Know What You Can Ship Today: Order Fulfillment in Business Central

Welcome and Agenda

Good morning or afternoon, everyone. This is Mark. Today we’re going to go through a little bit on how you can optimize your fulfillment operations within Business Central, primarily with the order fulfillment worksheet, but we’ll also cover a whole bunch of other goodies that’ll help you decide what you need to ship and then help you ship it.

The plan for today is to go through a quick PowerPoint to set the stage and talk a little bit about us and the different tools you can use to help with your fulfillment operations, then run through a demo, and go through pricing at the end. The session should run about 45 minutes, but that depends on how many questions come in as we go. If you do have questions, enter them in the question box in the GoToWebinar panel and we’ll do our best to answer them as we go through the session or at the end.

About Us and Our Free Applications

We’ve been around for just over ten years now, and we work primarily with our partners. If you have questions about pricing, we have basic pricing guides on the website, but for quotes and other specifics, check with your partner. If they’re one of our resellers, they can help you out or put you in touch with us, or you can reach out to us directly through the website.

We have a large stack of applications and work primarily in warehousing, manufacturing, and retail, including point of sale solutions. Many of these applications are free add-ons or apps you can install directly into Business Central. Before getting into the main topic, here’s a quick rundown of some of the free tools, several of which are directly applicable to fulfillment.

• Enhanced Planning Worksheet – replaces the standard Business Central planning worksheet. Standard Business Central MRP and MPS don’t do a great job with purchasing in a warehouse environment; this tool is built to assist purchasing so you’re not relying on Excel and other workarounds to figure out what you need to buy.
• Forecasting Worksheet – also free.
• Graphical Scheduler – primarily used for production scheduling, though it can also be used to schedule picks and quality inspections.
• Doc Extender – drag-and-drop document management that stores documents in SharePoint in a discoverable way, so you can find what was attached to a given sales order directly in SharePoint without going through Business Central.
• Order Ship Express – a free app for shipping. There’s no cost for the app itself, and if you’re in the US you get discounted rates on carriers like UPS and FedEx if you don’t already have your own accounts (you can also bring your own accounts). It retrieves rates, labels, and tracking information directly from Business Central.
• WMS Express – free warehouse management covering the four key functions: receiving, picking, inventory movements (bin movements), and inventory counts. It’s completely free.

Between Order Ship Express and WMS Express, that may be all you ever need for your warehouse and shipping requirements. We do have larger applications with more functionality, but if these free tools meet your needs, you can decide up front that they’ll cover you going forward — there’s no need to start small and “graduate” to something else later.

The Fulfillment Chain: From Planning to Shipping

Here’s an overview of the key applications that assist with getting stuff out the door.

It starts with the Enhanced Planning Worksheet, which is really about getting stuff in the door — planning your purchasing and production so you have inventory available to fulfill orders in the first place.

For fulfillment specifically, it starts with the Order Fulfillment Worksheet. The idea is that it tells you what you can actually ship today. It looks at your inventory availability based on whatever criteria you specify, and then automates the next step — generating warehouse picks or inventory picks, printing pick documents, or even printing shipping labels to use as pick documents. In short, it tells you what you can ship and automates the process of generating picks.

Once pick documents exist — whether a simple picking list report, a warehouse pick, or an inventory pick — they go out to the warehouse to be executed. For that, there’s WMS Express (mentioned above) and the full Warehouse Insight product, a complete WMS that supports up to 200 barcode-scanning devices on the shop floor and allows for local development and extension. From a picking perspective, either tool supports barcode scanning or text-based scanning — you don’t actually need barcodes to use them.

Once picking is complete (whether on paper or with a device), the order moves to shipping, where Order Ship Express provides simple, quick shipping directly from the sales order. For more advanced needs, Dynamic Ship generates labels, bills of lading, pallet packaging for LTL shipments, customs documents, and can optionally send ASNs via EDI — simplifying the whole shipping process so you never have to leave Business Central to deal with carrier websites or carrier-specific software.

Demo: Order Fulfillment Worksheet Setup

Before diving into the worksheet itself, here’s a quick look at its setup. There are about ten configuration options, and most of them default in without needing adjustment. Several settings control restrictions on what can be picked — for example, preventing picking from blocked bins, locked serial or lot numbers, or inventory that’s close to its expiration date.

There’s also a performance timing option (normally turned off for demos) that shows just how fast the calculation runs — it can process around 10,000 order lines in seconds.

Demo: Using the Order Fulfillment Worksheet

Opening the worksheet for a given location immediately runs the calculation. Orders (sales and transfer orders) are sorted by shipment date, and for each order the system determines whether the lines can be supplied.

If an order is fully available, it’s fully allocated. For example, if an order needs two units and 45 are available to pick, two get allocated, leaving 43 for the next order that needs the same item. This is called dynamic allocation — as the worksheet works through orders sorted by date, it soft-allocates inventory, so a later order requiring more than what’s left will only get partial availability.

When an order can only be partly supplied, it shows as partially available and partially allocated. In one example, an order needed three units of an item; only one could be allocated because the rest was sitting in bins that couldn’t be picked directly (an advanced, directed put-away location) and needed to be moved into a pickable area first before the order could ship.

The worksheet offers extensive filtering and sorting. You can filter by a specific item to see every order that needs it and how inventory is being allocated across those orders in sequence. You can also sort by criteria other than shipment date — for example, by order value, so the highest-dollar orders get first priority on available inventory, or by shipping agent, customer, or any combination of columns and filters (something standard Business Central doesn’t support). You can create and save as many custom views as you like.

Because orders are sorted by shipment date by default, back orders are naturally prioritized: an order that’s been waiting the longest gets first claim on any new inventory that comes in, without needing a separate clipboard or manual tracking system.

Reservations, Special Orders, and Assembly Components

The worksheet respects reservations — if an item is reserved for a specific sales order, it won’t be made available to any other order. It also handles special orders, drop shipments, and assembly order components: for make-to-order items, it explodes the bill of materials and checks the availability of each component to determine how many finished units can actually be supplied.

If an order’s shipping advice is set to “ship complete” but only partial inventory is available, you can either create a pick and stage what’s available while waiting on the rest, or use a reservation to lock in the available quantity for that order without creating a pick yet.

Creating Picks and Warehouse Shipments

From the worksheet, you can select one or more orders and create a pick. If multiple orders are selected, you’re prompted to combine them into a single warehouse shipment before generating picks — useful if you want one shipment covering several orders. Pick creation works similarly to standard Business Central pick creation, letting you organize by item, zone, or bin, and you can have picks print automatically as they’re generated. Once a pick is created for an order, that order drops off the “available to ship” list because it’s now in progress.

The worksheet works the same way whether a location has warehouse shipments and warehouse picks enabled or not — it works with inventory picks, warehouse picks, or no warehouse documents at all.

Automating Fulfillment with the Job Queue

Everything shown so far can also run automatically through the Business Central job queue. Two example job queue entries illustrate this:

• A “pick automation” job that runs every 30 minutes between 7:00 a.m. and 3:30 p.m. It looks for released sales orders that are fully available and need to ship within the next two days, then creates picks for them — combining up to six sales orders per pick. As orders come in (for example, from e-commerce), the job creates warehouse shipments, generates picks, and prints them automatically, so no one has to manually check the system.
• A second job that runs once a day at 4:00 p.m., picking up any available orders with fewer than three lines that are shipping via UPS — a “last-minute scramble” to catch small orders before the UPS pickup at 4:30.

These automations can be scheduled on whatever cadence makes sense — every 10 minutes, every 30 minutes, once a day — to keep inventory allocated, picks generated, and the warehouse running without manual intervention.

One additional note on shipment dates: the “earliest ship date” shown for an order is pulled from the sales lines (the oldest shipment date among them), and it can be edited directly — doing so updates all the lines on that sales order to match, which can be useful when you want to standardize the shipment date across an order.

Demo: Shipping with Order Ship Express

Once everything is picked — whether paper-based or barcoded — the next step is getting it out the door. Order Ship Express is a simple, no-cost way to do that directly from the sales order (there’s also a dedicated “sales order shipping” page in Business Central that works the same way, without pricing information, for warehouse staff who don’t need to see pricing).

From the sales order, you specify package dimensions, weight, and number of packages, then choose (or default in) a carrier, such as FedEx Ground. Hitting “get rate” shows the shipping cost before committing, with the option to apply a markup (a default markup percentage can also be configured). Options like requiring an adult signature adjust the cost accordingly. Hitting “get label” generates the shipping label, tracking number, and cost, and can automatically print the label if a print connector is configured. The shipping charge is also added to the sales order automatically, along with the tracking number. Setup takes roughly ten minutes, with no registration requirements to get started.

Demo: Shipping with Dynamic Ship

For more comprehensive shipping needs, Dynamic Ship extends the same basic capability — quickly generating labels for a couple of boxes — with barcode-driven packing and verification. Scanning the pick ticket brings up the order, and items can be packed into boxes by scanning barcodes alone, without touching a mouse or keyboard (barcoding isn’t required, but it makes the process faster). Weight can be calculated automatically or read directly from a connected scale.

If no carrier is specified in advance, Dynamic Ship prompts for one at the point of getting a label, offering multi-carrier rate shopping so you can compare rates and choose. It also supports more robust international shipping, customs documentation, and pallet packing for LTL freight.

Value Proposition

The core problem this solves is that warehouse staff, especially with native Business Central tools alone, often don’t know what they’re supposed to do — relying on clipboards and getting pulled in different directions. The Order Fulfillment Worksheet tells the warehouse exactly what it’s able to ship today and what still needs to ship, including back orders.

Pricing

The Order Fulfillment Worksheet is priced at $150 per month, per location, with discounts available for annual or three-year subscriptions (which can be cancelled at any time with a credit). A 30-day trial is available, and the app can be installed and tested with no impact on the rest of Business Central — safe to try in a sandbox or even in production.

Warehouse Insight and Dynamic Ship are priced based on the number of devices and locations. Pricing guides for different scenarios are available on the website, and partners can provide more specific quotes.

Closing

A recording of the session will be sent out afterward. For additional questions, reach out through a partner or the website.