Business Central – A Modern Solution That Integrates Easily

Microsoft Dynamics enables businesses to develop custom solutions that are easy to configure along with a wide range of functional features. It is the go-to choice for businesses that want minimal configuration, combined with ease-of-use to generally improve business processes and deliver a modern, scalable, and future-proof solution.

What does Business Central bring with itself?

Business Central is fast to implement, easy to configure in product design, development, implementation, and usability. This flexibility allows users to use Business Central with either cloud or on-premise datacenter, depending upon their use case. It offers a great user experience that is consistent across Windows, Android, and iOS devices helping you run your business anywhere. Business Central offers multilanguage support giving the flexibility to view the application in the language of their choice. The availability of multiple languages from all around the world has been assisting businesses. This country-based classification of Business Central provides functionality that has been adapted towards a particular country’s market requirements.

Microsoft data center provides encryption that helps users protect their data from unauthorized access maintaining high standards of security. It also allows users to make informed decisions using connected data to better fulfill the project requirements and reach the optimal level of output. Business Central helps its users to make effective decisions using insights on project’s current status, and resource-usage metrics.

Using MS Dynamics 365 Business Central for App Development at Xgrid

With Dynamics 365 Business Central revolutionizing the ways of doing businesses, team of application developers at Xgrid adapted this solution for managing multiple jobs and different tasks assignments to enhance the functionality of the construction application for a notable customer. The purpose of this app is to provide a central control to the manager while assigning tasks to the on-site team. It provides a full visibility of on-site tasks and helps in the better management of operations. The solution has a desktop version coupled with an iPad application, to lubricate field task management, resource allocation and bridge the communication gap between the off-field managers and on-site employees effectively.

These applications along with a legacy SQL server based database use an enhanced business management capability. For the dynamic management of offsite projects, we used Microsoft Dynamics Business Central (on-premises) version to extract and store the data from web applications and legacy databases. The solution leveraged the dynamic capabilities of web services to offer data-rich, cognitive services.

Business Central provides flexibility to customize the applications which allowed us to extend the existing functionality of Job Management module in the construction application. This led us to get the on-premise functionality with robust ERP functionality across the job management module for the construction app. We developed our extension on top of the application to meet our client’s business needs. Our developed extension connected the Business Central web services to the API layer of our solution. This acted as a middleware between the database and the front-ends of the application. Through Dynamics Business Central Web Services, the application users can view real-time data that helps them in dynamic management of their off-site projects. All workers, contractors, and suppliers are now able to perform their tasks keeping each crew member informed and updated all the time.

The second module was to schedule periodic data processing by configuring Job Queues in Business Central. These jobs continuously synced data to and from legacy databases. One of key usage of Business Central in the complete solution was to bridge legacy solutions with a range of mobile devices like iPhone, iPad and Windows client for day to day user activities.

Dynamics Business Central helps businesses to streamline their application processes and present logical data as per user needs for consumption by the Desktop and Mobile applications. The solution also employed the resource module and enhanced the functionality to provide users with the requested material for a specific job. This further enabled the procurement department to generate purchase orders based on requested materials from different job locations. The ability to have data in real time helps the decision makers to make timely decisions without a need for data migration to transition to this robust platform.