Business Central for Manufacturing
Your production planning still runs on spreadsheets. Your month-end takes too long because manufacturing variances are calculated manually. Your material shortages are discovered too late, and your costing feels like guesswork until the numbers finally land. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Premium edition connects your shop floor to your finance department within a single integrated platform, delivering a 37% average month-end reduction across our manufacturing clients.
From raw materials to finished goods in one system
Your planners are juggling spreadsheets to track what is scheduled, what is in progress and what has been completed. That lack of visibility costs you time, materials and margin. Business Central Premium provides four types of production orders, planned, firm planned, released and finished, each representing a stage in the production lifecycle so your team can see the full picture in real time.
When a production order is created, Business Central automatically calculates the materials required from the Bill of Materials (BOM) and the capacity needed from the routing. Material availability is checked against current stock levels, and any shortages are flagged for procurement action. This automation replaces the manual spreadsheet planning that causes your material shortages and production delays.
The planning worksheet in Business Central provides a centralised view of all demand and supply across the organisation. Using Material Requirements Planning (MRP), the system calculates what needs to be purchased and what needs to be produced, when each action is required and in what quantity. This calculation considers lead times, safety stock levels, lot sizes, demand forecasts and existing orders to produce an optimised production and procurement plan.
Bills of Materials
Multi-level BOMs with version management, phantom BOMs for sub-assemblies and assembly BOMs for kit operations. Each BOM level calculates material requirements cascading through the complete product structure.
Routings
Define the sequence of operations required to produce each item. Each operation specifies the work centre or machine centre, setup time, run time and move time. Routings drive capacity planning and production scheduling.
Capacity Planning
Machine centres and work centres are defined with their available capacity. Business Central calculates the load on each resource based on released and firm planned production orders, identifying bottlenecks before they disrupt production.
Output and Consumption
As production progresses, operators record material consumption and finished goods output. Variances against standard quantities are captured automatically, providing the data for continuous improvement analysis.
Assembly Management
For kit selling and light manufacturing, Assembly Management in BC Essentials provides assembly orders, assembly BOMs and assemble-to-order functionality without requiring Premium. Ideal for businesses that assemble components into finished goods but do not need full production order routing.
Know exactly what every product costs to make
Accurate product costing is fundamental to manufacturing profitability. Business Central supports multiple costing methods including standard cost, average cost, FIFO (First In, First Out), LIFO (Last In, First Out) and specific cost. For manufacturers, standard costing with variance analysis is typically the most valuable approach.
Standard costs are defined for materials, labour and overhead at each BOM level. As production orders are completed, Business Central compares actual costs against standard, calculating material usage variance, capacity variance and overhead variance. These variances provide the data your production and finance teams need to identify inefficiencies, negotiate better material prices and improve production processes.
The cost roll-up function calculates the standard cost of finished goods from the bottom of the BOM structure upward, incorporating material costs, operation times and overhead rates at each level. When raw material prices change, you can simulate the impact on finished goods costs before committing to a price change.
Manufacturing Cost Components
| Component | How BC Captures It |
|---|---|
| Material Cost | Calculated from BOM quantities multiplied by unit costs, with actual consumption recorded during production |
| Labour Cost | Derived from routing operation times multiplied by work centre rates |
| Machine Cost | Machine centre rates applied to run time and setup time from routings |
| Overhead | Applied as a percentage or fixed amount per unit at the work centre level |
| Subcontract | External processing costs captured through purchase orders linked to production |
Raw materials, work in progress and finished goods
Manufacturing inventory management is fundamentally more complex than wholesale or retail. You need to track raw materials through production into finished goods, with work-in-progress valuation at every stage. Business Central provides comprehensive inventory management that handles this complexity.
Item tracking through serial numbers and lot numbers enables full traceability from raw material receipt through production to finished goods despatch. This is critical for manufacturers who need to trace materials for quality investigations, recall management or regulatory compliance.
Warehouse management in Business Central ranges from basic inventory with bins to advanced directed warehouse management with zones, bin ranking and automated pick and put-away. The level of warehouse complexity you need depends on your operation, and we configure the appropriate level during implementation.
Reorder policies control how Business Central generates purchase or production suggestions. Options include fixed reorder quantity, maximum quantity, lot-for-lot and order-based reordering. The correct policy depends on the nature of each item, its usage pattern and its lead time characteristics.
Common Challenge
"We carry too much stock of some materials and run out of others." Business Central's planning worksheet uses actual demand data from production orders and sales orders to calculate optimal replenishment quantities and timing, reducing both overstocking and stockouts.
Common Challenge
"We cannot trace a finished product back to its raw material batches." Business Central's item tracking functionality links lot numbers through every stage of production, creating a complete genealogy from receipt to despatch.
Compliance-ready manufacturing records
For manufacturers operating in regulated industries or those with demanding customer quality requirements, Business Central provides the foundation for comprehensive quality management. Lot tracking creates an immutable chain of custody from raw material receipt through production to finished goods despatch.
Certificate of conformity documents can be attached directly to item records and lot numbers. Non-conformance tracking enables your quality team to record and investigate quality issues with full traceability back to the materials, operations and operators involved. While Business Central is not a dedicated Quality Management System (QMS), it provides the data backbone that supports your quality processes.
For manufacturers who require ISO 9001, ISO 14001 or industry-specific certifications, the audit trail within Business Central supports compliance by providing timestamped, traceable records of all transactions, changes and approvals.
Further Manufacturing Configuration
For production managers and technical evaluators who want to understand the platform in more detail.
Business Central supports multi-level BOMs where a finished product's BOM references sub-assemblies that have their own BOMs. The system explodes these structures automatically when calculating material requirements. BOM versions allow you to maintain multiple versions of a product's structure, with effective dates controlling which version is active. This is essential for engineering change management where new materials or process changes need to be introduced on a specific date without disrupting current production.
Phantom BOMs represent sub-assemblies that are not physically stocked as separate items. When a production order is created for a finished product with phantom BOM levels, the materials from the phantom level are pulled directly into the top-level production order, simplifying shop floor operations while maintaining accurate engineering documentation.
Routings define the sequence of operations for manufacturing an item. Each operation specifies the work centre or machine centre, setup time per batch, run time per unit, wait time and move time. Business Central uses this data for both capacity planning and cost calculation. Forward and backward scheduling options allow you to schedule from the required delivery date backward to determine the latest start date, or from a specified start date forward to determine the earliest completion date.
Subcontracting operations are included in routings where specific processes are performed by external suppliers. The system generates purchase orders for subcontract operations and links them directly to the production order, ensuring that external processing costs are captured accurately.
The planning worksheet in Business Central runs MRP calculations that consider all demand (sales orders, production orders, transfer orders, demand forecasts) and all supply (purchase orders, production orders, inventory) to calculate net requirements. The system respects lead times, safety stock levels, lot sizes, order multiples and dampener periods to produce realistic and executable planning suggestions. Demand forecasts can be entered for items or item groups to drive forward-looking planning, ensuring procurement and production schedules account for anticipated demand rather than reacting solely to confirmed orders.
Action messages tell planners what to do: create new orders, reschedule existing orders, change quantities or cancel orders that are no longer needed. This is significantly more powerful than manual spreadsheet planning because it considers the entire demand and supply picture across all items simultaneously.
For manufacturers with international operations, Business Central supports multi-entity configurations where each manufacturing site operates as a separate company within the same environment. Tres Tria deploys a standardised BC configuration across territories with local adaptations, coordinating the entire multi-territory rollout from a single project management structure.
Key capabilities for international manufacturing include:
- Multi-currency procurement – purchase raw materials in supplier currencies while maintaining your reporting currency for consolidated financial statements
- Multi-entity consolidation – intercompany transactions automate the transfer of goods between manufacturing entities, with automatic generation of corresponding purchase and sales orders and elimination entries for group reporting
- Country-specific VAT and Intrastat – each entity uses its local VAT scheme, Intrastat reporting and customs declarations, configured correctly for the jurisdiction
- DACH and Nordic manufacturing localisation – Tres Tria has delivered manufacturing implementations across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden and Norway, with full local compliance and statutory reporting
Our Enterprise tier, starting at £50,000, is specifically designed for international and complex multi-entity manufacturing operations.
Why manufacturers choose Tres Tria
Manufacturing implementations demand a partner who understands production environments, not merely the software. Our consultants have delivered Business Central to discrete manufacturers, process manufacturers, make-to-order producers and mixed-mode operations across the UK since 2004.
- Manufacturing-specific discovery workshops covering BOMs, routings and costing methodology
- Pre-built configuration templates for common manufacturing scenarios
- Data migration expertise for BOM and routing data from legacy systems including Sage, NAV and Great Plains
- Astral 365 extensions on Microsoft AppSource for recurring billing, payments and reporting
- Published starting price of £50,000 for Premium implementations
- Support Minutes model with small changes potentially live within an hour
- International deployment capability for multi-site manufacturing operations
"They understood our manufacturing processes from the first conversation. The BOM migration was the part we were most worried about, and they handled it without a single error. Our production planning is now based on real data rather than guesswork."
"Month-end close went from 12 working days to 7. The production variances are now calculated automatically, so the finance team can focus on analysis rather than data gathering."
Ready to Modernise Your Manufacturing Operations?
Speak with a Business Central specialist who understands manufacturing. We will show you how the platform handles production planning, costing and inventory for manufacturers like you.