8 Free Business Central Apps for Warehouse, Shipping, Production, and Safety

Introduction

Good afternoon, everyone. This is Mark, and today we’re going to talk about some of the free applications available from Insight Works for Business Central.

Here’s the plan for today: a little bit about who we are, then a review of the broader set of solutions we have available, and then a focus on the free applications. Most of our time will be in the demo, looking at the software and how it works, but we’ll spend a little time on the PowerPoint first.

If you have questions as we go, enter them in the question box in the GoToWebinar panel. I’ll do my best to answer them during the session or at the end.

About Insight Works

If you don’t know who we are, we’ve been working in the Business Central space for just over 10 years, and almost everything we do is through our reseller partners. Your Business Central partner is likely one of our resellers, and they can help you with questions about pricing and similar topics. You can also get in touch with us through our website, and we’ll work with your partner to help you out.

Our applications focus on manufacturing, distribution, and retail. Any time you’re touching physical goods, that’s likely where we come in, with things like warehouse management, fulfillment, and production scheduling. We have thousands of customers using these solutions every day, and tens of thousands of people using the free solutions we’ll cover today.

Apps for Distribution and Warehousing

Before we get into the free solutions, let’s look at the broader set of applications. We have over 30 applications, and these are the key ones for warehousing, distribution, and retail. Some of them are free as well.

Planning and Forecasting

Distribution starts with planning: purchase planning, forecasting, and production planning if you’re in production. The Enhanced Planning Pack is a subscription product with eight or nine modules, but two of those modules, the Enhanced Planning Worksheet and the Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet, are free. If you install the Enhanced Planning Pack and the 30-day trial expires, you still have access to those two free tools.

Order Fulfillment Worksheet

The Order Fulfillment Worksheet is for getting stuff out the door. If you’re in a higher volume environment or you have e-commerce, it’s really a must-have. It automates the generation of your pick documents and shipments, either on a time basis or interactively, so you know what you’re supposed to ship today and what you can actually ship today, and it handles back orders. It’s a massive time saver for warehouse operations.

Barcoding in the Warehouse

Once we’ve decided what we need to receive or pick, we send it to the warehouse, and there are two options for barcoding. Warehouse Insight is a subscription product that handles pretty much anything you need in the warehouse, including inventory and production.

WMS Express is the free version. It handles the four key functions in the warehouse: receiving, picking, bin movements, and inventory counts. If that’s all you need, and you just want to add barcoding to Business Central, WMS Express is all you’ll ever need. You plug it in and away you go. It’s limited to five concurrent licenses, and you can buy additional licenses if you need more than five.

Shipping

Once the warehouse has handled the order, it goes out to be shipped, and again there are two options. Dynamic Ship is a subscription product for LTL, full truckload, multi-carrier rate shopping, international shipments, and everything else you need to do for shipping within Business Central.

If you’re only doing domestic parcel shipments, Order Ship Express is free. It plugs into Business Central, and you can generate shipping labels and get tracking information and costs for multiple carriers right within Business Central, without any external software.

Apps for Manufacturing

On the manufacturing side, we start with the Enhanced Planning Pack again, because it covers purchasing and production planning. Then we send that out to be scheduled, and there are two solutions there as well.

Production Scheduling

MxAPS is automated production scheduling. It generates a schedule you can actually execute on the shop floor, looking at labor, material, floor space, or any other constraints you want to throw at it.

Graphical Scheduler is a free tool, and it’s the minimum you’d want in your Business Central environment if you’re doing anything related to production or projects. It lets you visualize your schedule and drag and drop it around, so you can do manual scheduling and see your machine capacities. It’s very configurable. If you have custom tables you want to visualize or drag and drop, you can add them. You also get views for scheduling picks and assigning quality inspections, so it extends beyond production into other areas. You could, for example, set up a chart that shows all your sales orders, when they’re supposed to ship, and who’s assigned to them.

Shop Floor Execution

Once the schedule is set, it goes to the shop floor for execution. You can use Warehouse Insight for production tracking: consumption, output, and staging material. For labor tracking, there’s Shop Floor Insight. It also handles consumption and output, and it does quality inspections using our Quality Inspector module.

Quality Inspector and Microsoft Quality Management

Quality Inspector is a subscription product. Microsoft’s Quality Management module for Business Central is built on Quality Inspector code that Insight Works licensed to Microsoft, with a portion of the functionality removed. So you get a version of that capability from Microsoft at no charge.

If you need the additional functionality Quality Inspector offers that the Microsoft module doesn’t, it’s basically a one-click update, and all the data you’ve set up in the Microsoft module moves over to Quality Inspector. Then you get the extras, such as non-conformance reports (NCRs), formulas, and sampling.

There are a few more modules on the execution side, like Maintenance Manager, and Safety Logbook, which is a free tool we’ll talk about shortly. After execution, the order goes out to be shipped, and that follows the normal warehouse flow: the Order Fulfillment Worksheet tells you when it’s ready to ship and automates the picking and shipment, Warehouse Insight handles the picking, and Dynamic Ship ships it.

One area not shown here is retail. We have a good video on our Counter Sales solution, which works well for retail outlets, B2B, and B2C, and integrates with all of these solutions.

The Free Apps

I’ve already mentioned a number of the free apps. These are the key ones, and there are more available, including add-ons for Warehouse Insight such as fixed asset counting and proof of delivery. The ones listed here you can install directly from Microsoft Marketplace.

All of these are free for the cloud version of Business Central. If you’re running Business Central on-premises, some are available for your on-premises install as well. Others, like Order Ship Express and WMS Express, are cloud only.

Enhanced Planning Worksheet and Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet

The easiest way to get these two is to install the Enhanced Planning Pack. Once the trial expires, you still have access to both. You can also install them from Microsoft Marketplace independently.

In warehousing, the standard requisition worksheet and planning worksheet aren’t designed for that environment, and the Enhanced Planning Worksheet is. In a production environment, it makes your planning life much simpler. The Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet handles sales forecasting, using the Microsoft forecasting service that runs online, and updates the forecast for you.

PrintNode Connector PowerTool

There’s a cloud printing service called PrintNode. You still pay PrintNode for their service, but the connector to it is free. It really simplifies printing, especially if you want to print from handheld devices or print labels automatically. PrintNode is the option we recommend for cloud printing.

Import Export PowerTool

The Import Export PowerTool is more technical. It’s very good for consultants, developers, and support people who need to manage data within the system.

Barcode Generator PowerTool

The Barcode Generator PowerTool lets you add barcodes to reports. All of our reports that include barcodes use it, and we have a set of sample reports you can use or modify. It’s mostly a development tool, but there’s also an end-user tool for generating lists of barcodes for testing or training.

DocXtender

DocXtender is drag-and-drop document management. Business Central has drag-and-drop documents, but DocXtender goes further. You can drop documents onto any page in Business Central that has the documents fact box, and it stores them in SharePoint or in the Business Central database, like standard attachments.

When it stores documents in SharePoint, it builds a structure you can browse without going into Business Central, so people who don’t have Business Central licenses can find documents themselves. And once documents are in SharePoint, you can use SharePoint and Power Automate to build out a fairly comprehensive document management solution, with alerts and workflows. For example, dropping a purchase order onto a sales order could trigger an email or a process that notifies the warehouse.

Order Ship Express

Order Ship Express lets you ship from within Business Central. The big limitation is that it’s for domestic parcel shipments; you can’t do international shipping with it.

WMS Express

WMS Express does the four key things you need in a warehouse, and it’s limited to five concurrent licenses. That means you could have 20 scanners, and if only five are in use at a time, you wouldn’t pay anything for WMS Express. “In use” means talking to Business Central. A scanner that’s sitting open but not communicating with Business Central isn’t in use, so you can easily have 10 scanners out there and use the five free licenses.

Safety Logbook

If you have a health and safety program, you’re probably tracking everything in Excel or something similar. Safety Logbook lets you track any event right in Business Central: injuries, audits, certifications, and anything else related to safety. It’s a nice helper tool for a warehouse or manufacturing environment.

Demo: DocXtender

Now let’s look at the software. We’ll start in Business Central with an existing sales order. This one happens to be a configured product. I didn’t mention it in the PowerPoint, but we also have a full-fledged configurator if you want to build configured products and get the pricing automatically.

Attaching a Purchase Order from Outlook

I’ve entered this order for the customer and emailed it to them, and they’ve sent back a purchase order. Now I want to log that PO against the sales order. I have the email in Outlook, so I drag the PO attachment over and drop it into DocXtender.

As soon as I let go, it stores the document in SharePoint. This can be completely silent. It created a document link, and, as an optional setting, it also created an attachment. That attachment isn’t the PDF stored in Business Central, which is what Business Central does by default when you upload a file. When I click it, it opens the document in SharePoint.

Finding Documents in SharePoint

In SharePoint, the document is there, in a structure that’s easy to navigate. For sales order 1001, here are all the documents attached to that order. People in the shop or engineering who don’t have access to Business Central can still find and open those documents.

Adding the attachment is useful because the links fact box often isn’t visible, and you can manage the attachment just like a normal one, even though it’s stored in SharePoint. I could also drag in the entire email, or a file from my hard drive. And storing in SharePoint is an option: if you’d rather keep everything in Business Central, you set it to store in Business Central instead.

Demo: Printing and Barcodes

Next, I’ll print a pick instruction. The Order Fulfillment Worksheet is what tells you whether you can ship the order. If the items were in stock and ready to pick, it would create the pick document for the warehouse automatically, maybe sending it to a warehouse printer or to handheld devices.

To print manually, notice the printer is already selected. If I hit Print, it goes straight to that printer. In standard Business Central, if that isn’t set, it defaults to handling by the browser, so you get a print preview and then have to print from the browser. This can also be completely non-interactive: the report goes to the printer and I don’t have to touch anything.

In the preview, you can see a Data Matrix barcode on the report. That’s the Barcode Generator PowerTool. It can be any barcode format, and you can add barcodes anywhere you like on any report. The Barcode Generator PowerTool also includes a barcode list tool, where I can list whatever barcodes I want, in Data Matrix, QR code, Code 39, Code 128, or other formats, and print them for testing, training, or scanning, or scan them right off the screen.

Demo: Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet

Now I want to plan my purchasing and production to support all my demand, but I might have additional demand. In the Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet, I’ll run a three-month forecast based on my last 24 months of history. My work date is set in the past because this system has older history rather than recent history.

When I calculate the forecast, it tells me there isn’t much history and asks whether I want to go back less time. I’ll run it for all locations instead, and that gives us more history. For this chair at the main location, I get a forecast for each of the three months. Many lines are zero, and you can filter those out.

From here, Update Demand Forecast sets the standard Business Central demand forecast values for these items on those dates, so planning can reference the forecast. If I need two this month and don’t have them, it tells me to buy or manufacture two.

The other option is to use formulas to calculate your minimum and maximum inventory and your safety stock. Update Item Planning sets reorder points on the stockkeeping units or item cards, so your min-max purchasing is driven by forecasted values.

Demo: Enhanced Planning Worksheet

Now I have sales orders and a forecast, and I need to figure out what to purchase. That’s the Enhanced Planning Worksheet. In the warehousing world, you’ll want Calculate Purchase Plan. You can also run standard MRP planning from here.

There are a lot of options, and it’s job queue ready, so you can schedule it to run every hour, every morning at 7 a.m., or whatever you like, and keep appending to your plan. It’s very fast: you can plan 50,000 SKUs in about two minutes, so you can run the plan many times a day or just once in the morning.

It looks at supply, including inventory and incoming POs, and at demand, works out the difference, and tells me what it thinks I should purchase. It also shows a supply and demand summary you can drill into. If I’d rather transfer from another location where I have availability, I can make that change, and the next time I run the plan, it respects that decision instead of telling me to cancel the transfer and buy instead.

Vendor Summary

The vendor summary shows what I’m planning to buy from a specific vendor so far. If I’m managing three of our 10 vendors, I can see just those three and decide when to cut the purchase order, for example once I’ve met a prepaid threshold. There’s also a separate screen listing every vendor I’m planning to buy from, where I can choose which POs to create.

Understanding Reorder Rules

On this line, it’s telling me to buy 300 when I only have a demand of two. The worksheet shows exactly what the purchasing rules are, which is a nice time saver. This is a fixed reorder: if I hit 200 or less, I buy 100 at a time. So it brings me up to my minimum of 200, the demand of two takes me below 200 again, and it adds another 100, for 300 in total.

If I think that’s too many, I can change the rule to 100 right here, and it updates the stockkeeping unit or item card directly. Normally you’d have to drill down several levels to get to this detail, and doing that on every line is painful. This makes life much easier.

Item Usage Chart

How do I know whether it should be 100 instead of 200? The chart gives a quick visual of all the usage for an item, including purchases and returns, over whatever time frame you set. If I’m only using three or four a month, I can question why the minimum stocking level is 100. When I’m done, I can create the purchase orders, release them, and send them to the vendor in one click. It handles production planning the same way.

Demo: Receiving with WMS Express

Now I’ve ordered the parts I need, and I want to receive them in the warehouse, ideally by scanning barcodes. I have three handheld devices here: two running WMS Express and one running the full Warehouse Insight. You can use any style of device you like.

Devices and Setup

If you get your devices from us, we include a mobile device management solution at no charge, so you can manage all your devices centrally and remotely. These are Android devices, and you can also use tablets, or run on Windows if you’re using a Surface Pro or similar. There’s a video online that walks through setting up WMS Express, and it takes very little time. We also have a Quick Start program: if you’re already running Business Central and want to add barcoding, we’ll jump in and get you set up.

WMS Express gives us inventory counts, receiving, picking or shipping, and bin movements. The logo at the top is configurable, so you can show your own company name or anything you want.

Receiving a Purchase Order

In receiving, I get a list of all the purchase orders in Business Central I can receive against. I tap the first one. You can also use the Enter key or the menu, but ideally you never tap the screen; you just scan barcodes.

Ideally the vendor has barcoded the items, and the barcode can be a UPC, a custom barcode, or anything else. If incoming products don’t have barcodes, I can print labels directly from the handheld. It asks Business Central to print whatever label report I’ve specified to a particular printer, which is where the PrintNode Connector PowerTool comes in, and the barcodes are generated with the Barcode Generator PowerTool. They all work together. I can also enter a quantity manually and print labels for that quantity.

The barcode can contain whatever data you want: item number, lot number, serial number, expiration date, quantity, unit of measure, variant code, GTIN. We can pull all of that out with configuration. Here I scan item 1908-S, the third item on this PO. It can optionally show a picture of the item for visual verification, so if a red chair appears when you expected something else, you can fix the barcode before that error spreads through the warehouse. I enter the quantity, Business Central is updated, and it tells me I have two left to find.

There are several user interface options, such as a tile view with pictures in the list and a card view that shows one entry at a time. The default is a compact view: scan a barcode, enter a quantity, and you’re off to the races. Without a barcode, you can tap the line or use the change quantity menu item.

Scanning Text Instead of Barcodes

We can also scan printed text almost as quickly as a barcode. If lot numbers or serial numbers come as human-readable text, you can scan them without a barcode. That’s useful if you’re new to barcoding and your bins are labeled without barcodes: you don’t have to relabel them, because you can scan the text that’s already on the bin label.

I’m showing this in Warehouse Insight, but it works the same in WMS Express. This is a small toothbrush I picked up at a conference, with a lot number printed on the packaging. I scan it, and it brings in that lot number. It tells me the lot isn’t in stock, but that’s how easy it is. On a lot-tracked item, I scan the lot number, enter the quantity, and it adds 25 to the existing quantity of 50. If you need to scan text instead of barcodes, let us know and we can help you with the right devices.

The full Warehouse Insight has more options, but for receiving, picking, and the rest, WMS Express works the same way, and it’s completely free.

Demo: Shipping with Order Ship Express

Back in Business Central, we’ve created the sales order, attached the confirmation, printed a document with a barcode, planned the purchasing, and received the goods. We’ll assume it’s been picked, using the Order Fulfillment Worksheet if you need that automation, and now we need to get it out the door.

The freight quote and address validation actions are part of Dynamic Ship, the subscription product. The Order Ship Express actions are right beside them. I want one or more shipping labels for this order. This customer defaults to FedEx Ground, but you can set up whatever carriers you want and choose a different one to compare prices.

I enter the packages: a 5 by 6 by 7 box at five pounds, and a second 4 by 3 by 7 box at eight pounds. For carriers with specific packaging that gets you better rates, you can choose that packaging. Dynamic Ship has a much richer packaging interface, but this is dirt simple.

I can get the label immediately, or get the rate first. Get Rate goes out to FedEx and returns the rate, and shows what I plan to charge the customer. You can set up configurable markups, or override the charge manually, because it gets added to the sales order. That’s an option you can turn on or off. If I need an adult signature, I change that option and get the rate again. It’s nearly double, but that’s fine. Third-party billing to the customer’s own carrier account is also supported.

When I hit Get Label, the labels print automatically on a printer that’s probably sitting on a developer’s desk somewhere. That’s the PrintNode Connector PowerTool: shipping labels always go to a specific printer, with nothing else to do. A print preview shows the labels for box one and box two with tracking numbers, ready to stick on the boxes. From here I can also refund a label or create return labels.

The shipping charge is added to the sales order, so you can always track whether you’re making or losing money on shipping, and the FedEx tracking number is right in Business Central. Dynamic Ship goes further: it retrieves delivery status automatically, emails the customer, and provides a branded tracking page. With Order Ship Express, the tracking number is standard Business Central data you can use on order confirmations or shipments, or in Shopify or another e-commerce solution.

Demo: Graphical Scheduler

For any manufacturers on the call, here’s Graphical Scheduler. There’s a good online demo that covers configuring it. From a shortcut, I see all my production orders and whether my machines are overloaded. I can drag and drop an order and it reschedules appropriately. I can double-click to open the production order or zoom to a document.

It’s more than production. You can set up views for almost anything: assembly, project-type jobs, quality inspection assignments, warehouse shipments, and pick assignments, which installs by default. If you’re doing wave picking or want to assign picks to specific people, you can do it all from Graphical Scheduler. It’s intended for production data, which is what it installs with, but you can create your own views with any table to visualize and manage your data with drag and drop.

Demo: Safety Logbook

Safety Logbook gives you a place to track all of your events: audits, training, certifications, injuries, or, in this case, an oil spill. It’s great for certifications. This certification is good for 180 days, so I can see when it expires, open it to see everyone certified on that date, and know who needs to be recertified.

For an injury, I can use DocXtender to bring in pictures and keep everything I need to track the detail for an OSHA claim, including the claim ID and follow-up activities, such as conveyor training. You can create your own categories and log types beyond the defaults created at setup. It’s a great little tool for tracking health and safety events in Business Central.

Getting the Free Apps

If you have more questions, go to insight-works.com to contact us, or talk to your partner. For the free applications, there’s no registration and you don’t have to tell us what you’re doing. Grab them from Microsoft Marketplace, install them, and use them. We may check in to see whether you’re doing okay, but you won’t be hassled or constantly upsold. They’re yours to use, so go to town.

Questions and Answers

Can I use the Barcode Generator PowerTool to print labels for my products?

Yes. Business Central has a default barcode label, but we also include a sample item label with the Barcode Generator PowerTool that you can modify to meet your requirements. These are standard Business Central reports, so you can build a Word or report designer layout for whatever label you want, and the Barcode Generator PowerTool creates the barcode.

Business Central now has built-in barcode capability, but the Barcode Generator PowerTool long predates it. We built it because we needed to print barcodes from Business Central before that capability existed, and it’s still a better tool in many cases. For example, it can produce GS1-128 barcodes, which standard Business Central can’t.

Will this webinar recording be shared?

Yes, we will share it.

Can barcode IDs from third-party applications be mapped to my item numbers?

If you’re referring to something like UPC codes, it depends on what the third party provides. Typically, people get a list of the UPC codes and map them to their own item numbers using item references in Business Central. If the third party provides an API for this, you could set that up in Business Central, which is something to discuss with your partner.

Is there a simulator for testing WMS Express without buying equipment?

Yes, there are a few options. You can run it on any Android phone and use the phone’s camera as a scanner. Many people run the Android app in an Android emulator on Windows.

There’s also a Windows version of Warehouse Insight in the Microsoft Store, starting with version 3.0, and it works exactly the same way. You can use it for training and testing. The Barcode Simulator PowerTool, which is also coming to the Microsoft Store, lets you create a list of barcodes and send them as simulated scans into WMS Express or Warehouse Insight.

WMS Express doesn’t have its own Windows version yet, but you can use the Warehouse Insight Windows version with WMS Express. It just gives you a warning that you’re using a newer version than what’s loaded in Business Central. As long as it’s an Android app on an Android device, you can use that to run WMS Express too.

How does Graphical Scheduler handle reservations?

Graphical Scheduler uses the standard Business Central scheduling logic. A drag and drop is the same as changing the operation starting or ending time on the production order, so you get the same behavior as standard Business Central. If a reservation causes a conflict, you get the same reservation error.

MxAPS, the full automated scheduler, handles reservations differently. It manages all of your scheduling, with or without reservations, and gives you a schedule you can actually execute.

Does Graphical Scheduler work with NAV?

No, Graphical Scheduler only works with Business Central. Shop Floor Insight does work with NAV and has its own scheduler, but that requires purchasing Shop Floor Insight for NAV. It covers production orders only, including firm planned, planned, and released production orders, and it’s less capable than Graphical Scheduler. If you need a manual graphical scheduler for NAV, have a look to see whether it meets your requirements.

How are serial numbers created when receiving?

That’s process dependent and depends on your Business Central setup. If you want to assign serial numbers at receiving, you can scan them, or have the system create serial or lot numbers automatically, and WMS Express and Warehouse Insight both handle that. When you post the receipt, the serial numbers are in Business Central. If you want to create serial numbers ahead of time, that’s a Business Central process or configuration.

Do WMS Express and Warehouse Insight support iOS?

No. WMS Express and Warehouse Insight run on Android and Windows only. Effectively every handheld device you buy today for the warehouse or proof of delivery is Android, so Android is the native support. Windows is great if you’re running a Surface Pro in the warehouse, or one of our additional applications such as Counter Sales.

Will MxAPS reschedule sales order dates?

MxAPS reschedules all the dates on the production order, but it typically won’t touch the sales order. If you have a reservation on a sales order against a production order, one of several options is to retain the reservation in a broken state, where production ends after the sales order is supposed to ship. You’ll see a warning, but the sales order dates won’t update automatically. The MxAPS website, SchedulingForDynamics.com, has more information, videos, and knowledge base links, or your partner can set up a demo.

Can SharePoint access be restricted when using DocXtender?

Yes, absolutely. By default, SharePoint access is on a per-user basis, so you have full control over who has access to what. If you have an HR folder, your salespeople won’t see it unless you’ve given them access in SharePoint. Everyone dragging and dropping uses their own user ID, so if they don’t have access to a folder, they can’t drop documents into it or view it in SharePoint. That lets you separate HR, accounting, and sales documents however you want. There’s also an option to use a global SharePoint user for non-interactive use.

Closing

If I didn’t answer your question, let us know. I hope that was useful, I hope you have a great rest of the week, and hopefully we’ll talk to you again soon. Thanks, everyone.