An insider's view into Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central

The guest in episode 26 of Martin's Business Central Manufacturing Show was Andrei Panko. Andrei is a program manager in the Business Central engineering team at the Microsoft Development Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. Having a Microsoft employee as a guest on the podcast was really a novelty. In the other episodes so far, all speakers were Business Central manufacturing experts working for a Microsoft partner. So this podcast provides most interesting insider insights into how things work in the Microsoft Business Central development team.

Andrei started working as a consultant, developer, and project manager in 2004 - back then it was Dynamics NAV, of course - and was an MVP for six years running. He has extensive field experience in the supply chain and has engaged in many other aspects of the Business Central application and platform as well. Besides, he is the author of the book "Supply Chain Management in Microsoft Dynamics NAV", which was published in 2008, and he holds a patent for metadata-driven machine learning for systems.

Before diving into how things happen at Microsoft, Martin first wanted to know how Andrei got into manufacturing and how it does matter to him. Andrei related that one of his first customers was a small manufacturing company that needed to improve its processes and for whom he purchased and implemented Business Central.

According to Andrei, the great strength of Business Central, even back then, was that it could be easily and flexibly modified to fit specific unique company processes. While Andrei and Martin agreed that this strength still exists, they both think that the way of creating these enhancements has changed quite a lot. In their opinion what had been real customizations in the past, now increasingly get turned into apps.

This led to a discussion about whether Business Central has become a much more core part of Microsoft's overall strategy, by e.g., providing the AppSource infrastructure or integrating it with Power Platform.

Andrei gave a short "historical" discourse from how the ERP was deployed 20 to 30 years ago to how it is done today by way of SaaS. The red thread running through this development over time is one of the core initiatives at Microsoft Business Central. The team has been helping partners reduce the number of ad-hoc developments. This not only changed the selling and deployment model of many partners but also changed the requirements for Business Central.

In order to help partners and customers reduce the number of ad-hoc developments, Business Central has become tighter integrated with the Office products, tools are now much better integrated with the overall ERP and there is much more tooling support also from the power platform.

In this context they talked about another way of reducing ad-hoc developments, namely listening to, and using the feedback they get from customers and partners. Andrei related two interesting facts:

• The development teams do not receive much direct feedback from end-users and customers.
• Mostly, the partners only give feedback about their own needs instead of those of the end-users, and they prefer to get tools to solve their customers' problems instead of getting solutions for these problems directly.