Production orders are used to manage the conversion of purchased materials into manufactured items. Production orders route work through various work or machine centres on the shop floor.

This enables you to run the agile manufactuing, supply planning and capacity planning modules.

Create and management different versions of the manufacturing bill of materials and routings.

The planned capacity of a work centre consists of the availability of the corresponding machine centres and the additional planned availability of the work centre. The planned availability of the work centre group is, therefore, the sum of all corresponding availabilities of the machine centres and work centres.

A production bill of material (BOM) holds master data that describes the components and subassemblies used in the production of a parent item. Once a production order is created for that parent item, its production BOM will govern the calculation of material requirements as represented on the Prod. Order Components page.

The production operations required to transform inputs into finished goods must be planned daily or weekly depending on the volume and nature of the products. Business Central offers features to supply for anticipated and actual demand from sale, assembly, and production as well as features for distribution planning using stockkeeping units and location transfers.

Manage finite loading of capacity constraints resources. Taking capacity into account so that no more work is assigned to a work center than the capacities can be expected to execute during a given time period. This is a simple tool without any optimization. Used with the Order Promising module, Finite Loading also enables the system to calculate capable-to-promise (CTP).

Inventory management is a trade-off between customer service and managing your cost. On one hand, a low inventory requires less working capital, but, on the other hand, stock-outs potentially lead to missed sales. The Sales and Inventory Forecast extension predicts potential sales using historical data and gives a clear overview of expected stock-outs. Based on the forecast, the extension helps create replenishment requests to your vendors and saves you time.

The program distinguishes between three types of capacities. These are arranged hierarchically. Each level contains the subordinate levels.

The top level is the work centre group. Work centres are assigned to the work centre groups. Every work centre can only belong to one work centre group.

You can assign various machine centres to every work centre. A machine centre may only belong to one work centre.

The planned capacity of a work centre consists of the availability of the corresponding machine centres and the additional planned availability of the work centre. The planned availability of the work centre group is, therefore, the sum of all corresponding availabilities of the machine centres and work centres.

Forecasting functionality is used to create anticipated demand; actual demand is created from sales and production orders. During creation of the Master Production Schedule (MPS), the forecast is netted against the sales and production orders. The Component option on the forecast determines which type of requirements to take into consideration in the netting process. If the forecast is for a sales item, only sales orders net the forecast. If it is for components, only dependent demand from production order components net the forecast.

Forecasting allows your company to create "what if" scenarios and efficiently and cost-effectively plan for and meet demand. Accurate forecasting can make a critical difference in customer satisfaction levels with regard to order promising dates and on-time delivery.