Olivia: So good morning everyone and welcome to our exclusive webinar on end-to-end solutions for distribution and manufacturing. I’m Olivia Morris, the marketing manager for Montpellier and I’ll be your host for today’s session so thank you for joining us. Today we’re excited to share some valuable insights and practical demonstrations that will empower those in manufacturing and distribution to maximise their use of 365 Business Central with Insightworks. So I’m thrilled today to be joined by Eric from InsightWorks, who will guide us through today’s session. Eric, if you’d like to start.

Eric: Yeah, thank you very much, Olivia. So hello, everyone. This is Eric again with InsightWorks. And as Olivia mentioned, today I’m going to take you through a few of our applications for manufacturing and distribution. So I’m going to cover today is just a little bit about who we are and what we do. So who are we?

Well, InsightWorks has been around for a little over 10 years now, and we work globally with companies in the manufacturing and distribution industries. And we also cover a little bit of retail as well. And we work with Montpellier to deploy all these applications you see over here on the right. So these are all the applications we offer for Business Central, both on-premise or in the cloud. And the cool thing here is that a number of these applications are free with no cost associated. So here’s a sample of some of those free applications that we offer for Business Central. These are typically available for Business Central Cloud, though some of these are also available for on-premise if you have a subscription with one of our other products. So I’ll just give you a quick overview of a couple of these applications before we jump into the details. So Doc Extender here, really this is something everyone should have. It lets you easily drag and drop documents directly into Business Central.
which can then be stored either in SharePoint or directly within Business Central.

So if you use SharePoint, that provides a fairly robust document management solution right from within Business Central. Graphical Scheduler, I’ll show you this a little bit later on in the demo, but this is a scheduling tool, whether it’s for production orders, picks, or whatever else you might want to manually schedule within the system. Then Order Ship Express and WMS Express, These are free products offering a comprehensive warehouse management and shipping solution at no cost. There’s no registration required for any of these. You simply plug them in and you can start using them. So with that, let’s dive a little bit deeper into some of these tools. So we’re gonna start with the distribution side, the fulfilment side. So when you begin the process of fulfilling your orders.

The first tool we have here is the order fulfilment worksheet. So this is a powerful tool that lets you automatically allocate the inventory you have on hand to your orders, effectively answering the question, what can I ship today? So it’ll tell you what you can ship and then it can automatically generate your pick tickets or any other documents you need to execute those shipments. And then once we’ve decided what to pick for the day and we’ve generated the pick tickets, we move on to executing those tasks in the warehouse.

So we have two options here. One here is our full Warehouse Insight product, which is a subscription product. And that provides everything you need to manage all your warehouse operations from simple warehouses to the most advanced. And it runs on mobile devices, allowing you to scan items and manage all your warehouse tasks with ease. WMS Express is a lighter version of that. So it covers the four essential tasks for most warehouses. That’s receiving, picking or shipping, bin-to-bin movements, and inventory counts. If those basic tasks are all you need from a handheld device with barcode scanning, WMS Express is the ideal solution. Again, it’s free, just plug it in and you can use it. If you need more capabilities, you can upgrade to Warehouse Insight. These tools allow you to scan barcodes on your items or print barcodes for items to facilitate picking. Then once we pick the product, the next step is getting it out the door. For this, we have both our Dynamic Ship and Order Ship Express solutions. Order Ship Express here, again, completely free, lets you directly generate shipping labels from a sales order for a variety of carriers. It supports three different carriers of your choice from a selection of about 60 options.

That’s including major carriers like UPS, FedEx, DHL, and more. You can generate shipping labels directly from Business Central, record shipping costs, add markups for freight charges to customers, and capture tracking information is perfect for companies that ship domestically and don’t ship large volumes. Or even for those that do ship large volumes, but regularly use just one or two carriers. And for businesses that need more advanced capabilities, Dynamic Ship is a full-featured shipping solution. It includes a packaging interface, support for LTL, so less than truckload shipping, international shipping, automated email notifications, and a range of other tools for managing a complex shipping environment. Dynamic Ship is a solution for users who need more robust packaging and shipping requirements than what Order Ship Express provides. This is the fulfilment side. Now, the manufacturing side shares some of those requirements as well, because once you build something, you need to get it out the door. But manufacturing involves additional processes as well.

On the manufacturing side, we’ve got a few key applications for that. We start with the Enhanced Planning Pack. This set of tools simplifies the planning process significantly. If you’re currently using the planning worksheet or the requisition worksheet in Business Central, the Enhanced Planning Pack will make your life much easier. It offers an improved user interface for planning. It includes forecasting, some production analysis tools, and even more. And the pack makes planning smoother and it just enhances your overall experience within Business Central. So we use the enhanced planning worksheet, which is part of the enhanced planning pack to do our planning. And then we need to schedule that production. So for scheduling, we offer two solutions.

The first is the graphical scheduler here. So again, that’s a drag-and-drop tool that displays all your production orders, allowing you to arrange them manually. So it’s a robust tool for those who need to manually schedule production orders directly and on the fly. However, if you’re dealing with a high volume of production orders or frequent rescheduling, the manual process of dragging and dropping can be quite time-consuming. In this case, you’d want to look at MXAPS. MXAPS, it’s priced very affordably and delivers a huge amount of value. This tool is an automated production scheduler. You just click a button and it generates a workable schedule for you. It provides finite capacity scheduling, that factors in what can be completed based on current capacity, producing a schedule that’s immediately actionable on the shop floor. It can also be set up to consider constraints like material, labour, tooling availability, or whatever you like if you want to get more advanced with that. But in the simplest case, you click a button and you immediately have an actionable schedule. And then after scheduling, we need to capture that real-time information from the shop floor.

And for this, we use Shopfloor Insight. So while you could rely on paper and the standard Business Central production journals, Shopfloor Insight allows for real-time data capture from the shop floor, including time and attendance, time logged against production orders, jobs, service orders, non-productive time, and more. So this data flows directly into Business Central, and that can also feed back into the scheduling tools, helping to track progress and update those schedules. Or you could just use it for cost, or it does payroll and even more. So Shopfloor Insight, again, is essential for capturing that accurate real-time Shopfloor data. And then once production is scheduled and executed, we move to fulfillment again. So here we use the same tools we discussed on the fulfilment side. The fulfilment worksheet helps determine that the completed production order is ready to ship to meet a sales order requirement. Warehouse Insight enables picking.

And Warehouse Insight actually can also do things like production consumption and output and similar tasks. Shop Floor Insight covers consumption and output as well. But for a more mobile-friendly solution, Warehouse Insight does provide barcode scanning and tracking throughout the production process. And finally, we ship the product using Dynamic Ship. So again, that allows for shipping via parcel, LTL, and other carriers. If you don’t need all the features in Dynamic Ship, Order Ship Express, again, is an option for a streamlined free shipping solution. So these tools here, provide essential support for both your manufacturing and distribution environments. All right, so that’s enough of the PowerPoint. Let’s take a look at what these tools actually look like in Business Central. I’m going to start by going into the fulfilment worksheet. And I’m going to focus a bit more on fulfilment than manufacturing.

If you manufacture something, again, you’ve got to handle it in your warehouse and then eventually get it out the door. So the order fulfillment worksheet is where we start. Again, this tool helps to answer the critical question, what can I ship today? So it dynamically allocates your available inventory to all your orders in the system. So see here, I’ve got some transfer orders and some sales orders. And what this is showing me, if we look at this transfer order here, this is showing me that this transfer order is available to ship and of the items that I can ship, they’ve been fully allocated here. So if we go down and look at the order lines, I can see this item here, we need five, we’ve got just over 11,000 available, and therefore we’ve allocated five and we can ship that order. If I look at this sales order here, well, this one’s showing as not available. And that’s because for the items that are needed on this sales order, I don’t have any available at all.

This order here is showing as partially available, and that’s because only some of the items are available to ship here. You see this 1968-S is not available at all, but it’s showing as fully allocated, and that’s because of the items that I can ship, I’m able to ship those in full. And the way this works is again, it’s allocating your available inventory They’re just working down top to bottom, starting with the first order here and then allocating as it goes down the list. If you look at this item here, this SCM 1011, I’ve got 90 available. I need two, so I’m allocating two. But then any order further down the list here that needs this item is only going to have 88 available because I’ve allocated two to this order here. If we look at this order down the list, we can see it needs the same item here, but it’s only 88 available here.

Again, we’re allocating nine to this order. Again, any order further down the list that needs this same item will then only have 79 available to allocate. What this does is it allows you to remove the need to use reservations, though it does respect reservations if you’re using them and you can create reservations right from the worksheet here, but it’s really meant to help replace that. The default sort order here for the orders in the worksheet is by the plan shipment date. So the idea here is that you want to allocate your inventory to your oldest orders first, right? To help you get your back orders out the door. But you can set up completely custom views in here. So if I come in here, I can select a view and I’ve got a filtered view here for just my available orders, right? So these are all the orders that are sort of fully available to ship here.

I can come in, click this create picks and that’s going to create my warehouse picks or inventory picks depending on what you’re using in the system. That will also create your warehouse shipments if you’ve got warehouse shipments enabled as well. If you’re not using picks or shipments, that’s fine as well. You can just come in here and you can print the pick instructions directly for the sales orders as well. This process can either be run manually like I’m doing here, or you can set this up to run automatically with no user interaction. So you can have it run automatically every half hour, picking up any new purchase orders, production output, or newly available stock, and then automatically generating pick tickets for those items to fulfil your outbound orders. And again, by default, the default sort of sort order there is the planned shipment date, but you can come in here, you can sort, filter on any of these fields here.

So maybe you want to sort by the order amount and make sure you’re allocating your inventory to your biggest orders first. You can also do it by shipping agent, anything you like, really to decide which orders to prioritize for picking and shipping on any given day. Once the picks are created in the fulfilment worksheet, the next step is to go out to the warehouse and execute those picks. To do that, we’re going to use a handheld device. What I’ve got here is a data logic scanner, and here’s the screen as well on the left. You can see here as I touch the screen, you can see that update. What I’ve got here, I’m displaying a custom logo on this device. This could be your own logo, your own branding, or whatever image you like really. This is running Warehouse Insight. This is the full version of the product with all the functionality and even custom applications that are available.

So these two applications down at the bottom here, this fixed asset count and this proof of delivery, were actually installed from our add-on catalogue. So all these applications are managed within Business Central. So if there’s functionality that you need that isn’t there out of the box, our add-on catalogue may just have that. You click a button and you can install another app create an update to an existing application in the system or even create your applications from scratch if you prefer. So you’ve got tons of options for that. And again, WMS Express, which is a free product, looks the same. It’s just limited to those four key apps, which again are receiving, picking or shipping, bin-to-bin movements, and inventory counts. So you’ve only got those apps available, but it looks and works the same way. So to demonstrate this, I’m gonna jump right into picking. So again, I’ve used the fulfilment worksheet to generate my picks.

Now those pics are loading here on my handheld. We can only show the ones that are assigned to me or all the pics in the system. What I’m going to do is grab one of these pics and open it up. By the way, I’m using the physical keypad here. You don’t have to do that. You can use a device that is just a screen like this style of device here, or you can use a tablet or a phone. We support wearables, all that good stuff. But again, I’m going to choose this pic here. open it up, and then all I have to do here to do this pick is start scanning barcodes. Now, technically, you don’t have to scan barcodes. You can set it up to just manually enter everything that you’re doing, but I’m going to scan barcodes. The way I’m going to do it is I’m going to first identify the bin that I’m scanning at. I’ve disabled that, but by default, it does force you to scan the bin. I’ve disabled that so I don’t have to scan the bin if I don’t want to, or if you don’t have bins enabled, that’s fine too.

If you’re in a smaller area or retail outlet or something like that, it just won’t show you this bin column, and you can just go ahead and scan the items. But in my case, in my warehouse, I do have bins enabled, so I’m going to scan that bin. I’m going to start by scanning this bin S106 down on the third line here. The way I’m going to do that is I’ve generated a bunch of barcodes here using our free barcode generator tool. This is our sample barcode list. You can use this to generate your barcodes, things like that, your labels, add barcodes to reports, whatever you want. The barcode style you see on the left is called a data matrix barcode. We don’t really care what the barcode style is. It could be a typical linear barcode like the ones on the right there, or a QR code, or a data matrix code like this, whatever you like. Data matrices are nice because they hold a lot of information.

You can fit the item number, you know, lot number, serial number, expiration date, quantity, and unit of measure. All of that stuff can fit in one little barcode about this size. I’m going to go back to the scanning here. So what I’m going to do, again, decide to pick sort of that third line on the pick. And that’s where I want to start picking from. So I walk up to the bin. I scan the bin barcode. And what you see here down at the bottom is it identifies now that we are picking from this bin. And then I simply scan the item that I’m picking out of that particular bin. So in this case, I’m going to scan this 1908-S barcode here. And as soon as I do that, recognize it, I’ve got it set up to optionally show the item picture, right? And that can be useful if you’re doing your barcoding, because if I scan that and it shows me a picture of a chair and I’ve got a pair of socks in my hand.

Well, I know I’ve got a problem with that barcode and I can fix that issue before it propagates all the way through the system. And here I can optionally enter a quantity. You could set this up. So you’d have to scan this item 23 times if you like or have this start at zero. So you always have to type something in. Or if the barcode you’re scanning has the quantity in it, this could default to the barcode quantity. But in this case, I just have it set to default to the remaining quantity. So I can just press enter on my physical keypad here, or again, or press the OK button on the touch screen. And that updates Business Central in real-time. And now we know that we’ve picked that particular item. And that’s all we have to do really to execute a pick. Scan the item, optionally enter a quantity, and we’re good to go. And again, it supports lot numbers, serial numbers, expiration dates, and all that kind of stuff as well. And there’s a bunch of other things you can do here as well.

For example, if I’m having trouble finding an item in the bin, I can press the hotkey on my keypad here. And I could have used the touch screen to do that as well. But that’s going to drill down and show me all the details about that particular item. You can set colour roles here to change colours based on whatever criteria you define. So I’ve got the quantity coloured yellow if the bin quantity is less than 50. You can also set up fact boxes to display either on the bottom of the screen or on the right-hand side of the screen. You can change the size and display things like images, comments, pick or work instructions, or whatever you like. I can just tap this and make it full-screen. Lots of stuff you can do for the user interface. But this drill down gives me lots of context and lots of insight into what’s going on in the warehouse. I can use that to help me make decisions in the warehouse. Rather than having to
run back to the office an hour later to try and read what I wrote down on the back of my hand.

I’ve got everything I need on this computer that I’ve got in my hand, and I can make those decisions right on the warehouse floor. Right, and you have full control over all this stuff. You can change the menus, you can change the columns, you can change the applications. You can do whatever you like right from within Business Central. So that’s the picking process. And again, everything works the same way Whether you’re doing inventory counts, receiving, or all that, you scan an item, optionally enter a quantity, and you’re good to go. So let’s now say that I’ve finished doing my picks. I’ve got everything, and it’s ready to go out the door. So now I’m going to ship it. Now, technically, I can ship right from the handheld. You can see the ship application here. I can ship this from the handheld if I want. But I’m going to go into Business Central and do some shipping. And again, there are two ways we can ship in Business Central.

So one option for shipping is Order Ship Express, which again is the simplest and easiest way to handle your shipping. So let’s start with that. So go into my sales orders. Once I’m in my sales order here, I can see what needs to be shipped. So in this case, on this order, I have some mountain bikes that I need to ship. And with Order Ship Express, it’s incredibly straightforward. I can create shipping labels directly from this sales order. So to ship these bikes, I’m just going to select create shipping labels. Then I choose the carrier. So I’ll say maybe UPS ground for this shipment here. And then I enter the package dimensions. Maybe this one’s 25 by 20 by 15 and 5 kilogram. I could also use a predefined box size here if you want, but I’ll just use these dimensions that I’ve entered manually here.

And if I want to check the shipping cost, I can just click get the rate. And that’ll tell me here what it’s going to cost me. So it’ll fetch that cost from UPS. It’ll show what it’ll cost. And it’s also going to show here what we’re going to charge the customer, including any markup that we’ve added. And maybe the customer finds this rate a little bit high, and that’s because of the adult signature requirement here. So I can just change that option, and get the rate again, Looks like it didn’t get the response on that one. Not sure what’s going on there. We’ll see if UPS, there we go. Just the UPS test server can be a little bit finicky sometimes. But you see there we got the rate. Now this one is only showing about 15 pounds to ship that order. So that’s really all you need to do to do your shipping. You don’t even need to use that get rate option.

if you don’t want to, right? I could just come in here, and define my packages. Right now, I’ve just defined one package here, but it does support adding multiple packages. And I don’t even need to click Get Rate. I could just click Get Label, and the system’s then automatically going to print the carrier label for, again, UPS, FedEx, DHL, whatever carrier I’ve selected, and then I can ship it out the door. It’s just that simple. So that’s how Order Ship Express works. Of course, Dynamic Ship offers a more comprehensive set of features, including packaging options, LTL shipping, less than truckload, and other shipping tools as well. That’s the basic fulfilment process. Use the order fulfilment worksheet to generate your picks, use the handheld devices to execute those picks, and then use Order Ship Express or Dynamic Ship to ship those orders out the door.

Next, let’s briefly discuss some of the manufacturing capabilities. First, I’m going to go into the graphical scheduler here to view all of my production orders. The production orders we see here were generated from a forecast using our enhanced forecasting worksheet. That worksheet takes all your sales history and sends it to the AI forecasting model in Microsoft Azure, which then generates that forecast. I got this forecast, but you can see here, a lot of these operations were set for the same day at the same time. Friday afternoon on this laser cutter. So clearly, this is not an executable schedule. This view, by the way, is completely configurable. So you can change the colours, the text, and the display details to suit your needs just by configuring the views here. For example, I’ve added the machine loading percentages and totals and customized the colour coding based on those values. So you can see that this laser cutter here is completely overloaded. So what do we do?

One option is to manually drag and drop the orders to reschedule them. I can move jobs to specific machines or different days, but really no one wants to spend all day dragging and dropping to create a workable schedule. The alternative to that is to simply click generate schedule. I’m going to set this, I’ve got some older data here, but I’m going to set this to run, let’s just say that’s for tomorrow, at 4 p.m., so starting with the afternoon shift, and I’m going to have that run a 30-day schedule. So when I hit go, the system goes out, and processes that schedule. So in this case, I’ve got around 60 production orders. For larger quantities, say 1,000 orders, this may take a few minutes to run. But during this time, crunches all the numbers and generates this production schedule here that is actually executable on the shop floor.

Unlike the default schedule that we got from Business Central, which may unrealistically suggest doing everything on a single machine at the same time. You can see here, that I’ve got all the historical records of all the schedules I’ve run since the beginning of time. Here are all the ones I’ve generated. Then we can see here for a schedule, how many orders are going to be late, how many are going to be early, or how many are going to be on time. This level of information just isn’t available in standard Business Central. This supports scenarios as well. So for instance, if the schedule doesn’t look optimal, I could add another shift or decide to outsource certain tasks and see how those adjustments affect the overall plan. If I want a visual representation of this, I can open that graphical scheduler again to display the same production orders. So here we’ve got those same production orders, but now if we look at this laser work center here.

The system has assigned the jobs to the most suitable machine. So it’s avoiding any overloads on a single day. So instead of everything piling up for Friday afternoon at the same time, it’s now distributing that workload effectively. The purple bars by the way here represent setup time and the green bars show the runtime. So the system can also optimize setup times. For example, if multiple similar parts are scheduled consecutively, it can eliminate that redundant setup time and it’ll pull orders ahead in time to further reduce setup times. and things like that. If we look at this particular item here, this long bracket typically runs on this 10-foot machine. But if that machine becomes too busy, the system will intelligently select an alternate machine to handle the job. So you see the same part here being run on this 120-ton press bait. So it will make those smart scheduling decisions in real-time when you generate that schedule, which is the press of a button. We’ve got a fully optimized schedule.

That’s ready for the shop floor now to work against. So the team now can see the order in which these jobs should be performed. And then with shop floor insight, they can log the actual times, output, and other relevant data. And the next time that schedule is generated, it will consider that data to refine the plan further. Again, you can set up constraints based on labour, materials, tooling, electricity prices, or any other relevant factors that you may want to use. Once your routings are set, You can go to AppSource, you can install MXAPS, click Generate Production Schedule, and you’ll get a schedule. You don’t need to do any additional setup to have that work. If you want, you can start adding constraints or other things, but again, very quick and simple to get it up and running. But it’s advanced enough that it can handle the most complex production environments out there. We’ve got billion-dollar parts plants running this exact tool.

So alongside scheduling, again, our shop floor insight solution captures actual labour data. I’m not demonstrating that today, but it supports shared terminals, handheld devices, and tablets for logging labour time and other prediction data, feeding that directly back into Business Central. So those are just a few of the applications we have available for manufacturing and distribution. We also have apps for quality inspection and control, product configuration, maintenance management, cloud printing, and a whole bunch more. For further details, you can visit our website. You’ll find detailed demo videos for each of the applications, or you can contact Montpellier to help you out or to schedule a more in-depth demo, or discuss which tools may best suit your environment. So with that, I’d like to thank you very much for your time.