Business Central in the cloud - real-time data and automated processes

Martin met with Shannon Mullins, Chief Revenue Officer of Accelerynt, and a Microsoft MVP of business applications. She has over 20 years of experience in - amongst others - deployment implementation of CRM and ERP systems and hence has a deep understanding of the functional aspects of projects’ process automation and system design and the reporting needs and requirements for complex ERP systems.

While talking to Shannon for the first time at last year’s Directions EMEA in Milan, Martin quickly noticed to his shame, that he never had a woman as a guest to his podcast and decided on the spot to change this.

So it happened that Shannon agreed to become the first in – as we hope – a long line of female guests.

After having wondered a bit about the fact that more people from Europe visit the Directions North America than vice versa, Shannon related that some years ago, she switched into the manufacturing focus and that she liked manufacturing projects because they are a lot more complex and detailed than just a pure financial project.

Then it was straight to the main topic of the podcast: how moving to the cloud helps smooth and automate processes in Business Central. Process improvement and automation is run by Shannon and her team by looking at how manufacturers are currently doing their processes. Then they figure out how they not only can leverage Business Central but also Power Automate, Power BI, and Power Apps so that the manufacturer gets a robust future-forward system. In short, Shannon recommends making multi-step processes into one step. Using ERP in the cloud together with the power platform leads to spending less time on development and more time on improvement in customer service, which in turn smoothes integration processes and also saves money.

The customers’ reporting needs and the KPIs they want to see depend on who is consuming the reports and here one can distinguish two types: On the one hand, the very detail-oriented accountants and on the other hand people running a plant or part of the plant who are looking more at the summary level and want to have an overall picture.

Concentrating on the latter, one sees that the KPIs that are important to them very much depend on whether they are more labor-centric or more machine-centric. Of course, a manufacturer with very expensive machinery is usually more concerned about those machines being up than a customer that is very retail, who, in turn, will be more concerned about keeping delivery dates.

In this context and together with the ever more advanced automation processes, one can observe that the KPIs tend to change their nature from backward-looking into becoming forward-looking and predictive. The past approach was, for instance, that companies came to work on Monday and saw that there was a machine downtime on Friday. Then they tried to figure out why. With Business Central and the power platform, manufacturing clients now can get a real-time notification and with this can make much more real-time decisions and pivots.

Shannon and Martin agreed that with moving to the cloud, ERP has totally transformed in that data have become much more real-time and you can automate more processes. The danger associated with an increasing automation degree, of course, lies in getting rid of people.

But this is not what is intended - the purpose is rather to make people’s work more meaningful and also to change the scope of their work. What's more, having everything real-time and transparent certainly increases the pressure on production leaders: Now that they have to make more informed decisions, they have to make sure they have the reporting they need. And that's where automation can come in place. Rather than sitting there and watching reports all day long and trying to figure out what's going on, they get an automated notification if something happens that they should be aware of.