Simplify BOM Creation & Configuration Management in Dynamics 365 Business Central

Welcome and Session Overview

All right, so I still see a few people joining, but we’re going to get started here. So hello, everyone. This is Eric with InsightWorks.

Today, I’m going to be taking you through our Product Configurator application for Business Central and showing you how you can use it to streamline your business processes when configuring products.

The plan for today is to start with a brief introduction about InsightWorks, then talk a bit about the Product Configurator and its capabilities, but we’ll spend most of our time in a demo actually looking at the software and how it works. The expected session time is 45 minutes to an hour.

If you do have questions as we go along, please enter them in the question box in the GoToWebinar panel. I’ll do my best to answer them. If I don’t answer your question during the session, don’t worry—we will follow up with you afterwards and answer those questions via email.

The session is being recorded, and you’ll get a link to download it as well.

About InsightWorks

Just a little bit about InsightWorks: we’ve been around for just over 10 years now as InsightWorks, and we’ve got a lot of applications for Business Central—both on-prem and in the cloud.

We work primarily through our reseller partners. So if you have questions on pricing or implementation or things like that, and your existing Business Central partner is one of our resellers, they should be able to help you out. Otherwise, I’ll give you some contact information at the end of the presentation, and you can contact us directly.

On the side here, you can see we’ve got quite a few apps. Each of these blocks is one of our apps, and Product Configurator is one of those. It’s going to help you build your configurable items, your bills of materials, and your routings that feed into the production and assembly modules in Business Central.

We work primarily in manufacturing and distribution. We do quite a bit there, with a very large number of customers using our software on a daily basis to run their operations.

We’ve got over 34,000 installs from AppSource now. We do work with cloud and on-prem, as I mentioned. And with that, of our applications, we do have a number of free applications that are available. These are predominantly for Business Central Cloud. You can go into AppSource and install them—there’s no licensing or registration required.

Free Apps Highlighted

The Graphical Scheduler: if you’re doing anything with production orders or assembly orders—which will likely be the case if you’re building configurable products, or really anything that you want to show graphically on a time base—the Graphical Scheduler is likely for you.

The default is production orders, but you can plot anything you like on the scheduler. For example, if you’re using warehouse picks for your components, it has a pick assignment screen where you can go in and do pick scheduling and assign picks to individual people using the Graphical Scheduler, or whatever information you want to show on that. So it’s very configurable, a nice little tool—again, completely free.

Doc Extender is drag-and-drop document management. Business Central has some support for drag-and-drop now, but Doc Extender is easier to use. The big advantage is that it supports uploading to SharePoint with a nice folder structure that it creates.

So if you’re dropping documents onto a sales order, you don’t need a Business Central license to go into SharePoint and view those documents. Then you can also add SharePoint automation, like alerts and revision histories and things like that. With that, you have a pretty comprehensive document management solution just by plugging in Doc Extender and using it with SharePoint.

For example, if you’re working on a sales quote for a prospective customer and they provide you a PDF with their specifications for the product that they want you to configure, you can drag and drop that file into the sales quote and have it saved and stored for easy access.

In the middle here, we have our Import-Export Power Tool. This allows you to easily import and export data in Business Central. If you’ve ever used configuration packages or RapidStart, you’ll understand how long it can take sometimes to process those imports and exports.

The Import-Export Power Tool does all of that and more in a fraction of the time. That’s a very useful tool along with the configurator. If you’re coming from an existing CPQ, or using spreadsheets, you can map your data to the Product Configurator tables and use the Import-Export Power Tool to quickly migrate or upload that data into Business Central.

Why Use Product Configurator

Let’s talk about why you might want to use the Product Configurator—and CPQs in general. You can use them whenever you’re selling or creating configurable products.

In the demo today, we’ll be configuring computers, a table, and a bicycle, but our Product Configurator is currently used in a wide range of industries—from heavy equipment, furniture, and building materials to electronics and medical devices. The applications really are endless.

If you have standard product lines and you can configure those products, that is when you would want to use the configurator. If you’ve ever created items with bills of materials and routings manually in Business Central or NAV, you know how long that can take. Our Product Configurator saves you time and does the heavy lifting for you.

It’s going to help you simplify that data entry process for your sales team, improve efficiency and accuracy, and whatever you need really to create those configurable items. It’s all built directly into Business Central or NAV.

Key Benefits and Features

A big benefit is that it’s built into Business Central or NAV. It’s not external, and that means you can use the configurator on a sales quote or a sales order—we’ll look at that today.

Or if you’re in engineering, you can use it independently as well. Suppose you’re part of the engineering or product design team—you can use it to create items ahead of time. But it’s primarily meant for the sales team to quickly create configurable products with pricing details and reference data, such as the production BOM and routing, or the assembly BOM, so that the item can be used immediately by your business.

It’s very easy to set up and use. There are many other configurator products out there, and regardless of the product, it takes time to set up the rules and the options before you can start using it. We try to make those tasks as simple as possible so you can be up and running in a very short time.

Product Configurator has many features we’ll be looking at today. One is the Bulk Editor—where, say, you’re selling several items from the same product line on a sales order, you can configure the items in a spreadsheet-style view to make data entry more efficient. We’ll see that a bit later on.

Another feature is the ability to create complex rules and formulas using our Rule Builder application. That lets you build up your own custom logic in a simple, user-friendly interface.

And it’s an inexpensive solution relative to other products currently available on the market. A lot of CPQ tools out there can add significant cost and time to get set up and running. Our Product Configurator can likely do everything you need for configuring products in Business Central, with a much lower cost and setup investment compared to other solutions.

Demo Setup in Business Central

That’s enough of the slides for now. Let’s take a look at the software in action. I’m going to switch over to Business Central here.

I will mention that our Product Configurator is also available for NAV. In NAV, you won’t have the advanced Rule Builder and some of the new features that we see here today. But for Business Central, it’s available for both on-prem and cloud, and today we’re going to be using it in the cloud.

To set the stage, let’s imagine we’re part of the sales team. We get a request from a customer to buy a computer. We could start with a sales quote or a sales order depending on our business process, and today we’ll use a sales order.

I’m going to create a new sales order, choose our customer, and then to configure a product I’ll select this empty sales line and then select Line, Configurator, and BOM Designer.

Configuring a Personal Computer in BOM Designer

The BOM Designer is the worksheet that we’re going to use to configure the product. If it’s a new sales line like this, it opens like a blank canvas. To start, we select the item category for the product we want to configure.

If I open the dropdown, this includes the products or product lines that we sell and configure. If we’re selling personal computers, we might have several product lines—desktop, laptop, or even more specific offerings. But in our setup here, we’ve kept it very simple and we just have a single category for personal computers.

So I’m going to choose the PC category, and the BOM Designer refreshes with all the options I can configure when selling this PC—processor, memory, hard drive, and so on.

I can go through these options and select choices based on the customer’s request. This is using some older Microsoft sample data, so it’s a little dated, but it’s fine for demonstration purposes.

I’ll select a processor, choose some RAM, and you’ll notice the quantity defaults automatically, but I can change it—maybe the customer wants two sticks of RAM. As I make these choices, the total line price updates to reflect the choice and quantity, and it’s also building up a rolled-up cost for the product.

I’ll choose a hard drive, and down at the bottom we have summary information: total MSRP, expected total cost, and if weight calculations are included, expected weight.

You may notice the total sale price is more than the sum of the visible line prices. That’s because it includes hidden options—components we always include when configuring a computer, like assembly labor, shop supplies, or other standard components that aren’t directly chosen by the salesperson.

So that’s a simple example: we select options, it calculates the price, and once we’re happy with the configuration, we click OK.

Item Creation, Description, and Comments

When we click OK, it takes us back to the sales order and creates an item for us. In this case, the item is set up as an assembly order item, so it created the item, created the assembly BOM, and added the item to the sales line.

The description is generated based on the choices we made—processor, RAM, and hard drive—and it also added comments based on those choices. These comments can be formatted using rules you set up, so you can see the information the way you want to see it.

You can even take it further and have those same comments added to the production BOM or the routing, or in this case the assembly BOM. For example, you might want to pass special instructions to the shop floor—like cut-to-length measurements captured in the configuration.

These comments are optional, but they can be very useful. And if I scroll to the right, you can also see it included the unit price and unit cost it calculated as well—so it did a lot of the heavy lifting we’d normally need to do manually.

Assembly Order and Item Card Review

I’m going to take this a little further and create an assemble-to-order assembly order so we can look at the component lines. When we open the lines, we can see the components match the choices from the configurator—processor, RAM, hard drive—and we also see assembly labor that we didn’t choose directly, but it was included automatically.

Next, let’s look at the item card that was created. Here’s the item number and description that was generated automatically. Scrolling down, we can see unit cost and unit price, and if we open the assembly BOM, we see the bill of materials that the Product Configurator created for us.

One other thing: when it created this item, we had it set up to insert item attributes as well. Based on the components and quantities selected, it created item attributes, which can be useful for reporting or searching for items with specific attributes.

Editing an Existing Configuration and Additional Choices

Back on the sales order, imagine the customer wants to change something—say they want to add a monitor. We can open the BOM Designer again from the existing sales line, and it loads the same configuration so we can make changes.

For the monitor, we have two standard choices, but if they want a larger monitor and we only stock certain sizes, we can use the Additional Choices functionality to select non-standard items from our item catalog lists.

This allows salespeople to select from a much larger list of products that are accessible to them, so they can build the product exactly how the customer requires.

Also, when we configured this item, we had it set up to create an actual item. Another option is to only create the bill of materials and routing, which can be useful for a one-off item you’re unlikely to sell again in that exact configuration.

Configuring a Table with Groups, Mandatory Options, and Rules

Now let’s imagine the customer asks for a table to put the computer on. We’ll go to a blank sales line and open the BOM Designer. When it opens, we select the item category for the table.

This one has a bit more going on than the computer. You can see styling and grouping, and we can flag options as mandatory. If the user hasn’t selected a choice, the name appears in red; when it’s satisfied, it turns green.

We also put options in groups to make it easier to follow—like a tabletop group, legs group, and a components and labor group. The flow is the same: choose options, calculate price and cost.

I’ll choose a thickness, set a length and width, select walnut material, set the height, and choose a leg type. When I chose the leg type, you’ll notice the leg type size option suddenly appeared. That logic was built using our Rule Builder—so it conditionally shows or hides options depending on what the user selects.

There’s also a rule that conditionally shows which size choices are available based on leg type. If the leg type is round, you see the round size choices; if it’s beveled, you see beveled choices.

For this category, you’ll notice the total line price is zero. That’s because the design is set up to calculate total price and costs using hidden options intended to give us a net price and net cost based on the choices made.

Once we’re happy, we click OK and return to the sales order. It updates the sales line, brings in a generated description and formatted comments. The comments for the table are formatted in a more customer-friendly way, and you can format them however you want.

Quoting Items, Production Orders, and Shop Floor Instructions

One thing that’s different with the table: it didn’t create a new item like it did with the computer. Instead, it used what we call a quoting item, which is essentially a placeholder item used on the sales line for the configuration.

With quoting items, you can still create production orders and assembly orders with some restrictions. This table category is set up as a production order item, so I can create a Configurator production order from the sales line and drill into it.

On the production order, you’ll see the description and the source number, which is that quoting item. The quoting item is an actual item you create in advance, and the category uses it over and over again as a placeholder, allowing you to use standard Business Central functionality to produce the configured product.

If we look at components, we see it brought in the materials. The walnut sheet material quantity was calculated behind the scenes, and we also have material requirements for table legs.

If we look at the routing, the operations were added based on selections—for example, cutting and machining operations related to the choices made. And here’s an important piece: comments. You can pass comments from the configurator selections into routing comments on the production order.

For example, on the saw cut operation, we can see special instructions for how to cut the tabletop raw material down to the exact length and width entered in the BOM Designer. There are also instructions for cutting the table legs down to the height entered.

This is useful because while inventory might consume a fraction of a sheet of wood or bar stock for costing and inventory accuracy, the shop floor needs specific measurements. Passing those measurements through routing comments makes it clear how to cut and build the product to the customer’s exact specifications.

I’m going to back out and delete this production order since we don’t need it for the demo.

Converting a Quoting Item to an Actual Item and Smart Item Numbers

Back on the sales order, another thing I want to show is how you can convert the quoting item into an actual item. Quoting items are nice if you don’t want to litter your item list with items you’d only sell once or twice. But if you plan to sell it again, or based on reporting requirements, you may want it to be an actual item.

From the sales line, I can convert the quoting item into an actual item. Once converted, it shows up in the item list, and now we can use it in MRP, select it on purchase orders, create production orders for it, and so on.

This also lets me show the smart item number feature. For the computer, the item number came from a number series. For the table, it uses a smart item number—where the first characters represent things like the walnut material (WAL), then thickness, length, width, and other selections. I’ll show how to set that up a bit later.

Bicycle Example and Configured Picture Feature

I want to do another example now to show some newer features. Let’s imagine the customer’s office is relocating and they need transportation. Luckily, we also run a bike shop next door, so let’s build them a bicycle.

Just like before, we select a blank sales line, open the BOM Designer, and select the bicycle category. Then we go through the options: maybe a road bike, carbon fiber, medium size, and red.

As soon as I chose the color, this fact box on the right updated. This is the configured picture feature. As we set options, it builds up a picture based on the choices. When we finish the configuration and it creates the item, it saves that picture and attaches it to the item card.

As I add choices like the fork and other components, the picture updates to represent the bicycle we’re building. When the customer’s happy, we click OK, it creates the sales line, generates the item number from a number series, formats the description and comments, and adds price and cost.

If we open the item card for the bicycle, we can see the item picture saved automatically—just as it appeared in the BOM Designer.

Sales Report Output from Configurations

So far we’ve done three examples: a computer, a table, and a bicycle. From the salesperson’s perspective, it’s that simple: open the BOM Designer from the sales line, select the product line or item category, choose options and quantities, and it builds up the price.

Once you’re happy, click OK, it builds the item and adds it to the sales line, and it can bring in comments so that when you print the sales confirmation or quote report, it includes the item, pricing, and other details.

Let’s show that now. We’ll print and preview the sales confirmation. You can see the computer with pricing and comment lines, the table with pricing and comment lines, and on the next page the bicycle with the same. Down at the bottom we have a grand total for all three items.

Bulk Editor Demonstration

There’s one other demonstration I want to do before we look at setup. So far, we’ve been focusing on the BOM Designer, but I want to briefly talk about the Bulk Editor, which is another way to use the Product Configurator.

Suppose the customer is an organization looking to buy multiple variations of the same product line. We can use the Bulk Editor to build different configurations for the same product line on the same sales document using a spreadsheet-style interface.

For this, I’ll close the sales order and create a sales quote. The process is similar: create a quote, choose the customer, select an empty sales line, open the Configurator menu, and this time open the Bulk Configurator.

First we select the item category—for this example, we’ll select the PC category. The page refreshes, and we work through the lines and columns to set option choices.

One thing to note: you can map the configuration to a specific field on the sales line to capture details. This is commonly used to record the customer’s reference for the variation you’re configuring. In this example, it’s mapped to the Description 2 field on the sales line.

So maybe we build computers for different departments. I enter “Sales department,” set quantity to five, and select the choices for processor, RAM, hard drive, monitor, keyboard, and mouse. Then I do the same for “Engineering department,” maybe three units with higher-end hardware, and then one for the reception area with a simpler setup.

Once we’ve built all three configurations, we click OK. It takes us back to the sales quote and creates the sales lines—each with an item, and the Description 2 field updated with the department reference. Price and costs are pulled in as well.

From here, we can preview the sales quote report and send it to the customer for review.

Configuration Setup: Item Categories

That’s it for the examples. Next, I’m going to go through some of the setup. For that, we’ll go into the Configurator item categories. These are the products or product lines that you configure, and they link to the standard Business Central item categories—so make sure you set those up first.

For example, we have categories for bicycles, personal computers, and for a table. One thing to note is the configured item type. This determines whether we’re creating an item like we did for the personal computer, or using our quoting item feature like we did for the table.

If you’re using quoting items, you specify the placeholder item number here. The data template is where you configure required fields for when it creates an item—posting groups, base unit of measure, whether it requires lot or serial numbers, and so on.

Item number behavior determines how the system assigns the item number. You can use a number series, or our smart item number feature. If you use a number series, you set it to number series and specify the code. If you want smart item number, you set it to smart item number and configure the rules in smart item number configuration.

Smart Item Number Configuration

For the table, here are the rules we set up for the smart item number. These rules define the sequence for the components of the item number.

The item number includes material, thickness, quantity, length, width, edge choice, height, and the leg type size. For instance, material is the first three characters—like WAL for walnut.

For thickness, length, and width, we pad with leading zeros. So if you chose a thickness of three, that can be represented as 03 in the item number. You can set up rules to format the item number as needed, but keep in mind the standard 20-character limit for item numbers in Business Central. You may need to be creative to fit within that limit and keep it unique.

Other Key Category Settings

A couple other settings to point out: BOM type controls whether you’re creating a production BOM and routing, or an assembly BOM. For the computer, we created an assembly BOM; for the table, we created a production BOM and routing.

The item description template defines how the item description is generated. For the computer, the description included the processor, RAM, and hard drive choices.

And link sales field name lets you link details from the configuration to a field on the sales line. For example, in the bulk editor demo, we entered “Sales department,” “Engineering department,” and “Reception,” and it populated those into the Description 2 field on the sales quote.

Configuring Options and Choices

Next, I’m going to go through some of the options for these different product lines. Let’s start with the personal computer. We’ll go into the Configurator options.

Before we go too deep, let’s refresh how the PC appears in the BOM Designer. We can use test configuration to see the options: processor, RAM, hard drive, monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

This is also one way the configurator can be used independently outside a sales quote or sales order—for example by engineering or design teams. You can build up your design in test configuration, and there’s an action to create the item or configuration if you want.

Back in options, the page is divided into two parts: the upper area shows the options, and the lower area shows the choices for those options.

Within options, you can set the display order, define if an option is mandatory (which affects the green/red display in the BOM Designer), hide an option using the hidden-in-configurator flag, control bulk edit visibility for the spreadsheet-style bulk editor, and configure additional choices to let users look up items in item lists or catalog lists for non-standard selections.

For example, the monitor option can be set up to look up catalog items for different monitors, and you can filter it—like only showing catalog items from a specific vendor.

There’s also item attribute mapping, which controls how options map to item attributes. For the PC, we created item attributes for processor and hard drive, along with quantities.

Choice Types, Pricing, and Hidden Defaults

If we select an option like processor, the choice list shows the items that appear in the BOM Designer. The type field specifies how the choice is included—item or production BOM adds it to the bill of materials, resource adds it to the assembly BOM, and operations or routing choices add steps to the routing.

Text type is used to capture details that don’t directly tie into an item, resource, or operation. Configuration type is where you can build sub-configurations.

You can also set default choice, default quantities, variant codes if applicable, and pricing and costing—unit price and unit cost.

There’s an update unit price setting. When it’s set to “when used,” it takes the latest price from the item card whenever the choice is used. That lets you maintain pricing at the item card level rather than maintaining it directly on the option choice. If you set it to “manually,” then you maintain the price at the option choice level. There are similar settings for unit cost and weight.

For the assembly option, this is how we included assembly labor automatically: we hid it in the configurator and flagged it as the default choice with a default quantity of 0.5—so it’s always added behind the scenes whenever we build a product in this category.

We also set up shop supplies as a child choice, meaning whenever assembly is selected, it also includes supplies automatically. And for shop supplies, we can calculate quantity using a formula—like processor quantity plus RAM quantity plus hard drive quantity. There are other standard functions you can use too, like rounding, min, and max.

Advanced Table Setup: Groups, Text Options, and Extended Text

Next, let’s look at the configurator options for the table. The first thing to point out is grouping. We use line types to set up groups and options—begin group and end group for headings like tabletop, legs, and components and labor, and then the selectable lines use a line type of option.

This enhances the presentation for the salesperson, makes it easier to follow, and improves that guided experience.

For options like length, we use text type because we’re capturing a dimension that doesn’t tie directly to an item, resource, or operation. We can set min and max rules—for example, minimum 50 and maximum 150.

Extended text controls whether comments are added to the sales line. If “add extended text” is yes, it includes comment lines when that choice is made. The extended text template determines how those comments appear. That’s how we got the customer-friendly formatting for the table comments—like “Thickness” followed by the dimension, “Length” followed by the dimension, and so on.

This feeds into sales quotes and order confirmations, so the salesperson makes selections, it creates the configuration, adds it to the sales document, and you can print a report to provide to the customer.

Rule Builder Examples for Table Raw Materials and Leg Options

In the table example, we didn’t see how raw material got added, but there are options for that at the bottom. When we created the production order, it automatically added the walnut raw material.

So how did the configurator know to choose the walnut item? That’s where the advanced Rule Builder comes in. Based on what the user selects for thickness and material, it sets the tabletop raw material option to the appropriate choice—the specific inventory sheet item required for that combination.

In Rule Builder, you set up conditions to check selections and perform actions based on true/false results. For example: if thickness equals 3 cm and material equals oak, set tabletop raw material to a specific item. If thickness equals 4 cm and material equals maple, set it to another item. There are lots of combinations, so you’ll see repetition, but the logic is straightforward.

Rule Builder can also set quantities, conditionally hide and show options and choices, and display messages—there are a lot of different things it can do.

Another example is the leg type rule, where it conditionally hides or shows the leg type size option. If the leg type is blank, it hides the size option and its choices. If it’s not blank, it shows the option, and then further logic determines which size choices are available based on whether the leg type is straight, beveled, or round.

That’s what controlled the behavior you saw in the demo—switching from beveled to round changed the available size choices.

Pricing and Implementation Overview

That about wraps up the demonstration for the webinar today. I’m going to quickly switch back to our PowerPoint slides and talk about pricing.

How is it priced? It’s priced per company. That means one price per month, regardless of the number of users or how you use it. If you have one company in Business Central, it’s one price. Contact your partner for the actual pricing.

Like I said, the configurator can do nearly all of the things that much higher priced CPQ solutions can do, and those solutions can often be 10 times the cost of our configurator.

As for implementation, we do offer services for that. We offer initial training to get you up to speed on how to use it, much like what we covered today but in more detail, walking you through your configurations and how you would approach setting those up.

After that initial training, you’ll be building configurations on your own. That can take a few days or even hours sometimes—you can get it done rather quickly. Sometimes it can take weeks. It depends on how complex your configurations need to be.

From our perspective, we’ll get you up to speed—usually half a day, maybe a day—and after that, it’s all yours to build the configurations you need.

Closing

All right, so that’s about it. If you want to get in touch with us or find more information on the configurations,