Managing Post Go Live Challenges With Microsoft Business Central

Emma: Welcome back to the Deep Dive. Today we are going to unpack a scenario that I think is going to sound painfully familiar to a lot of you listening. I call it the Post Go Live hangover.

Ryan: That is a very vivid and unfortunately a very accurate way to put it.

Emma: It’s real, isn’t it? I mean, picture this. You have just survived the massive Herculean undertaking of implementing a new ERP system. Specifically, we’re talking about Microsoft Business Central today. But honestly, the feeling is universal.

Ryan: Oh, absolutely. Whether it’s SAP, Oracle, netsuite, doesn’t matter, right?

Emma: So you’ve done the training, you’ve migrated the dirty data, which is just a nightmare in itself. You’ve cut the ribbon, there’s cake in the break room, and you are expecting nirvana. You’re expecting this software to run every single aspect of your business seamlessly, you know, right out of the box.

Ryan: Ideally, yes, that is the promise that sold in the boardroom during the sales pitch.

Emma: But then reality hits. It’s a Tuesday morning, maybe three weeks later. And it’s not that the system is broken, the system is working. It’s just that things feel sticky, there is friction, and you find yourself sitting at your desk thinking, wait, why do I have to click five times just to see when this order is shipping? Or why am I still using a spreadsheet to plan my production schedule if I have this expensive software I just spent six months installing?

Ryan: You are describing what I like to call the ERP Paradox.

Emma: The ERP Paradox. Okay, unpack that. For me.

Ryan: It’s the fundamental tension between standard and reality. And it’s a hard thing for people to wrap their heads around when they’ve just signed a check with a lot of a lot of zeros on it.

Emma: Sure.

Ryan: We need to start by setting the stage here. Business Central is a foundation. It handles your general ledger, your inventory, debits and credits, your sales and purchasing logic. It handles all of that perfectly well. It creates the structure. It’s sort of like the concrete slab of the house.

Emma: Okay?

Ryan: But no software can anticipate every single operational edge case of every single business in the world.

Emma: Because a manufacturer of high end aerospace bicycle parts operates completely differently than a distributor of, say, frozen fish.

Ryan: Precisely. The frozen fish guy cares about expiration dates and temperature. The bicycle guy cares about precision machining time. So the software gives you the standard process, but your real world operation, that’s.

Emma: Where it gets complicated.

Ryan: That usually lives in the margins. Yeah, it lives in the specific way your warehouse manager likes to scan boxes, or the specific way your planner needs to see dates to make a decision. And that gap, the distance between the standard way the software thinks and the real way your people work, that is where that friction comes from.

Emma: And usually the knee jerk answer to that friction is customization, which is just a fancy word for more money, more time, and crucially, more risk.

Ryan: Usually, yes. You hire a developer, you write a spec, they write code to bridge that gap. It takes weeks, it breaks when you upgrade. It’s a whole thing. But today we are looking at a different route. We’re analyzing a stack of solutions that form an ecosystem of free apps.

Emma: And I have to pause you right there, because free, especially in the world of enterprise software, usually triggers my alarm bells. Usually free means it’s a trap. It means free for 10 days and then we lock your data. Or free, but it barely works. Or free because we are selling your data to a third party.

Ryan: A very healthy skepticism. You should absolutely have your guard up. But in the business central world, specifically within Microsoft’s App Source ecosystem, there is a legitimate tier of tools that are designed to extend the system. Without that commercial hook, the nine apps we are analyzing today, they aren’t about tricking you into a subscription. They’re designed to bridge those specific gaps. We talked about that distance between standard features and actual daily operations without adding, you know, architectural complexity or licensing costs.

Emma: So what’s the catch then? Why would a developer build something for free? Are they just altruistic?

Ryan: Sometimes. But usually it’s about reputation and trust building. In the Microsoft channel, you have what are called independent software vendors or ISVs. By providing a really solid free utility that solves a common headache, they get their foot in the door. If you love their free shipping tool, maybe three years from now you’ll look at their paid advanced warehousing module. But for the purpose of our discussion today, these tools stand alone. You don’t have to buy anything else.

Emma: So the mission today is how do we maximize the investment we’ve already made without spending another dime?

Ryan: Exactly. It’s not about criticizing business central. It’s about polishing the rough edges where the standard user interface falls a little short of human intuition.

Emma: I love that framing. Okay, let’s dive into the first source of friction. And this is a big one for anyone in manufacturing or assembly. The outline calls this visibility without complexity, but really it’s about the limitations of the human brain. When you’re just looking at data.

Ryan: Right. It’s the wall of dates problem.

Emma: So out of the box, Business Central has all your production orders. It knows what needs to be made. It knows the routing, it knows the due dates, it has the data. But if I’m a production manager walking onto the floor with a cup of coffee, how am I seeing that data?

Ryan: You’re likely seeing it in a list. Just rows and rows of text and dates. Production order 101 starts on the 12th. Production order 102 starts on the 14th. It’s static data in a grid, which.

Emma: Is fine for a database. SQL loves lists, but for a human trying to spot a conflict, it’s terrible.

Ryan: Yeah. It is incredibly difficult to spot a bottleneck in a list of dates. If you have three jobs scheduled for the same machine at the same time. A list doesn’t screen problem at you. You have to carefully read every single row. You have to mentally cross reference those rows. That is a high cognitive load.

Emma: Right.

Ryan: You, you are effectively asking your production manager to run a simulation in their head every time they look at the screen.

Emma: And that’s when they print the list out. Walk over to a whiteboard and start drawing boxes.

Ryan: Exactly. They create a shadow system because the digital system isn’t giving them the visual feedback they need.

Emma: So enter the first app on our list, the Graphical Scheduler.

Ryan: This is a perfect example of solving a visibility gap without over engineering. The Graphical Scheduler takes those lists of release production orders and well, it visualizes them on a timeline. It’s a Gantt chart view integrated directly.

Emma: Into the erp, which seems so basic. I mean, Gantt charts have been around for a hundred years. Why is this such a game changer in this context?

Ryan: Because it changes the user experience from reading to seeing. You can actually see the blocks of time. You can see the white space where a machine is sitting idle. You can see the overlaps where two blocks are stacked on top of each other, indicating a conflict. And crucially, it allows for interaction.

Emma: The drag and drop feature, Right.

Ryan: Think about the standard system. If you want to move a production bait because the material is late, what do you do?

Emma: You have to open the production order card, find the line.

Ryan: You open the card, find the line, change the starting date, hope the ending date updates correctly, then you save it. It’s purely administrative friction with this tool. You just click the block on the timeline and drag it from Tuesday to Thursday. Done. The system updates the underlying tables in the background.

Emma: That’s the difference between a tool that fights you and a tool that helps You. But I want to clarify something because scheduler is a loaded word in manufacturing. Is this an optimization engine? Is there some AI in the background telling me the mathematically perfect way to run my shop?

Ryan: No. And that is a very, very important distinction to make. This is not an advanced planning and scheduling APS engine. It is not calculating infinite capacity. It isn’t looking at your changeover saying, hey, if you run the blue paint before the red paint, you save 20 minutes.

Emma: Why is that a good thing? Usually we want the AI optimization, don’t we?

Ryan: Do we? I mean, APS engines are notoriously difficult to implement. They require pristine data. If your run rates are off by 10% or your setup times aren’t perfectly documented, the optimization engine produces garbage. It’s the garbage in, garbage out rule on steroids. The graphical scheduler takes a different approach. It assumes the human knows how to schedule. They just need to see the schedule.

Emma: It’s a tool for the human, not a replacement for the human.

Ryan: Exactly. Sometimes you don’t need a Ferrari, you just need a clean pair of glasses. An optimization engine is a six month project with consultants. This is plug and play. It solves the immediate problem. I can’t see what’s happening.

Emma: And it must facilitate communication. I imagine this stops a lot of the arguments between sales and production.

Ryan: Oh, it changes the nature of the conversation completely. If I’m on the sales team and I call down to the floor asking, can we squeeze this rush order in? The production manager isn’t guessing. They look at the screen, they see a gap on the assembly one line, they say yes. Or they see a solid wall of blocks and say no. It’s objective.

Emma: It reduces the interpretation gap between the office and the shop floor. Okay, so moving from the shop floor to the back office. Let’s talk about the planners, the people responsible for making sure we actually have the staff stuff to make the stuff.

Ryan: The unsung heroes of the supply chain. If they do their job right, nobody even notices. If they mess up, the entire factory stops.

Emma: The outline calls this theme two Better planning without spreadsheets. And that really hits home because I feel like Excel dependence is the dirty secret of every major company. We spend millions on ERPs, but the actual decisions happen in Excel.

Ryan: It is rampant. And we have to ask why? Why do planners take data out of a sophisticated ERP like Business Central and just dump it into a static spreadsheet? It’s not because they love Excel. It’s because Excel gives them something the ERP often doesn’t. The control, visibility control and Visibility, it’s the view failure. It’s what I call the Alt tab struggle. In the standard system to get a full picture of an item, a planner might have to look at the demand page to see sales orders. Then they Alt tab to the vendor card, see lead times. Then they Alt tab to the inventory availability by location page to see if they’re a stock in a different warehouse.

Emma: They’re stitching it all together in their head.

Ryan: They are stitching together a picture of reality from five different screens.

Emma: So Excel is just a way to put all those columns next to each other so they can actually think.

Ryan: Exactly. Excel lets them build the God view, but the moment that data is in Excel, it is dead.

Emma: Dead.

Ryan: It’s disconnected. It’s a snapshot of reality from 8.00am If a massive sales order comes in at 900am the spreadsheet doesn’t know.

Emma: Yeah.

Ryan: If a shipment is delayed at 10am, the spreadsheet doesn’t know. So you are making purchasing decisions based on stale information.

Emma: Okay. Enter the Enhanced Planning worksheet.

Ryan: This app is designed to stop the Alt tab madness. It’s effectively that godview we were just talking about, but built inside the erp.

Emma: So what does it actually look like? What’s different?

Ryan: It creates a consolidated workspace. It brings the supply and the demand context into a single grid. So instead of just seeing Buy a hundred widgets, which is what the standard requisition worksheet might tell you, you see the context.

Emma: The why?

Ryan: The why buy a hundred widgets? Because sales order 505 needs them. And by the way, you usually buy these from vendor A, but vendor has a better lead time right now. And, oh, you also have 20 sitting in the east coast warehouse, all on one line, all accessible in one view. And crucially, you can take action from there.

Emma: So you don’t have to go back to the purchase order screen to actually execute the buy.

Ryan: No, you check the boxes, you click process and it generates the purchase orders or the transfer orders directly from that screen.

Emma: So it brings the sort of usability of Excel back inside the guardrails of.

Ryan: The erp, which means your data stays live. It reduces manual reconciliation. You aren’t copy pasting PO numbers back into the system. The truth stays inside the system and.

Emma: Connected to this is the enhanced forecasting worksheet. Because if planning is hard, forecasting is usually a nightmare of like gut feelings and sticky notes.

Ryan: Or again, massive spreadsheets with complex macros that only one person in the company, usually Bob in the corner office, understands the Bus factor.

Emma: If Bob gets hit by a bus, nobody knows how to order inventory.

Ryan: Exactly. Native Business Central has forecasting, but it can be a bit rigid. It often requires you to forecast at a very high level, or it doesn’t.

Emma: Easily account for location differences and location matters. Selling winter coats in Florida is completely different than selling them in Maine.

Ryan: Exactly. If you just forecast winter coats globally, you’re going to have a massive surplus in Miami and a shortage in Bangor. This app allows you to filter by item and by location, which is huge. It allows you to run a forecast based on historical usage and most importantly, have that forecast respect your existing planning rules.

Emma: So it doesn’t just say, you sold 10 last year, so buy 10. It looks at your minimum order quantities, your safety stock levels.

Ryan: Right. It feeds directly into the planning engine we just talked about. It closes the loop. You get better demand signals coming in, which leads to better purchasing decisions going out, and you retire. Another disconnected spreadsheet.

Emma: I’m really seeing a pattern here. The free aspect is great, but the real value is integration. It’s about keeping the workflow inside one single perimeter.

Ryan: That is the core philosophy. Every time you leave the system, whether it’s to excel to a piece of paper or to a web portal, you introduce friction and you introduce the potential for error. These apps are about sealing those leaks.

Emma: Speaking of friction, let’s talk about speed. Theme 3 Operational speed and data Movement.

Ryan: Okay, we’re going into the engine room for a moment. This is for the admins and the IT teams listening.

Emma: The outline mentions the import export power tool. Now, I admit import export doesn’t sound like the sexiest topic for a deep dive. It sounds like plumbing.

Ryan: It is plumbing. But when the toilet is backed up, plumbing is the only thing you care about. Imagine you are a system administrator. It’s 5. 00pm on a Friday. Marketing just sent you a spreadsheet with updated pricing for 5,000 items that needs to be live by Monday morning for the new campaign.

Emma: Okay, Instant panic mode. Why is that hard? Can’t you just upload it?

Ryan: In standard Business Central, you use something called configuration packages. It’s a powerful tool, don’t get me wrong. But it can be slow. It validates every single record one by one. It triggers logic for every line. It can hang. It can timeout. And if it fails on record 4,999 because of a typo, you might have to start the whole thing over.

Emma: It is stress inducing and the power tool changes that.

Ryan: It’s built for speed and stability. It uses a different method to Inject data, allowing for high volume imports and exports much, much faster. But the aha moment for me isn’t just the speed, it’s the reusability.

Emma: Explain that. What do you mean by reusability?

Ryan: You can save your configurations as templates. So if you have a routine task, say every month you need to update pricing, or every week you need to import tracking numbers from a third party logistics provider, you don’t have to map the fields from scratch. Every time you just load the config, you drop the file and you go.

Emma: It’s automation for the admin and it.

Ryan: Has built in validation too. So it tells you what’s wrong. Hey, this item number doesn’t exist before it tries to crash your database.

Emma: So for the technical teams listening, this is really a quality of life upgrade.

Ryan: It’s a massive one. Faster testing, cleaner go lives. It removed the friction from the implementation and support process itself.

Emma: Okay, let’s flip from data speed to physical speed. The outline pivots to the warehouse floor with Ordership Express.

Ryan: This brings us back to that swivel chair problem we mentioned earlier. This is one of the most common inefficiencies in small to mid sized warehouses.

Emma: Picture the scene for us. You’ve picked the order, you’ve packed the box, you are standing at the packing station. Now, what happens next?

Ryan: In a non integrated environment, the packer has to stop. They walk over to a computer, they minimize Business Central. They open a web browser, they log into the UPS or FedEx portal. They type in the customer’s name, address, city, state, zip code, they type in the weight, then they hit print and.

Emma: Then they have to grab the tracking.

Ryan: Number and they swivel their chair back to Business Central. They find the order again. They type or paste that tracking number into a field so the customer service team can see it. Then they mark the order as shipped.

Emma: That sounds absolutely exhausting just listening to it.

Ryan: It is the definition of inefficiency and it’s a massive error trap. You type suite 100 instead of suite 101 in the carrier portal. The ERP doesn’t know the package gets lost and you have no record of why.

Emma: So Ordership Express fixes this by bringing the carrier inside the system.

Ryan: Precisely. It integrates parcel shipping directly into the Business Central interface. You’re on the shipping screen, you click a button, it connects to the carrier API. It rate shops to find the best price, which saves hard dollars, not just time.

Emma: Now that’s a nice feature.

Ryan: And it generates the label and prints it on your zebra printer. And the tracking number automatically writes back to the sales order and the posted shipment.

Emma: No swiveling.

Ryan: No swiveling, no typing addresses. And just consider the scale of that if that saves you two minutes per box.

Emma: Two minutes doesn’t sound like a lot.

Ryan: But do the math. If you ship 50 boxes a day, that is 100 minutes. That’s nearly two hours of labor every single day over a year. That’s hundreds of hours for a free app.

Emma: That is the kind of math that gets a CFO’s attention. And again, I have to ask, is this just for one carrier or.

Ryan: It usually supports the majors. UPS, FedEx, USPS via scamps.com it’s designed for the high volume parcel shipper.

Emma: Moving deeper into the warehouse. Now let’s talk about the people picking those boxes. Theme four is the warehouse floor.

Ryan: This is a really interesting segment of the market. You have this dichotomy in warehousing. At the top end you have the Amazons of the world. They use massive million dollar warehouse management systems. A wms. Everything is automated. Robots are moving shelves.

Emma: And at the bottom end, paper.

Ryan: The pick list.

Emma: The clipboard brigade.

Ryan: Exactly. But there is a huge mid market. The companies that have a warehouse, they have inventory. They want accuracy. But they cannot justify a six month implementation project and $100,000 in licensing for a top tier WMS.

Emma: They are stuck in the middle. Too big for paper, but too small for robots.

Ryan: And sticking with paper is dangerous. If you are using paper pick sheets, your inventory accuracy is dependent on someone reading a part number correctly, walking to a bin, picking it, checking it off with a pen, and then hours later, someone else typing that confirmation into the computer.

Emma: So your inventory in the system is always lagging behind reality.

Ryan: It is laggy and it is prone to human error. If the picker grabs the red widget instead of the dark red widget, the paper doesn’t beep at them. The customer gets the wrong thing.

Emma: So the app here is WMS Express.

Ryan: The solution for the scanning gap. It provides mobile scanning for the core functions, receiving, picking, shipping and inventory counts.

Emma: So I can use a handheld scanner, you know, like the ones I see at the grocery store.

Ryan: Yes, an Android device with a barcode scanner built in. You scan the item, you scan the bin. If you scan the wrong item, the device buzzes and says wrong item.

Emma: That simple validation prevents the shipping error before it even happens.

Ryan: It moves the validation to the point of action. But the technical magic here is actually how it connects.

Emma: How does it talk to business central? Usually handhelds require a server middleware complex synchronization. I mean, it’s a whole IT project.

Ryan: That’s the beauty of this modern extension model. No middleware. It’s a direct connection to the cloud erp. It works with the existing business central warehouse setup. So if you were using basic warehousing with just bins or advanced warehousing with directed picks and putaways, in B.C. terms, it just plugs right in.

Emma: That feels like a huge strategic value. It’s a very low risk entry into scanning.

Ryan: It is. You get the immediate accuracy gains of barcode scanning without the heavy lift. And here is that free philosophy again. It lets you prove the concept.

Emma: What do you mean by that?

Ryan: Many companies are terrified of moving to scanning. They think their team won’t adopt it. They think their processes are too messy. With a free tool, you can buy three scanners, install the app and just try it for a month. If it works great, you’ve solved the problem for free. If you outgrow it. If you need fancy cross docking or wave planning, sure, go buy the big WMS. But for I’d say 80% of businesses, WMS Express covers the core. Make sure we ship the right product.

Emma: It’s the crawl, walk, run approach.

Ryan: Exactly. Don’t try to sprint with a million dollar system if you haven’t even crawled with basic scanning yet.

Emma: Okay, I want to transition to theme 5 context compliance and Paper trails. This is about all the stuff that surrounds the transaction.

Ryan: The metadata of business. The stuff that isn’t just a number in a field.

Emma: We’ve all been there. You’re looking at a sales order in the system, but the customer sent a specific email with instructions. Or there’s a signed PDF of the contract or a drawing of the part. Where is that file?

Ryan: Usually it’s on a salesperson’s desktop or it’s buried in an Outlook folder called Important, which is the black hole of information.

Emma: And the person processing the order in the warehouse has no idea it even exists.

Ryan: That is the problem of disconnected documents. The context is lost. The DockXtender app addresses this with a feature that honestly feels like it should have been there all along. Drag and drop attachments.

Emma: Wait, can’t you attach things in standard Business Central? I thought that was a base feature.

Ryan: You can, but it’s click heavy. You have to open the attachments pane, click upload, browse your file system, select the file. It’s friction. And because it’s friction, people don’t do it. Doc Stender makes it web native. You just drag the PDF from your email and drop it right onto the sales order. Boom, it’s there.

Emma: And it stays there. Linked to the record.

Ryan: It links it to the record. So six months from now, when there’s a dispute about what was ordered, you open the order in B.C. and the original customer P.O. is right there in the fact box.

Emma: It preserves the transactional context. It creates a single source of truth, not just for the data, but for the documentation that supports that data.

Ryan: Simple but vital. It eliminates the forensic email search that happens every single time an audit occurs.

Emma: Speaking of audits, here’s a curveball. Safety. I don’t usually associate safety with erp.

Ryan: No, it is often the forgotten module. But if you are in manufacturing or warehousing, safety compliance is huge. OSHA compliance. Incident tracking.

Emma: It’s a legal requirement and usually tracked in. Let me guess. A red binder on a shelf, A.

Ryan: Dusty red binder on a shelf. Or a spreadsheet called accidents2024xlsx on a shared drive that nobody remembers the password to.

Emma: Right. And the problem is when an auditor comes in or you need to do a safety review, scrambling to find that data is a complete nightmare.

Ryan: And it’s disconnected from operations. If a specific machine is causing injuries or a specific shift is having more accidents, you want to know that in the context of your production data.

Emma: So the Safety Logbook app brings us into bc.

Ryan: It creates structured incident records inside the erp. You can track the employee involved, the type of injury, the severity, the follow up actions required. All of it.

Emma: I’m going to play devil’s advocate here. Why put that in the erp? Why not put it in HR software?

Ryan: That’s a valid question. HR software tracks the person, but the ERP tracks the operation. The operational leaders, the plant managers, the supervisors, they are living in business central all day. They aren’t logging into the HR portal every day. By having the safety log in BC, it becomes part of the operational dashboard. You can link an incident to a specific machine or a work center so.

Emma: You can actually see, hey, machine four has had three hand injuries this month. Maybe we need a new guard on that machine.

Ryan: Exactly. It turns safety data into operational intelligence. And practically speaking, it digitizes the red binder so it’s secure and searchable.

Emma: Okay, final app. And this loops all the way back to our discussion on scanning. We talked about how great WMS Express is for scanning barcodes, but you have to have barcodes to scan.

Ryan: The classic chicken and egg problem. I’ve seen this happen so many times. A company buys scanners, they roll out the software. And then they realize their vendors send boxes with no labels or their own production output. The sub assemblies they make don’t have labels.

Emma: So you have a scanner and nothing to scan. Does gizn essential not just spit out barcodes natively?

Ryan: It’s surprisingly difficult. Business Central can store the barcode number, the gtin or the upc, but rendering that into a visual barcode on a piece of paper, that usually requires a developer. You have to install barcode fonts, you have to modify the report, layout the RDL code and ensure it scales correctly.

Emma: It’s custom report layout territory, which means.

Ryan: Billable hours, expensive and time consuming. The barcode Generator Power Tool fixes this. It’s a utility that allows you to add 1D the standard lines and 2D like QR codes to to your documents, invoices, picks, production orders, you name it all using a simple configuration.

Emma: And it doesn’t mess with the data structure.

Ryan: No changes to core data. It’s just a rendering engine. But think about the downstream impact. If you can print a packing slip that has a barcode on it, your customer can scan it when they receive it.

Emma: Or if you print a production traveler, that piece of paper that follows the part down the line and it has a barcode, your shop floor team can scan it to log time or consumption.

Ryan: It enables the digital flow we talked about earlier. You can’t have a digital automated warehouse if you can’t bridge the gap between the physical item and the digital record. The barcode is that bridge. This tool just makes building that bridge free.

Emma: So we’ve covered nine apps, from visualizing schedules to printing barcodes, to logging safety incidents. That is a lot of ground.

Ryan: It is. But do you see the common thread running through all of them?

Emma: They all seem to attack the last mile problem.

Ryan: Exactly. They focus on the edges of the erp, the core of business central. The ledgers, the tax logic, that’s solid. But the edges, where the human hand touches the keyboard or the scanner beeps or the decision is made, that is.

Emma: Where the friction lives and where the frustration lives.

Ryan: These apps are all about smoothing out those edges.

Emma: So let’s wrap this up with a synthesis of this free philosophy. Why does this matter to you, the listener? Why should you care about free apps rather than just paying a partner to fix matters?

Ryan: Because of the concept of risk. Usually to solve these problems, I need a scheduler or I need scanning. You have to take a risk. You have to sign a contract, you have to buy a license, you have to pay a consultant to scope it out.

Emma: And if it doesn’t work, you’ve lost.

Ryan: Money, you’ve lost time, and you’ve lost face with your team.

Emma: Oh, management bought another tool. That sucks. We’ve all heard that. But with these no cost equals no pressure. These apps are easy to deploy, and critically, they are easy to remove. If you install the graphical scheduler and your production manager hates it, uninstall it, you’ve lost nothing but 20 minutes of your time.

Ryan: It’s the ultimate try before you buy. Except you never actually have to buy. It allows you to test drive functionality. It allows you to prove the concept to your team. Hey, would scanning work for us? Download WMS Express and find out if it works. Great. You’ve solved the problem for free. If you outgrow it, you now know exactly what you need in a paid solution because you’ve already defined the process.

Emma: It empowers the user to take ownership of the system. You don’t have to wait for a budget committee to approve a $10,000 add on just to print a shipping label.

Ryan: Precisely. It democratizes the improvement process. It moves the power from the check signers to the problem solvers.

Emma: So here is the final thought for you. Listening if your team is struggling with a specific process in Business Central if they are complaining about dates in lists, or drowning in spreadsheets, or manually typing tracking numbers, stop and ask yourself a question.

Ryan: Is the solution really a complex, expensive customization? Or is the friction coming from a common edge case that has already been solved by someone else?

Emma: I’d encourage you to go explore the free app library. Don’t look at it as shopping. Look at it as an evaluation of possibilities.

Ryan: See what is possible when the barrier to entry is removed. You might realize that the system you have is far more capable than you thought. It just needed a small extension to unlock it.

Emma: You might find that the solution to your biggest headache is just a download away. And that is a very powerful position to be in indeed. Thanks for diving deep with us today. Go check out the ecosystem and we’ll see you on the next one.