturing in Business Central across multiple locations — and you use location-specific WIP accounts in your Inventory Posting Setup — there is a good chance your finance team has been quietly chasing an unexplained WIP imbalance for longer than they realise. It was not a data entry error. It was not a misconfigured posting group. It was a system behaviour that caused capacity and overhead costs to post to the common inventory posting group based WIP account. BC 28, generally available April 2026 as part of 2026 Release Wave 1, fixes this. This post explains exactly what was happening, what changed, and what you need to do before and after upgrading. The problem — what was happening before BC 28 Material ...

  Introduction If you have implemented Business Central for a manufacturing or distribution client with any meaningful governance requirement, you have almost certainly had this conversation: "Can we put an approval on the requisition worksheet before purchase orders are created?" Or this one: "We need someone to sign off on inventory adjustments before they are posted. Can BC do that natively?" Until BC 28, the honest answer was no — not natively. Getting approvals on item journals or requisition worksheets required either custom workflow development, a third-party ISV solution, or a manual offline process that relied entirely on discipline rather than system control. With 2026 Release Wave 1 (BC 28, GA April 2026), Microsoft has extended the standard approval workflow framework to cover both item journals and requisition and planning worksheets. This post breaks down exactly what is now possible, the important limitations to be aware of, and why this m...

  Introduction Most articles explain MTO and MTS in the context of a single finished product. But real manufacturing operations rarely have a single BOM level. If you produce sub-assemblies that feed into other sub-assemblies that feed into finished goods — which is extremely common in discrete manufacturing — the behavior of MTO vs MTS becomes significantly more complex, and the implications for your production planning process are substantial. This post focuses exclusively on that one topic: how MTO and MTS behave differently when you have a multi-level production BOM in Business Central. No discussion of reordering policies, no planning worksheet theory — just the production order behavior at each BOM level, and what it means for your team. The scenario Let us set up a clear example that we will use throughout this post. You manufacture a Finished Good (FG) . To produce it, you need Semi-Finished Good 1 (SFG1) as a BOM component. To produce SFG1, you need Semi-F...

  Introduction Manufacturing costing has always been one of the most technically demanding areas of a Business Central implementation. Get it right and you have a reliable, real-time view of what it actually costs to make your products. Get it wrong and your P&L tells a story that doesn't match your shop floor. In 2025, Microsoft has made meaningful improvements to manufacturing costing across both Wave 1 and Wave 2 — which targeted fixes to gaps that practitioners like me have been navigating in our implementations. This post walks through what changed, what it means in practice, and what you should do about it. Quick reference — what's available and when All four features covered in this post are already generally available. Here's the version map so you know exactly what you need to be running: Feature Wave GA Date BC Version Non-inventory items in production cost Wave 1 20...

  Introduction Subcontracting has been one of the most common pain points I encounter in Business Central manufacturing implementations. The question I've heard dozens of times is some version of this: "We send components to a vendor for painting / galvanizing / heat treatment — how do we handle that in BC without building a workaround?" Until now, the honest answer was: with some creative configuration, a fair bit of discipline, and an acceptance that BC's native subcontracting capabilities only handled the cost side of the equation, not the physical movement of goods. It is worth noting that subcontracting logistics functionality has existed in BC but only within specific localizations, namely India and Italy. Manufacturers running those localizations have had access to logistics flows for subcontractor transfers as a regional capability. With 2026 Wave 1, Microsoft is promoting this to a W1 — worldwide — solution, meaning any BC customer on any localization c...

  BC vs Traditional ERP — A Manufacturer's Perspective Introduction After 11 years implementing ERP systems — first as a production planner on the shop floor, then as a functional consultant— I've sat on both sides of the table. I've felt the frustration of a clunky legacy ERP as a user, and I've guided manufacturers through the transition to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central as a consultant. The question I get most often from manufacturers considering a move is simple: "Is BC really different, or is it just another ERP with a new logo?" The honest answer is: It depends on how you implement it; flexibility that actually fits the way a factory works. Here are the most practical differences I've observed, and the tips that make the difference in real-world manufacturing implementations. 1. Traditional ERP was built for Accounting, Extended to Manufacturing Most legacy ERP systems were designed from the financial ledger outward. Manufa...