Olof Simren - Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Blog

Business Central Case Study: Engineer-to-Order Manufacturing at Zook

I’m excited to share another case study today—this time featuring ZOOK, a manufacturer of rupture disks and pressure-safety devices. If you’re in manufacturing, especially if your business involves any level of engineer-to-order or custom production, this one’s worth your time. This isn’t a story about a company that deployed Business Central out of the box and called it a day. It’s about a manufacturer with genuinely complex requirements who found a way to make Dynamics work for them—first on NAV, and now on their way to Business Central. What Makes ZOOK Different ZOOK doesn’t make thousands of identical widgets. They […]

By Olof Simren October 26, 2026 Manufacturing, Miscellaneous No Comments

Mobile Solutions for Business Central: Why the Native App Is All You Need

I’ve been watching companies buy expensive third-party mobile applications for Business Central for years now, and I keep asking myself: why? I get it—old habits die hard. For decades, if you wanted warehouse staff scanning barcodes or shop floor workers capturing production data on a tablet, you had to buy something from an ISV. That’s just how it was. But somewhere around Business Central version 23, that stopped being true. Microsoft gave us native barcode scanning, tablet support, and AL extensibility in the standard mobile app—and most people are still acting like it’s 2015. I just came back from the […]

By Olof Simren October 19, 2026 Development, Manufacturing, Miscellaneous, Warehouse No Comments

Business Central Case Study: How World Emblem Automated High-Volume Manufacturing Processes

I’m excited to share a case study that really captures what I love about working with Business Central in high-volume manufacturing environments. World Emblem has been a Naviona client since 2017, and watching them grow from Dynamics NAV through multiple Business Central upgrades while quadrupling their revenue has taught me a lot about what it takes to scale an ERP system alongside a fast-moving business. The case study attached to this post tells their story, but I wanted to add some context about why their approach worked and what other BC users can learn from it. Because the real story […]

By Olof Simren October 9, 2026 Development, Manufacturing, Miscellaneous 1 Comment

Allow Posting Date Formula

It’s the first of the month, and people that are supporting Business Central or any of the former versions such as Navision or Dynamics NAV will tell you that the first of the month is when there is always someone that tries to post a transaction and panics because they get an error message saying something like Posting Date is not within your range of allowed posting dates in Gen. Journal Line Journal Template Name=’GENERAL’,Journal Batch Name=’DAILY’,Line No.=’10000′. Its been like since I started working with this software 24 years ago. There have been many ways to work around this, […]

By Olof Simren September 1, 2026 Finance, General, Miscellaneous 1 Comment

Approval Workflows in Planning Worksheet

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 […]

By Olof Simren July 13, 2026 Miscellaneous No Comments

ERP JumpStart: A Better Way to Get Started with Business Central

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 […]

By Olof Simren June 26, 2026 Finance, General, Miscellaneous No Comments

Quality Management in Business Central Version 28

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 […]

By Olof Simren April 8, 2026 Inventory, Manufacturing, Miscellaneous, Purchase No Comments

Business Central Configuration Audit using Vibe Coding

You can install this extension for Free from the AppSource here: Naviona Configuration Audit And here is my story behind this extension: 20+ years ago I was working at Tectura in Copenhagen, it was a fairly big office with something like 120 employees. About one third were Navision consultants, one third were Axapta consultants and one third was a mix of infrastructure, BI, etc. In the Axapta department there was a person named Alan. Alan was a very positive and likable person, his ‘claim to fame’ was that he had created some kind of report that could be run against […]

By Olof Simren February 13, 2026 Development, General 3 Comments

Copilot in Planning Parameter Worksheet

The development of the Copilot Inventory Queries extension that I described in my previous blog posts has inspired me to apply the same concept of using Copilot (or actually Azure OpenAI) to enhance the other extensions that we use. This blog post is an example of an application that hopefully can inspire others to apply AI to their Business Central extensions. In this case we have an extension called Planning Parameter Worksheet that allows Business Central users to set up rules and have the system suggest the planning parameters to use for each Item or Stockkeeping Unit. This is a […]

By Olof Simren October 31, 2025 Development, Inventory No Comments

Copilot in Planning Worksheet

This is a continuation of my last post where I described the Copilot Inventory Queries extension that I developed (available for free in AppSource). I have now taken that concept and applied it to the Planning Worksheet in Business Central. With this you get a Copilot user interface that can help explain the suggestions created by the material planning (MRP). I created this in a way that the AI model includes all the suggestions for the same item number, location and variant code for each query. So, if the plan makes multiple suggestions for the same item, you have the […]

By Olof Simren October 16, 2025 Development, Manufacturing 3 Comments

Olof Simren - Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central Blog

Business Central Case Study: Engineer-to-Order Manufacturing at Zook

Mobile Solutions for Business Central: Why the Native App Is All You Need

Business Central Case Study: How World Emblem Automated High-Volume Manufacturing Processes

Allow Posting Date Formula

Approval Workflows in Planning Worksheet

ERP JumpStart: A Better Way to Get Started with Business Central

Quality Management in Business Central Version 28

Business Central Configuration Audit using Vibe Coding

Copilot in Planning Parameter Worksheet

Copilot in Planning Worksheet

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