Business Central Planning Optimise Forecasting, Inventory, and Production Decisions

Welcome and Agenda

Hi, good day everyone, and welcome to today’s webinar on forecasting, item planning, and all those fun things nobody really wants to do, but we give you the tools to handle.

To plan for today, we’re going to go through our normal introduction—who we are, what our solutions are—and then we’ll jump into what we offer around forecasting and planning. This will likely be about 45 minutes or less.

As we go through the session, if you do have any questions, ask them in the GoToWebinar question box there. I’ll do my best to answer them as we go. With that, let’s get started.

About Insight Works

Just a little bit about Insight Works to start. Chances are you were on our website to sign up for this webinar, so maybe you know all this already, but I’ll talk about it anyway.

We work mostly in manufacturing, warehousing, and now retail as well. We have a really good retail solution for yourselves or for your customers, and we primarily work through our reseller partners.

So if you have questions about the products we’re talking about today, or really anything else in our stack of solutions here, your existing Business Central partner—if they’re one of our resellers—should be able to help. If not, you can contact us directly via our website, and I’ll give you a link at the end of the session.

We have a ton of applications and solutions, and a lot of those are free, which I’ll talk about in a moment. I won’t bore you going through all the stats, but the key takeaway is that we do a lot of work in warehousing, shipping, manufacturing, and retail, and we have apps to improve those areas in Business Central.

Key Free Applications

Let’s talk a bit about the free applications. These are some of the key free apps that we offer. The top two are what we’re going to be talking about today: the Enhanced Planning Worksheet and the Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet.

If you’re on Business Central SaaS (Cloud Business Central), these are free for one concurrent user. For a lot of organizations, you only have one person doing planning and maybe one person doing forecasting, so you can switch those. You can have multiple people using it for free, but only one concurrent user at a time.

If you’re on-premises with Business Central, these are not available at no cost. They’re still available, just not for free.

Some of the more technical or development tools include the PrintNode Connector, which allows you to do cloud printing easily with no user interaction. If you want to manage your data better, there’s the Import Export Power Tool, and there are tools for printing barcodes and other features.

On the more user-facing side, if you’re into manufacturing, you have graphical scheduling. This graphical scheduler works within the warehouse as well, and there’s a pick assignment view that allows you to schedule and assign picks. It can work with anything in Business Central, and it’s completely free—plug it in and away you go.

DocExtender is drag-and-drop document management. Business Central does have drag-and-drop capabilities, but it’s not as nice as DocExtender. DocExtender is easier to use, and the big advantage is it can store documents in SharePoint, so you can set up alerts and rules and get much better document management capabilities in Business Central.

Ordership Express is for domestic parcel shipments. You can generate shipping labels, get tracking numbers, and get the cost of labels, all right from within Business Central. It takes about 10 minutes to set up and you can start generating labels immediately.

Finally, WMS Express is warehouse management, again completely free. If you need key things in the warehouse like receiving, picking, shipping, bin movements, and inventory counts, WMS Express does all of those for free.

Overview of the Enhanced Planning Pack

Prior to the session, there were several questions about other solutions that we offer. So I thought I’d quickly run through a couple of slides to describe some of those before we get into the main topic of today, which is the Enhanced Planning Pack.

In a warehousing environment, the Enhanced Planning Pack helps you do purchase planning. Base Business Central purchasing capabilities don’t really work all that well in a warehouse environment—you get too much noise: lots of new actions, cancel actions, and reschedules. If you’re purchasing for distribution, you really want to look at the Enhanced Planning Pack.

It also works with manufacturing, and this is what we use to do forecasting. The Enhanced Planning Worksheet and the Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet are both part of this Enhanced Planning Pack.

We also have the Order Fulfillment Worksheet. If you’re in distribution, your shipper or warehouse manager walks in asking, “What do I need to ship today? What can I ship today?” This answers that question and automates the processes around it. Once you decide what to get out the door, you go to either the free WMS Express or the full Warehouse Insight Management to do picking, shipping, and other warehouse operations.

On the shipping side, Ordership Express is great for domestic parcel shipments to generate labels. If you need something more advanced, Dynamic Ship gives you pretty much everything you need to manage shipping—LTL, freight, parcel carriers, your own company drivers—all from within Business Central.

Manufacturing is similar. You start with the Enhanced Planning Pack to plan purchasing and production, then send it out to be scheduled. You can use the free Graphical Scheduler for drag-and-drop scheduling, or for advanced planning and scheduling, MXAPS can automatically generate a schedule you can use in the shop without having to do manual drag-and-drop.

Once scheduled, it goes out to the floor for execution. Shop Floor Insight captures what’s happening on the shop floor and feeds it back to the schedule. We capture labor, consumption, output, and quality from the shop floor. Quality Inspector captures quality information and can be used in both manufacturing and the warehouse—for receiving, shipping, during production, or random spot checks.

After production, just like in the warehouse, you need to figure out what to pick and ship, then send it out to the shipping solution, whether that’s Ordership Express or Dynamic Ship.

Enhanced Planning Pack Components

Let’s talk about the main topic of today’s session, which is the Enhanced Planning Pack. This is the starting point for both manufacturing and warehousing—we have to do planning before we can do anything on the execution side.

With the Enhanced Planning Pack, we have several tools to help with upfront planning and post-operations analysis. The Enhanced Planning Worksheet is an improved version of the standard Business Central planning worksheet. It has additional visibility and planning capabilities, including vendor planning management. This is useful where you may have multiple buyers who look after specific vendors or specific product lines, and it makes it easier to figure out what to purchase.

The Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet is for sales forecasting. By default, we forecast based on past sales history for your top-level sold items. You can extend this for component-level forecasting if you want, but out of the box it’s focused on sales forecasting for top-level items.

The Multi-Level BOM Viewer is a better version of the structure view or cost analysis view in Business Central and allows you to quickly review and edit your multi-level BOM structure more easily than standard Business Central.

Item Planning Review helps you set planning parameters like minimums, maximums, reorder points, and minimum order quantities in a more automated way. It’s almost like forecasting, but it’s more of a manual review of what your reorder points should be. You can use forecasting and item planning review together—for example, item planning review for components and forecasting for finished goods.

For analysis, Routing Analysis lets you compare actuals to expected values for production and provides statistical information about variability in processes, which helps determine if routing times are representative of what’s really happening. Production Order Analysis provides a detailed breakdown of variances on production orders.

Demo in Business Central

With that, I’m going to switch over to Business Central and see what the tools look like. I’m in Business Central Cloud on a role center that has the Enhanced Planning Pack installed. All of these individual tools you see are part of the Enhanced Planning Pack.

If you’re on the cloud version of Business Central and you want the Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet, the Enhanced Planning Worksheet, and the Enhanced Plan Vendor Summary, you can install the Enhanced Planning Pack with a 30-day free trial. Once the trial expires, you still have access to these components for free for a single concurrent user. Alternatively, you can install each of them individually from AppSource. The other modules shown are paid, and you can buy those individually from AppSource or as part of the Enhanced Planning Pack.

Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet

We’re going to start with forecasting, because first things first, we need to figure out what we need to plan. The Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet is a lightweight tool for sales forecasting. If you have very complex forecasting needs—service level agreements, fill rates, things like that—this isn’t going to do that.

What it does do is take your sales history and run it through the Microsoft Azure AI forecasting engine. It’s similar to what you’d see in the item list forecast fact box in Business Central, but instead of looking item by item, this lets you interact with it in bulk. You can filter to specific items or categories or locations, and you can do multi-location forecasting.

One thing to note is there’s a data limit on the Azure AI forecasting model. Depending on how much data you have, you may need to filter down to specific locations or categories to get results. We don’t control those limits; that’s on the Microsoft side and they can vary.

In the demo, we’re forecasting monthly for the next three months, based on the last 24 months of sales data. If you’re coming from GP or other solutions, or you’re just getting into Business Central and you don’t have sales history, the short answer is no—you do need that sales history in Business Central to use forecasting.

The good news is the Import Export Power Tool can help you import sales history so you have it in Business Central and can use it for forecasting.

Once you’ve set up the forecast, you can choose the forecasting algorithm from the available Microsoft models. That field isn’t visible by default, but you can add it with personalization.

After calculating, you’ll see forecasted quantities by item and location. If you don’t sell an item in a location, it won’t forecast requirements there.

A useful thing you can do is take the forecasted demand and update the demand forecast in Business Central. Demand forecasts are standard Business Central—you can create and edit forecasts manually, but the forecasting worksheet can update those values automatically. Then when you run planning, the planning engine uses that demand forecast to drive supply requirements.

You can have as many demand forecasts as you like—low, medium, high—to see how they impact costing and planning suggestions. You can also use the forecast to determine minimums and maximums for stocking levels by defining formulas based on the forecast.

Forecast Setup and Formulas

Those formulas are defined on the enhanced forecast setup. For example, a reorder point formula might be average daily forecast multiplied by lead time—if you forecast selling one per day with a seven-day lead time, your reorder point would be seven.

You can use functions like min, max, and average, as well as variables, similar to Excel-style expressions. A maximum inventory expression might simply be double the reorder point.

Once you define formulas, the worksheet calculates planning parameters and you can update item planning on stockkeeping units or item cards to reflect those calculated values.

To recap, you can use forecasted values to update your demand forecast, which planning uses to suggest supply, and you can also update planning parameters like reorder points and maximum inventory based on forecast results.

Item Planning Review

Before getting into planning, I’ll jump into Item Planning Review to illustrate another way to look at minimums and maximums. The idea is similar to forecasting in that you set a period type and filters, but the big advantage is you can set a specific timeframe—like last winter—instead of just looking back a set number of months.

In the demo, we’re looking at a 14-week period for chairs in a main location. When you generate it, it calculates average usage. A key difference from the forecast worksheet is that this can use consumption entries, negative adjustment entries, sales entries—whatever you choose—to calculate average usage. The forecast worksheet looks at sales entries specifically.

Based on that usage, it calculates suggested reorder points and maximum inventory. For example, you might see a current reorder point of 10 with a calculated reorder point of 30, and a current maximum of 20 with a calculated maximum of 60. You can then apply those suggestions to update planning parameters on the stockkeeping unit or item card.

In the Item Planning Review setup, you can define formulas to calculate reorder points and maximum inventory. Variables like average daily usage, lead time, total quantity, and many fields from the item or stockkeeping unit can be used in those formulas.

This means instead of exporting to Excel for pivot tables and doing a manual review, you can review and update item planning parameters automatically from within Business Central.

Enhanced Planning Worksheet

Now let’s take a look at the Enhanced Planning Worksheet. It looks similar to the standard Business Central Planning Worksheet, but there are some significant differences.

One key difference is the Calculate Purchase Plan. This is intended for distribution and warehousing environments where you’re buying to a reorder point, not buying to specific demand dates.

Unlike the standard regenerative plan, the purchase plan does not look at dates. So if a production order needs a component by the end of February and you have a purchase order coming mid-March, the purchase plan is not going to tell you to reschedule or expedite it. It sees that you have one coming and considers it good to go.

In a warehouse environment where you’re buying to reorder points, you don’t want messages changing dates on a purchase order that might be in a container in the Pacific Ocean. You just want it to create the PO when you hit the reorder point. The purchase plan is also much faster—100,000 SKUs in a couple of minutes—making it easier for purchasers to work with in distribution environments.

Purchase Plan Options and Automation

When you run the purchase plan, there are options like maximum level. By default, it uses the reorder point, but for seasonal orders you can use a maximum quantity to top up to maximum stocking levels and maximize orders to take advantage of bulk discounts.

You can also run this via job queue instead of interactively. That way it runs periodically—daily or hourly—and accumulates purchases in the planning worksheet. Purchasers can then review once or twice a day, or weekly, depending on your process.

In the demo, the purchase plan runs using a selected forecast and an end date, and you can choose different forecasts, end dates, and apply additional filters for items, categories, and locations.

Visibility and Better Decision Support

A big difference is you don’t get all the cancel and reschedule messages, which makes the worksheet simpler for purchasers.

You also get additional visibility through fact boxes showing supply and demand summaries. For an item, you can see on-hand quantity, what’s on purchase orders, and what the worksheet suggests buying.

You can view availability by other locations and set filters for which locations you want to check. This also lets you change replenishment type on the line. For example, if a purchase is suggested but another location has enough inventory, you can change it to a transfer order.

In standard Business Central, the next time you run the standard regenerative plan, it might tell you to cancel that transfer and create a purchase order based on the item’s replenishment setup. The purchase plan won’t do that. It recognizes the quantity is coming in on a transfer and lets you keep that decision.

The worksheet includes a vendor planning summary that gives an overview of vendors, planned spending, prepaid thresholds, and whether you’ve met thresholds needed to cut POs.

Understanding Why a Suggestion Appears

Sometimes you might see a suggested purchase quantity that doesn’t seem to match demand. In standard Business Central, you’d need multiple clicks to drill into item card planning parameters to understand why. In the Enhanced Planning Worksheet, you have extra information right on the page.

You can use the chart to see patterns, and the Planning tab shows parameters like reorder point and reorder quantity directly from the stockkeeping unit or item card. For example, if reorder point is 25, you only have 5 on hand, and reorder quantity is 50, that’s why it suggests buying 50.

The good news is you can change those parameters right there—adjust reorder point or reorder quantity—and it updates the stockkeeping unit or item card without leaving the worksheet or doing a bunch of extra clicks.

If you have order tracking enabled, it will also show soft reservations. You can view a supply-demand profile over time and also view a tabular version of the sales history that feeds the chart.

The Enhanced Planning Worksheet also replaces the need for the standard Requisition Worksheet because you can handle drop shipments and special sales orders directly from here.

The standard Business Central MRP regenerative plan is also available from here. We don’t change it—it’s just accessible from the Enhanced Planning Worksheet.

Enhanced Plan Vendor Summary

The vendor summary fact box in the Enhanced Planning Worksheet can also be accessed as a more detailed view in the Enhanced Plan Vendor Summary.

This provides an overview of accumulated purchases showing up in the planning worksheet. You can set it up to see only the vendors you care about, or all vendors, and filter to specific product lines using items or item categories.

If you’re running the purchase plan via job queue, purchasers can come in here, filter to the vendors and product lines they manage, see what’s happening, drill down for detail, and decide when to cut POs.

If you’ve exceeded a vendor threshold, you can cut the PO right from here. You can jump into the planning worksheet, create the purchase order, release it, create it open or released, and optionally send or print automatically. It streamlines releasing POs once thresholds are met.

This view will also show planned transfer orders, so you can use it for distribution requirements planning as well. You can manage vendor prepaid and manage vendors from here too.

Multi-Level BOM Viewer

Before showing analysis, I’ll quickly show the Multi-Level BOM Viewer, which is related to manufacturing planning. This is better than the standard structure view for a few reasons.

You can filter to a specific BOM version, enter date filters to respect effective dates on components, and calculate requirements based on a quantity you intend to manufacture. It will calculate how many you need, what you have on hand, and show additional information like what’s on component lines or transfer orders.

It provides an availability summary, and if you’re short, it shows that in red. The view is tree-style, so you can expand and see details across different levels of the bill of materials.

You can also edit the BOM directly from this page. For example, if a line is a phantom BOM and you want it to be a subcomponent produced for stock, you can edit the line right here. It automatically marks the BOM as under development, lets you make changes, and then recertifies it—without leaving the screen.

There’s also a diagram view that shows the same information in a visual tree and still gives you availability indicators, including red for shortages. You can click and edit lines from there as well.

Routing Analysis and Production Order Analysis

For analysis after production, there are a couple of tools. First is the Routing Analysis tool, where you can specify a routing and see how closely you adhere to it. It breaks out differences based on actual times and percentage differences, showing how close you are to planned run times and setup times.

You can also make changes to routing times directly from this page and they update automatically. For example, if your routing runtime is one hour but your average actual time is closer to three quarters of an hour, you can set a new runtime and it updates the routing.

It also provides standard deviation as a measure of process variability. Even if average differences are reasonable, high variability can indicate a process problem. You can drill down for an explanation of what standard deviation means and how it’s calculated. In general, if you see a standard deviation of one or higher, it’s probably something you want to look at.

The Production Order Analysis Worksheet is a great tool for finance to review cost differences on specific production orders. It provides a thorough breakdown of expected costs, actual costs, labor variance, and component variance. You can show or hide cost sections, personalize the page to focus on the metrics you care about, and print a report with summary information for further analysis.

Wrap-Up and Next Steps

Those are the components of the Enhanced Planning Pack: the Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet, the Enhanced Planning Worksheet, and the Vendor Summary. Those three are free for Business Central Cloud for a single concurrent user.

The easiest way to get them is to go to AppSource and install the entire Enhanced Planning Pack. It installs with a 30-day free trial, and you’ll get access to all the tools we looked at. At the end of the trial, you still have access to those three tools for that single concurrent user. The other tools would not be available unless you purchase them.

If you prefer and only want one or two tools, you can go to AppSource and purchase them directly through Microsoft. If you have any questions, reach out and let us know.

That about covers it. You can check out our website for more information, and you can contact your Business Central partner for more info as well. Or if you prefer to talk to us directly, go to the website, use the contact page or the chat, and we’ll help you out.

I don’t see any questions in the panel, so I think we can call it there. Thank you for attending—I hope you found that useful, and I hope you have a great rest of the week.