15 May Do you need to use Manufacturing in Dynamics NAV?

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central introduces Essentials and Premium licenses. The difference between is that the Premium license gives access to the functionality of Manufacturing and Service Management.

Therefore, if you are considering working with Dynamics 365 Business Central and do you want to manage your production processes with the ERP, you should ask yourself if you need the manufacturing module. Depending on the type of production you do in your company, you should know that there are scenarios in which it will not be necessary to upgrade to a Premium license. Taking into account the price difference between an Essentials license and a Premium one, it is advisable to make this prior consideration before the start of the project.

Difference between Assembly Management and Manufacturing

To decide if it is necessary or not to use the manufacturing module, we must first be clear about the difference between the concepts of ‘assembly’ and ‘manufacturing’. Both assembly mangament and manufacturing, in a nutshell, have the same purpose: obtain a final product from the consumption of other products in our inventory. But there are differences: let’s see them!

The assembly process is based on defining a final product indicating what products form it. At the time of selling this final product, all the products that comprise it are automatically consumed from the inventory.

On the other hand, the manufacturing process has the same purpose: to define the final product you want to reach through the consumption of different products (components). The difference lies in the fact that apart from managing the inventory we have the need to manage in much more detail all the tasks to be performed to achieve the final product.

In other words, assembly uses only the list of materials while manufacturing also takes into account other aspects such as manufacturing routes, times, calendars, subcontracting, machines, capacities, etc.

Manufacturing: more complete module

Obviously, as it is an additional module, the functionality is much more extensive. For example, it allows to define different parameters to carry out a detailed follow-up of the manufacture of each product:

• Sequences of operations to be carried out for the manufacture of the final product.
• Defining the task processing times.
• Scheduling the work shifts of the operators.
• Plant calendars, which allow analyzing the workload per day and work center.
  Manufacturing tracking. It allows specifying if a production has been stopped for any reason (mechanical breakdown, material defect, etc.).
• Measures of product quality.

Moreover, this module has different tools to analyze all the information, see statistics of production costs, etc.

Now it’s up to you to analyze your manufacturing process and decide if it’s a product assembly or if you have to control a manufacturing process in different stages. If you’re not sure, contact us here and we’ll help you decide which circuit to implement in Dynamics 365 Business Central. You can also check here the prices of the different Dynamics 365 Business Central implementation plans.