Unlocking the value of Business Central

Peter Filitz, Neil Halliday, and Eirini Katsampa discuss all things Business Central, the cloud accounting and enterprise resource planning application used by small and medium-sized businesses.

They cover the advantages of Business Central, such as its integration with other Microsoft applications and the availability of third-party apps on Microsoft's AppSource, as well as its suitability for businesses of various all sizes and sectors, adapting to the specific needs of each business

Neil also highlights the value of BCN's unique offerings, including their Evo Supply suite of products, and explains how BCN can help businesses with implementation, integration, and ongoing support.

Takeaways

• Business Central is a cloud accounting and enterprise resource planning application.
• Business Central is suitable for businesses of various sizes and is adaptable to their specific needs.
• Business Central offers integration with other Microsoft applications and access to third-party apps on Microsoft's AppSource.
• BCN provides unique offerings, including its Evo Supply suite of products, and can assist businesses with implementation and support.

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Transcript

Peter 0:01

Good morning and welcome to today's podcast. Today we have the pleasure of speaking to Neil Halliday and Irini Katsampa. Neil is one of our chief dynamics architects here at BCN, along with Irini, who looks after the customer continuity team. And we're going to be discussing all things business central. So stay tuned to learn more about this ERP system, which is transforming businesses in today's world. Neil, thanks for joining us. Do you want to tell us a little bit about yourself and your role at BCN?

SPEAKER_02 0:36

Sure. So I'm Neil Halliday. I'm the Chief Dynamics Architect here at BCN. So my role is to effectively make sure that all our teams and all our customers are using Business Central effectively with all the new technologies. And I'm also in charge of one of our vertical solutions, our Evo Supply solution, that we'll be talking about a little later on.

Peter 0:56

Excellent. Thank you so much. Irini, why don't you give us uh a quick overview on yourself and your role at BCN?

SPEAKER_01 1:03

I joined BCN a few months ago, and I'm responsible for um continuing the relationship with the customers after GoLive. So we want to make sure our customers have the best experience, not just while they're doing the project, to get them live to Business Central, but also after. And um I've been working with uh Microsoft, Novision, ERPs, and implementations and partners for more than 16 years.

Peter 1:31

Excellent. Thank you so much for joining us on today's conversation. So I think let's start with what is business central. Neil, do you think you could give the audience a high-level overview in terms of what it is exactly?

SPEAKER_02 1:46

Yeah, sure, of course, can. Okay, so what is business central? That's quite a big topic. Essentially, Microsoft Dynamics 365 at Business Central is part of the Microsoft 365 portfolio of business applications. And it's a cloud accounting and enterprise resource planning application, ERP solution, that's used by over 30,000 small and medium-sized businesses. What it does, it handles end-to-end functionalities for business management process, etc., from finance all the way through to manufacturing, should we need that.

Peter 2:21

And you touched on the size and demographic of businesses uh that it's sort of aimed at. So small to medium-sized businesses, how would you define that criteria in a little more detail?

SPEAKER_02 2:32

Okay, so um that's quite uh an interesting one. So when we look at an ideal user of business central, we don't really look at what you would normally look at to say uh this is a small business or medium-sized business. We actually look at how the business works. Okay, so when you actually look at business central, it provides a lot of functionality that larger businesses can actually use. But what we need to do is then identify whether or not there are larger products within the Dynamics 365 portfolio that would actually better suit. So the way that I personally look at it is if you're a business that has a few uh companies within your group of businesses and you have some simple forms of consolidation, business central will work for you. However, if you're a massive corporation type business, then Business Central is kind of outside what you would be looking at. There are other Dynamics 365 applications. So um we work with businesses that range from uh 10 million turnover all the way up to 150, 200 million turnover type businesses, anywhere between five users, ten users, all the way up to 200 users.

Peter 3:45

Thanks, Neil, for that overview. So I guess what comes out of the box, Irini, is this one for you to take? Can you give us a little more context in terms of what exactly the clients will get from Business Central?

SPEAKER_01 4:00

Yes, thank you, Peter. Just to go a step before that, we mentioned that Business Central is an ERP system, enterprise resource planning system. But what that means, every single business they have sales, purchase, they're buying stationery, utilities, they're doing some transactions. Um, they have to pay their staff, they have to pay suppliers, receiving payments from customers, moving stock in their warehouse, and all these transactions they have to be recorded somewhere. And as they're recorded as transactions, they are producing some general ledger entries that finance need in order to be able to submit their VAT returns, to pay taxes, and generally to record their balance seat like assets they have, the capital of the business, just to know who you pay and when you pay them, or when you're gonna receive money from your customers. So an ERP system for a small and and and medium business is a system where you can record all these transactions. For business central, it has all these things that a business will need. It has the finance, which is the core, where you monitor your cas uh management, bank accounts, uh, you monitor your fixed assets like equipment you have in your business, but it's covering account receivable, account payable, so you can see your cash flow. The business can monitor which categories of product selling more where uh my customers haven't paid yet, uh, where my cash flow is moving and all these things. Business Central also has the operation side because that's all finance. So it has the details of sales, quotations and orders, demand forecasts, it has purchase and procurement, reorder points for stock, to advise us of what we need to buy. So it's going to different directions, not just the finance, it has it's for sales department, procurement department, even a bit of marketing to monitor opportunities. And then you go into projects because you have businesses where they're not dealing uh with stock necessarily. And you have then also some businesses where they're doing manufacturing and also service repairs. It has also a simple human resource module and they have expanded the the employees module to be able to also monitor payments, not on the payroll side, more for expenses.

Peter 6:30

That's great, Irene. I think that's a super useful overview. So just to sort of summarize what you said there is it's a centralized business system which brings all the departments together under one umbrella, focusing on finance, sales, purchasing, uh logistics operations, and then touches on marketing and HR. So essentially all the key components a business needs to operate efficiently in today's modern world. I guess one for you, Neil, what makes this better than some of the competitors we see out there today?

SPEAKER_02 7:08

So, well, as Irini just said there, Peter, Business Central is packed with features, packed with capabilities. As well as that, Business Central also has a place on Microsoft's app source, that is Microsoft's Marketplace. What happens there is customers that are using Business Central also can go to the app source, go to the marketplace, and have a look at the thousands of apps that are actually available around the world that partners, users have actually created that extend the functionality of Business Central as well. And that's absolutely brilliant because if there is something missing that a particular customer or user needs, they can see if that's available and it saves them from actually having to reinvent the wheel. So that's one of the reasons why it's such a good application. But there's always some need for some sort of customization, something like that. And Business Central actually allows that customization as well. Partners such as ourselves can actually extend the functionality of Business Central. Adding new features might just be a new field, it may be a complete new module, it could be simple, it could be complex. And that's a really, really great feature that Business Central has. As well as that, it's a Microsoft application, so it sits with the technology that Microsoft offers. In terms of Microsoft 365, for example, there is an Outlook client, you can edit data in Excel with the full validation in the application, and there's also a Teams client as well that you can collaborate with your colleagues on, and that's a read-only client, so you can actually collaborate on Business Central data without actually having to have a license for those users. That's phenomenal, that's brilliant. Nobody else offers that functionality. And on top of that, as well, Business Central this year has been voted the ERP system of 2024 by Forbes Advisor. So I think that's the second year in a run that they've recommended that. And so that is why, in my book, Business Central is better than any other ERP system in the small and medium enterprise.

Peter 9:11

That's a really good overview. And I think you touched on a lot of key components there. So I think the integration with a Microsoft application, the wider stack, is obviously a big win. So for businesses out there who've embraced the Microsoft 365 ecosystem as their productivity suite of services, you know, this absolutely makes sense for them to leverage this added functionality. And also, I guess the insights you can bring into the system with Power BI as well as the whole power automation suite of services, right, to help support the functionality gained with the system. I guess that sort of brings us into what does BCN offer and how do we work with businesses for understanding their requirements and scoping a solution to meet their needs.

SPEAKER_02 10:05

Yeah, absolutely. So if you engage with BCN for a business central implementation, we can help with that end-to-end implementation of the application. So whether that's a simple finance implementation or whether it's a more complex distribution warehousing manufacturing type system, we have a whole team of consultants that are working with Irene that can help our users get the best from Business Central. Whether that's a business central implementation that's happening brand new, whether it's an existing implementation of BCNs, and we're working with our customer to actually enhance that even further. Maybe their business has changed, for example, or whether or not it's another business central user that's perhaps not quite getting the best out of their business central with the partner that they have. We speak to a lot of users that come to BCN to actually ask us for help to actually enhance what they're doing to get better usage out of their business central system. So not only that from the consulting side, but we've also got a development team for our business central area, and that team can help create any of the customizations that the customer may need. Maybe a gap has been identified, a new requirement for a customer has come out of the woodwork, or maybe the customer's changed their way of doing business. Our development team can pick that up and drive that forward and actually introduce these new enhancements into the business central application itself. Not only that, not just small tweaks and changes, we can create brand new modules as well, which we'll talk about a little bit later on when we start looking at some of the BCN products. And those modules can actually be customer specific as well, should a customer need it. On top of that, we've also got our dedicated support team who's there always on hand to actually answer any queries that uh our users may actually have. And our team there is backed up by the consulting team and the development team, should any sort of deeper analysis be needed in terms of the questions that the customers have.

Peter 12:08

That's great. Thanks, Neil. It certainly sounds like the team has all bases covered. I guess, you know, there are a lot of Microsoft partners out there. Business Central, as we know, is a system that is being adopted by more and more businesses. But for our audience's sake, what makes BCN unique?

SPEAKER_02 12:26

One of the things that truly makes us unique is the team that we actually have. So we've got a whole abundance of experience and talent within our team. If customers are engaged with us, they can be confident that they're in safe hands. Just to put that in perspective a little bit, some of our team members that we have in our business central team have been working within the Nevision, Dynamics NAV, and Business Central all through the iterations for almost 30 years. That is a long time within that application suite. So our team have really got that experience so our customers can really be confident that they're in safe hands. So that's on the BC team, but it's not just our business central team. BCN don't just do business central. So the role of power platform, data, and AI, they're increasing across business central implementations these days. And BCN are one of the few partners in the UK that actually hold all six Microsoft designations. And what that means is we can bring an additional wealth of knowledge to the ERP party, if you like. So we can bring that experience in data analysis, AI. Our PowerPlatform team can actually help bring Power BI dashboarding reporting or perhaps a Power App into play as well. Maybe a small power app that sits in the warehouse, something like that. So our entire team can now get involved in business central implementations, and that's quite a unique thing within the business central market. On top of that, BCN also have some value ads. We've got our ready-built BCN product suite, which if anybody listening to this wants to go and have a look on AppSource, you can see we're using AppSource, we're available on AppSource. And what that allows us to do is introduce applications and solutions into the business central world so that our customers can certainly benefit from those, but also other users around the world can actually benefit from those as well. And those are applications that throughout our 30 years of experience almost, we know that people are asking for these things over and over again. Maybe there's a gap there with Business Central. We've plugged that gap and we have that as an offering so the customers don't need to keep reinventing that wheel. We've also got our vertical solutions that we'll talk about a little bit later on. Our Evo Supply solution, which is perfect for importation, distribution, and manufacturing businesses, and also our Evo Auction application, which is a back-end management solution for auction houses. So there's quite a lot of things there that make BCN unique within the business central market.

Peter 15:04

Indeed, indeed. And uh I think you know that all works together in harmony to ultimately deliver on what the clients want and need an ERP system, which is boosting productivity, automating, and improving processes. So that leads us nicely into the Evo Supply suite of products that you've just touched on. Do you want to elaborate in a little more detail around the suite of products and how customers of ours are taking advantage of this set?

SPEAKER_02 15:35

Yeah, of course. So let me give you a quick overview of what Evo Supply is. Um, I think that will help give the audience an insight into why we've actually created this application as well. So Evo Supply is a suite of business applications that sits on top of Business Central. They're designed over many, many years to help businesses that are working in the supply chain sector to streamline all their business processes. So the application's been in development for the last two decades. We've had software experts, industry experts all involved in the design of this application. And we think that it's the most feature-rich solution for the supply chain industry. And what it actually does, it meets the needs of all those businesses that are involved in importation, distribution, manufacturing. Whether or not that's just a very, very simple or small drop shipping concern. Maybe that's one user operating out of their garage selling things direct via Amazon, or maybe it's a large multi-million pound business importing hundreds and hundreds of products from all around the world and then distributing them to major retailers. Wherever you sit within that range of businesses, Evo Supply has basically got you covered. What do we actually do within Evo Supply? Well, we build on a lot of the functionality that Business Central already has, but we enhance it to make sure it's more streamlined, uh, reducing the number of clicks, reducing the amount of data duplication, reducing the amount of data entry, for example. So we've got streamlined sales and purchasing modules within uh Evo Supply. We have a whole transit management application that its primary usage is designed just for the tracking of containers from the factory to the local port to your warehouse. We cover all of that and can track where your container is. We've got added tools in there like a visual container builder, for example, that helps the users quickly and efficiently build the content of their container, even down to a little graphic that shows you in real time where the vessel is that's got your container. You can track that, you can actually see it moving across the water as well. We've enhanced the inventory and the warehousing functionality within Business Central in order to make that more streamlined for our users. We've introduced advanced picking features, advanced shipping operations for the users that are taking orders from sales channels like Amazon, for example. We've introduced automated document handling as well in terms of email uh notifications. And finally, and the big one for me is our data bridge application, which is a crucial and fundamental part of Evo Supply. And what that does, that opens up our Evo Supply platform for integration to third-party warehouses, integrations to your suppliers, but most importantly, integrations to your customers. So we can take orders from Amazon, eBay, Wayfair, Linworks, and also some of our customers use tablet-based sales applications as well. We interface into those as well. So what we're doing is we're bringing all those points of data entry into Evo Supply via our data bridge application, automating it and making sure that everything runs as smooth as possible. And our users just need to deal with exceptions rather than checking every single order. So one of the examples that I can give there as an overview of that, let's say we're receiving an order from Amazon. The first time that we actually know that there's an order from Amazon is when that there is a pick in the warehouse to tell one of the warehouse workers to actually go and get the goods. It just comes straight through into the system, all processed automatically, and it's there for us to actually dispatch. So that's in a bit of a nutshell what Evo Supplied does.

SPEAKER_01 19:31

Just to comment on this, that this is really important. Where I was talking before, what an ERP system is, usually we you had as a business a system to just lock in and out transactions and that's all. And maybe you are be able to take some report and some statistics. Now, what Neil described it's where, especially after the COVID, a lot of small and medium businesses start going other ways of selling the projects, not old fashioned seller going out. To other businesses and trying to sell. So even the business to business now, it's through websites, and a lot of businesses start selling also business to consumer, not just business to businesses. So having a system that can capture all these transactions and automatically give updates to customers and to the website and also be able for some small and medium businesses where they don't have their own logistics, be able to utilize external logistics. But historically, they had to monitor all these things through spreadsheets and a lot of human effort and also with a lot of mistakes. So having all these integrations and offering that to not just big organizations but also to small and media businesses, it's a huge benefit for businesses.

Peter 20:50

Yeah, absolutely. I I think you hit the nail on the head there. It's probably more pertinent for the smaller businesses because at the end of the day they tend to have less resources to manage this. And as you've said there, it's opened up the market to them. They've got so many more channels that they can distribute their goods and services to, and this is a great platform that allows them to do that efficiently and at a lower cost. And I think taking our 30 plus years of experience and the expertise that we've gleaned across the different industries and sectors, the fact that we've been able to package a lot of that intellectual property and uh benefits into the Evo Supply product suite and making that now available to small to medium businesses is a great opportunity for them to take advantage of that. And I'm guessing, and correct me, Yanil, but with clients being able to tap into these pre-configured applications and modules, it will also reduce potentially the implementation time of the systems because we're templatising some of the modules, and it also makes it more cost-effective from a development and implementation perspective, right?

SPEAKER_02 22:04

Yeah, of course. Yeah. So our product is a template, all that functionality that we've just been describing there is out of the box. So that literally gets lifted and put into a user's business central database, and then it just comes down to configuration and data. There's no heavy development that needs to be done because we've got that, it's already there. And one of the things that our users can actually benefit from as well is because our Evo Supply solution is our vertical product, we're constantly changing that as well. We're adding new features all the time. So not only do they get what they implement on, they're constantly being updated as well with these new features, this new functionality, etc. So the application never stands still, which is a really for me is a really exciting part of Business Central and working with products in Business Central. You're always moving forward.

Peter 22:58

Yeah, that's so true. So I guess the burning question for a lot of the audience listening today is how do they get started? What is the process?

SPEAKER_02 23:09

Well, there's a couple of ways you can get started, really. Everything starts with a conversation, really. So, Peter, they phone you up and have a conversation. You know, get in touch with BCN, talk to your account manager if you're already a customer, get in touch with our business central accounts team. Alternatively, if you check us out on AppSource, you will see that we've got a lot of applications on AppSource there. Click the contact me button on AppSource, and that will then start a process of getting in touch with us. And then what we can do is start to have some conversations about how BCN can help you, how Evo Supply can help within your organization. And once we've had that conversation and Evo Supply is the application for you, Business Central is the application for you, the world's your oyster.

Peter 23:54

Excellent. So I guess um coming to the end of today's conversation, closing thoughts, I guess let me defer to Irini first. Any thoughts or experience you wish to share with our audience?

SPEAKER_01 24:10

Um NERP limitations are always stressful times for our customers. They have their everyday things to do. And on the top, we coming in and we're asking them, do a cleansing exercise on the data, think about how they want to restructure the data, think about how they want to report in the business, think about the future years to make sure they take the right decision of how a system will help them to grow as a business. So I understand that our customers sometimes are really stressed with this decision. At PCN, we have people that we went through this stress. A lot of our consultants or developers, they used to be users, especially our consultants. I used to be a user as well. I working as a cost accountant in the manufacturing business where we changed our system to NAV 2.7, I think, a few years ago. So this is something that uh BCN can offer to the customers reassurance that professionals that have been through this journey and can help them to take the right decisions. And on the top, obviously, it's a product that updates every six months, which means it's growing with the needs that the business has. We are there to help customers on this journey. We are a business where we're not just saying that the customer will be live and then that's it, we finish the project. My role and my team's role will be to make sure they have a very good journey through next phases and improvements and changes because every business is changing, the market is changes. So we are there to support them.

Peter 25:49

Fantastic. Thanks, Irene. Yes, it's very much a journey, right? That the businesses go on, and as you say, as the business grows, develops, and evolves, you know, it's important that they have someone at their side, a trusted partner who can help guide them through that and develop the system to ensure it stays on track with the business needs. Neil, over to you. Any closing thoughts?

SPEAKER_02 26:13

Um, Irene was just mentioning there about the updates and things like that that happen with Business Central. So for me, that is a really exciting thing for users of Business Central in that there's minor releases every month and there's two major releases every year. So, in effect, customers become versionless, so there's no big upgrades that need to be done. Once you're in your business central platform, you're there, you're growing automatically with Microsoft. Now, there's lots of things that actually come as a result of that. The big hot topic for me is AI. So the next release of Business Central is actually bringing in a whole bunch of AI features, and users of Business Central get those features for free. So it's a very, very exciting time just now for Business Central to be able to actually start to leverage some of these new technologies to see how they can help you in your workplace day-to-day. While Microsoft is introducing AI into Business Central, we're introducing AI as well in our roadmap for our Evo Supply products and our other product suites that we have. That is seriously exciting because it means we can start to actually bring some really nice, useful, and pretty cool features as well into our application suite.

Peter 27:30

Excellent. Thank you so much for joining us on today's conversation. I think it was super informative and it gives our audience a great overview on what Business Central can do for their business. Thank you so much for joining us today. If you want to know more about BCN and how we can help your business move forward, please feel free to visit our website www.bcn.co.uk. There you'll find a wealth of information regarding the products and services we are specializing in. Stay tuned and don't forget to subscribe and like our podcast. We look forward to welcoming you on the next one. All the best.