I met Bart Pattijn from Belgium for the fifth episode of the Business Central Manufacturing Show. He is ERP consultant at Christiaens BV, and actually didn’t start his career in an IT company. Instead, he initially was a production manager in several food companies. Hence, he has plenty of real-life experience when it comes to manufacturing and planning. He has been working with Navision since 2004. Our conversion quickly became very hands-on, and Bart managed to unveil two underestimated superpowers of Business Central to me: this is the upgrade-ability and the extensibility. Both in combination enable manufacturing companies to achieve more with Business Central, and to cope with the ongoing need for speed and need for change.
In the beginning of the interview, Bart used a phrase that caught my attention. He spoke about the Business Central platform instead of the Business Central "system" or software. Although the word "platform" sounds as something rather inflexible, the opposite is the case.
Partners and customers can build on it - they can extend it so that manufacturing customers can achieve more. Actually, the Business Central platform allows for an easy individualization via bespoke apps ... and there are lot of manufacturing apps out there (note to myself: this would be a nice topic for another podcast/ blog).
Interestingly enough, Dynamics 365 Business Central remains upgrade-able, and this is for sure an underestimated value for manufacturing companies. Given the rapid changes that everybody finds itself if, an always current platform allows for rapid changes and a much higher agility.
So to some degree, upgrade-ability and extensibility are two hidden superpowers of Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, and hence also for manufacturing clients.
You can tune in below 👇 on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Stitcher, TuneIn or anywhere you get your podcasts.