Dynamics 365 Business Central for Leading CNC Firm In USA

13 October 2021

The Client

The client was a mid-sized metal fabrication and CNC machining shop having their setup across Illinois and Michigan.

The Need

The client had been in the business for nearly 3 decades servicing many manufacturing and automobile factories in the area and had 2 shops that managed different clients and orders as a result, their business started to struggle to scale up as their current ERP system was not designed to address the needs of a busy job shop.

The Challenge

The shop was predominantly managed by the lackluster ERP system and spreadsheets and a lot of processes were still manual and reporting and managing schedules was a total challenge. When a task such as Estimating and Quoting a job needed to be performed there was a simple form that was created 20 years prior.

As the company grew report tracking became an issue and time-consuming prone to mistakes. For example, Bill of Material Shortage Reports had become widely inaccurate, which led to time being wasted correcting and which ultimately led to employee costs being higher.

Strategy

Star Knowledge after an initial discussion with the client’s Floor manager understood that the company needed a clear overhaul in their way of operations to sort out the chaos that had started to emerge as they grew.

The answer to this organization’s issues was Dynamics 365 Business Central integrated with Microsoft Power BI, and Microsoft 365. This integrated software combination allowed organizations such as this job shop to connect their people and processes like never before. From day one, ordering, reporting, selling, quoting, invoicing, and manufacturing was easier and faster.​​ Dynamics 365 Business Central provided many new functioning features for this shop and some of them are:

Statistics Availability: With Business Central viewing statistics was simple. When clicking on a job from the Job List you can see a Job Summary, Job Changes, Job Purchase Order Change, and Notes in the page’s side Fact Box.

Budget viewing: The system can be used to view the budget using Cost Categories and you can compare your budget by your predefined Cost Categories. Cost Categories is a user-defined unlimited amount list. This organization used Field Labor, Freight, Machine, Material, Miscellaneous, Overhead, Service, Shop Labor, Travel, Subcontractors, and a few others. Within the statistics, page employees can see the estimated cost, actual cost, estimated hours, remaining hours, and a lot more. The other view is through the sequence of the work being done (tasks within the job).

Job Sub-categories: Once the job has been created employees are now able to split this job into subcategories. For example, this organization has its master job and then splits this into 3 subcategories: Design, Fabrication Portion, and Installation and Billing. Employees can now see Tasks and Bill of Materials for each job subcategory.

Procurement: Employees can now do all of the buying for the Master Job and its subcategories from a single screen. Items can be imported directly from CAD software or typed in as needed. Purchasing is done much quicker because of the ability to generate Purchase Orders with ease.

Results

• Increased productivity and reduced costs for getting jobs done with the reduced month-end closing effort by nearly 75%
• Integration with Outlook and PowerBI increased the key decision-making ability of the stakeholders on the fly.
• Standardized templates and business processes made the work process and budgeting straightforward across both shops.
• Automated workflow and planning report planning job schedules with ease.

Technology Used

• Office 365
• Dynamics 365 Business Central
• Power BI

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