Business Central Planning: Optimize Forecasting, Inventory, and Production Decisions

Welcome and Session Overview

Hey, good morning or afternoon, everyone. Welcome to today’s webinar on forecasting, item planning, and all of those sorts of fun things that nobody wants to do, but we give you the tools to do them.

It’s the first webinar of the year, so that’s kind of exciting. Well, for me anyway. Maybe not so much for you, but maybe it gives you a little opportunity to take a break as we go through the session.

Today we’ll do our normal intro—who we are and what our solutions are—and then we’ll jump into what we offer around forecasting and planning. This should be about 45 minutes, maybe less. We’re going to zip through quickly. I’ve had a lot of coffee this morning, so it should be a fast little session.

If you have any questions, ask them in the question box in the GoToWebinar panel and I’ll do my best to answer as we go. There were also a bunch of questions submitted during registration, and I’ll try to cover those along the way. All right, with that, let’s get started.

About Insight Works

A little bit about Insight Works: chances are you were on our website to sign up for this webinar, so maybe you already know this, but I’m going to talk about it anyway.

We work mostly in manufacturing and warehousing, and retail now as well. We have a very good retail solution for yourselves or your customers. We primarily work through reseller partners, so if you have questions about the products we’re talking about today—or anything else we offer—your existing Business Central partner may be one of our resellers and should be able to help you out. If not, you can contact us directly via the website, and I’ll give you a link at the end of the session.

We do have a ton of applications and solutions, and a lot of those are free. I’ll go through some of the key free apps in a moment, but the point is we do a lot of work in warehousing, shipping, manufacturing, retail, and all of those sorts of things.

Key Free Apps and Tools

Let’s talk about the free stuff. These are some of the key free applications that we offer. There are actually 30 apps and add-ons available for free, depending on which solutions of ours you’re using, but these are some of the key ones.

The top two we’re going to talk about today are Enhanced Planning Worksheet and Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet. If you’re on Business Central SaaS (Cloud), 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, and you can switch who’s using it—there’s just one at a time. If you’re on-premises with Business Central, these are not available at no cost.

The tools shown in green are more technical or development-focused tools—things like cloud printing with no user interaction, data management tools like the Import Expert Power Tool, and printing barcodes and other utilities.

Down at the bottom are more user-facing applications:

• Graphical Scheduling: Primarily meant for manufacturing, but it works with warehouse processes as well. There’s a pick assignment view that helps you schedule and assign picks. It works with picks, production orders, our Quality Inspector application, and more. It’s completely free—plug it in and away you go.
• Doc Extender: Drag-and-drop document management. Business Central has drag-and-drop, but Doc Extender is easier to use, and the big advantage is it stores documents in SharePoint so you can set up alerts, rules, and better document management capabilities.
• Order Ship Express: For domestic parcel shipments, it generates labels, tracking numbers, label costs (and markup if you want), all inside Business Central. It takes about 10 minutes to set up and you can start shipping immediately, with discounted rates using built-in carrier accounts like UPS, USPS, and Canada Post.
• WMS Express: Free warehouse management for receiving, picking, shipping, bin movements, and inventory counts. Plug it in, use it, and away you go.

Where Enhanced Planning Pack Fits

I wasn’t originally going to show some of these slides, but there were questions during registration about other applications and solutions, so I’ll quickly run through how some of the broader solution set fits together—then we’ll focus on the topic of the webinar.

The Enhanced Planning Pack is what we’re really going to cover today. In warehousing, this helps you do purchase planning. Base Business Central purchasing capabilities don’t really work well in a warehouse environment—you get too much junk like “new” and “cancel” messages. If you’re purchasing for distribution, you need the Enhanced Planning Pack. It also works with manufacturing and everything else, but it’s a key toolset for warehousing.

This is also what does the forecasting. The Enhanced Planning Worksheet and Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet are part of the Enhanced Planning Pack.

We also have an Order Fulfillment Worksheet for distribution—answering the daily question: what do I need to ship today, and what can I ship today? Once you decide what’s going out the door, either our free WMS Express or full Warehouse Insight solution helps you pick and ship. For shipping, Order Ship Express supports domestic parcel, and Dynamic Ship supports more advanced LTL and parcel carrier management inside Business Central.

On the manufacturing side, it’s a similar flow: start with Enhanced Planning Pack for purchasing and production planning, then schedule work either with the free Graphical Scheduler or our advanced planning and scheduling solution called MXAPS. Then execution happens on the shop floor using tools like Shop Floor Insight and Quality Inspector. After production, the process returns to picking and shipping with Order Ship Express or Dynamic Ship.

Enhanced Planning Pack Overview

Let’s focus on the Enhanced Planning Pack, because it’s the starting point for both manufacturing and warehousing. We have to do some planning before we can do anything on the execution side.

Within the Enhanced Planning Pack, there are solutions for upfront planning and post-operations analysis. At the beginning, we have the Enhanced Planning Worksheet, which is a better version of the standard Business Central Planning Worksheet, with additional visibility and planning capabilities, including vendor planning management. This is especially helpful on the warehousing side (and it works in manufacturing too) when you have multiple buyers responsible for specific vendors or product lines.

We also have the Forecasting Worksheet for sales forecasting. By default, we forecast based on sales history for top-level sold items. You can extend it if you want component forecasting, because there are events available for customization, but by default this is sales forecasting.

Other modules include:

• Multi-Level BOM Management: A better way to review and edit multi-level BOM structures compared to standard views in Business Central.
• Item Planning Review: Helps set planning parameters like mins/maxes in a more automated way—almost like forecasting, but more of a manual review of reorder points and planning settings based on actual usage.
• Routing Analysis: Compares actuals to expected routing times and includes statistics like variability.
• Production Order Analysis: A detailed breakdown of variances on production orders, especially helpful for finance and accounting review.

Getting Started in Business Central

Let’s jump into Business Central and take a look. I’m on a role center that has the Enhanced Planning Pack installed, and the worksheets you see here are part of that pack.

If you’re on the Cloud version and you want the Enhanced Planning Worksheet, the Enhanced Plan Vendor Summary, and the Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet, you can install the Enhanced Planning Pack and get a 30-day trial. Once the trial expires, you still have access to those free components. You can also install each individually from AppSource if you prefer, but it’s generally better to get the pack and let the trial expire if you want the free version.

The other modules in the pack are paid. You can buy them individually or as part of the package.

Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet

I’m going to start with forecasting, because we need to figure out what we need to purchase or manufacture. The Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet is a lightweight tool for sales forecasting. If you have very complex forecasting needs—service level agreements, specific fill rates, and so on—this isn’t meant for that.

What it does is take your sales history and run it through the Azure AI forecasting engine that Microsoft produces. We send data to the Microsoft forecasting API, it crunches the numbers, and sends the results back. It’s similar to the forecast you can see in the item list fact box in Business Central, but instead of doing it item-by-item, this gives you a way to interact with the forecast properly and deal with it in bulk.

You can filter down to specific items, item categories, and locations. You can do multi-location forecasting—for example, forecasting multiple locations together or individually.

One important note: there’s a data limit on the Azure AI forecasting model. You may have to filter down to specific locations or categories, or reduce the amount of data you send, to get results back. We don’t control those limits, and they can be variable.

For an example, I’ll run a monthly forecast for the next three months based on past sales. If you’re coming from GP or another solution and don’t have sales history, you can’t forecast without that history. The longer answer is our Import-Export Power Tool can import sales history reasonably easily, and there’s a video on our YouTube channel showing how to do it quickly so you can use forecasting.

You can also choose which forecast algorithm to use. This field is hidden by default, but you can make it visible through personalization. The algorithms are published in the Microsoft model.

Updating Demand Forecasts and Item Planning Values

Once the forecast is calculated, you can update the demand forecast within Business Central. Demand forecasts let you manually enter forecast values if you want, but when we update from the forecasting worksheet, it will populate the values automatically on a monthly basis. Then, when planning runs, those values drive your supply requirements.

You can have as many demand forecasts as you like—low, medium, high—and run scenarios in the planning worksheet to compare cost differences and requirements.

There’s also another option: instead of using the forecast value directly, you can use the forecast to calculate reorder points, safety stock, maximum inventory, and reorder quantity. You define the formulas that calculate these values based on the forecast.

For example, you might define reorder point as average daily forecast multiplied by lead time. If you forecast one per day and have a seven-day lead time, your reorder point becomes seven. You can use various functions like round, min, max, and average. Once you’ve defined formulas, you can update item planning on stockkeeping units or the item card with the calculated values.

So you have two straightforward approaches: update a demand forecast for planning to use, or update your mins and maxes from the worksheet.

Item Planning Review

Before we jump into planning, there’s another tool: Item Planning Review. This is another way to review and set planning parameters like reorder points and maximum inventory.

It’s similar to forecasting in that you set a period type (like weekly) and apply filters for items, item categories, and locations. The key advantage is you can set a specific time frame. You can look back at last winter, two winters ago, or any period that matters for seasonal patterns.

It calculates average usage for the selected period—weekly average, for example—and you can choose what entry types are included, such as consumption entries, negative adjustments, sales entries, or whichever you prefer.

Based on that usage, it calculates reorder points and maximum inventory using the formulas you’ve defined. You can compare current values to calculated values and then update item planning to write those new parameters back to the stockkeeping unit or item card.

A lot of people do this in Excel by exporting data, building pivot tables, and applying formulas. This tool lets you do the review inside Business Central, and if the values look good, updating item planning is automatic.

Enhanced Planning Worksheet

Whether you use the forecasting worksheet or item planning review, the goal is to set up your demand needs—reorder points, stock levels, or forecasted demand—so it drives the planning worksheet.

When you open the Enhanced Planning Worksheet, it looks similar to the standard Business Central planning worksheet, but there are some significant differences. One of the biggest is the Create Purchase Plan process, which is intended for distribution and warehouse environments where you’re buying to reorder points rather than buying based on dated demand.

The big difference between the standard regenerative plan and this purchase plan is the purchase plan doesn’t look at dates. So if you have a production order that needs a component by January 30 and a purchase order for that component isn’t due until the end of February, the purchase plan won’t tell you to reschedule or expedite. It will simply see that you need one and you have one coming in.

In a warehousing environment, when you’re buying to reorder point, you generally don’t want all the date-based messages and noise—especially for items on containers in transit. You want the plan to tell you what to order when you hit reorder point, then generate the PO and move on.

This purchase plan is much faster—on the order of planning very large SKU counts quickly—and it’s easier for purchasers to manage. It also avoids a lot of the “new,” “cancel,” and “reschedule” churn you get in standard planning.

There are various options available, including minimum level logic. The default is reorder point, but for seasonal purchasing (booking orders), you can use maximum quantity to buy up to max stocking levels to take advantage of vendor discounts.

Another important capability is running the purchase planning calculation on a job queue. You can run it daily at a set time, or even hourly depending on your volume. The system can accumulate purchase suggestions in the worksheet, and purchasers can review and cut POs once or twice a day, weekly, or whenever it makes sense.

Reviewing Suggestions, Vendor Summary, and Quick Adjustments

Once you run the plan, you get suggested lines in the worksheet. The fact boxes provide quick supply and demand summaries and visibility into other locations or even other companies in the environment. This can help you decide whether to purchase or transfer inventory from another location.

You can quickly change a suggestion from a purchase order to a transfer order. In standard Business Central, changing that can create problems the next time the plan runs, but the calculated purchase plan won’t do that. If you need 50 and you have 50 coming in—whether it’s transfer or purchase—it considers you covered.

The Vendor Planning Summary gives you an overview by vendor. You can see what you’re planning to spend, and you can track prepaid thresholds—cost-wise and weight-wise. For example, you might need to reach a certain dollar value or container quantity before cutting a PO. The summary helps you see at a glance whether you’re ready to place an order.

There’s also a visual chart and tabular history that help you validate suggested quantities quickly. If the plan suggests ordering 50 and that doesn’t seem reasonable, the chart can help you understand why and whether it’s driven by reorder point, reorder quantity, minimum order quantities, or a fixed reordering policy.

A big advantage is speed of adjustment. If reorder point, reorder quantity, minimum order quantity, or reordering policy is wrong, you can change it right from the worksheet without having to click through item cards and planning tabs repeatedly. It seems simple, but it saves a lot of time when you’re doing planning every day.

You can also view supply/demand profiles, see sales orders and forecast entries, and review what’s going to happen to inventory over time. If you enable order tracking, you can see pegging and reservation details, though the recommendation is generally not to enable order tracking unless you have a specific reason.

The Enhanced Planning Worksheet also replaces the requisition worksheet for processes like drop shipments and special orders, so you can manage those in one place. Regenerative planning still works as well, and if you have a maintenance management product installed, you can plan maintenance tasks in the worksheet too.

Purchasing Flow and Vendor Management

The Vendor Planning Summary also supports purchaser-specific views. If purchasers look after specific vendors or product lines, you can configure it so each purchaser only sees the vendors they care about, along with a running total of the accumulated purchase recommendations in the planning worksheet.

This works especially well if planning calculations run in the background on a job queue. Purchasers can check vendor totals, verify thresholds, drill into the planning worksheet, and then create and release purchase orders quickly. If you’re comfortable with the process, you can even create purchase orders and send them out to vendors effectively in one click. You can still create POs as open and choose not to send them if that’s how you operate.

This view also shows transfer orders, so if you’re doing distribution requirements planning and cutting transfers, you can manage those alongside purchases and jump into the worksheet to generate the appropriate documents.

Manufacturing Tools in the Pack

On the manufacturing side, after planning, you typically do analysis on what you executed. Before analysis, I’ll touch on the Multi-Level BOM Viewer, because it’s part of the planning process for manufacturing.

The Multi-Level BOM Viewer is similar to Business Central’s structure view, but it’s still a better tool in many cases. You can select specific versions, set date filters for effective dates on components, set quantities, and apply a location code. It calculates required component quantities, shows what you have on hand, and highlights shortages when you’re planning to manufacture a certain quantity.

One of the key benefits is editing: you can make changes directly on the screen, even when you’re multiple levels deep. It automatically marks the BOM under development and recertifies it if it was certified, without you having to go find and edit the correct line manually in the top-level BOM.

There’s also a diagram view you can use to visualize the BOM structure, highlight low availability in red, and make edits from the diagram view as well.

Routing Analysis and Production Order Analysis

From an analysis perspective, after production, you can use Routing Analysis. You select a routing and compare actual performance against predefined setup and run times. It shows differences as percentages and actual time.

A helpful feature here is standard deviation, which measures how variable the process is. Even if average time matches expected routing closely, a high variability can indicate inconsistency—different people taking very different amounts of time for the same work—so it’s worth investigating. You can drill down for details on how the number is calculated, and you can filter to focus on areas with high deviation.

The Production Order Analysis Worksheet provides a detailed breakdown of variances—expected cost versus actual cost, with variance analysis for labor, components, quantities, and costs. It rolls everything up at the end and can provide margin information if the production order is tied to a sales order via reservation. You can print it, send it to Excel, and include as much detail as you need for further analysis.

Packaging, Licensing, and Wrap-Up

Those are the main components of the Enhanced Planning Pack: Enhanced Planning Worksheet, Enhanced Plan Vendor Summary, Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet, plus the other modules like item planning review, multi-level BOM viewer, routing analysis, and production order analysis.

If you’re on SaaS, the Enhanced Planning Worksheet, Enhanced Plan Vendor Summary, and Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet are free for a single concurrent user at a time. The other modules can be purchased independently through AppSource or included in the Enhanced Planning Pack. The Enhanced Planning Pack is unlimited users.

That’s all I wanted to go through today. If you’re purchasing through AppSource, that’s through Microsoft and it’s credit card based, and there are a couple of steps like opening the page and hitting buy. Otherwise, contact your partner and they can help you place an order.

If you need to talk to us directly, go to the website and use the contact page or the chat to ask questions. I don’t see any additional questions in the question panel, but if you do have some, give us a shout on the website and we’ll be happy to help you out.

All right, with that, thanks everybody. I hope it was useful, and I hope you have a great rest of the week.