Insight Works for Manufacturing

End-to-end apps from Insight Works to configure Business Central for a tailored manufacturing solution

For small and mid-size make-to-stock (MTS), make-to-order (MTO), or assemble-to-order (ATO) manufacturers who struggle to find an affordable solution to manage their operations from end-to-end, look no further than Business Central with apps from Insight Works. Insight Works provides the modular building blocks needed to create a tailored solution that includes Material Resource Planning (MRP) and Manufacturing Execution System (MES) capabilities that work the way you need them to.

Entry-level accounting software packages are not designed to manage production on the shop floor. Spreadsheets can quickly get messy and complicated. With apps from Insight Works, you have all the tools you need, from order entry to planning and scheduling to shipping and everything in between.

Like what you see? Ready to get started?

Order Entry

Order Management

Simplify order entry with an industrial point-of-sale solution

Insight Works provides an app for Dynamics 365 Business Central that enables manufacturers to quickly and easily add retail capabilities to their system. Staff will appreciate the easy-to-use order entry screen, barcode scanning capabilities, and advanced search tools.

For manufacturers who operate parts counters, trade desks, and smaller outlet stores, the Insight Works order management system is also a great solution to facilitate sales and payments.

  • Simplified order entry screen
  • Supports barcode scanning
  • Advanced search tool to quickly find items
  • Accept multiple payment types per order
  • Accept deposits in partial or full amounts
  • Easily reconcile the cash drawer at the end of day with the daily reconciliation report and closing process.
  • Track lost sales with formal lost sales tracking capabilities
  • Track pricing overrides on sales with formal override tracking
Sales Order
Product Configurator

Configurator

A robust configurator to make quote and order generation more efficient

Say goodbye to manually managing product options and variations and say hello to an Insight Works app for Business Central that significantly simplifies the creation of production Bill of Materials (BOMs) and routings, or assembly BOMs, helping to make quote and order generation more efficient.

  • Define product categories and options to allow sales personnel to easily select options to build new products or reuse existing configurations.
  • Save users significant time when quoting or designing products.
  • Reduce manual input and improve efficiency and accuracy in sales quotes and orders.
  • Simplify the ordering and quote process for staff.
  • Automatically generate Assembly or Production BOMs/Routings on Sales Orders and Quotes.
  • Integrate with standard Business Central MPS and MRP to plan your new products properly.

Document Accessibility

Attach drawings, photos, purchase orders, invoices, receipts, and other documents to Business Central records.

With a simple drag-and-drop, users will attach documents to any page in Business Central. You’ll easily associate engineered drawings to orders, customer POs to orders, invoices to POs, quality documents to receipts, or any other file to pages in Business Central.

There is no need to maintain an independent file storage system, and you can forget about having to pass around documents using email. Easily attach documents to your Business Central records, making them accessible when you need them, without having to search for them, and making them available to other users.

Document Drag-and-Drop
Inventory

Receiving and Stock Picks

Manage raw materials and finished goods with versatile a Warehouse Management System (WMS)

Accurately tracking and managing raw materials and inventory can significantly impact customer satisfaction and the bottom line. Trying to manufacture and assemble products when lacking inventory is highly ineffective. Manufacturers can use mobile computers with apps from Insight Works to update inventory levels in Business Central in real-time.

Insight Works transforms the traditional paper-based system of receiving stock and picking parts into a highly efficient and accurate time-saving process.

  • Get real-time access to warehouse, inventory, and production data on the shop floor.
  • Perform all inventory and warehouse operations from hand-held devices.
  • Use the same device for any location configuration, including non-mandatory bins and directed pick.
  • Capture lot and serial numbers for any transaction.
  • Scan directly to sales and production documents.
  • Easily customize views and menus on the hand-held computer.
Warehouse Insight WMSWarehouse Insight WMS

Inventory Counts

Simplify inventory counts with comprehensive data entry, reconciliation, posting and analysis tools

Why make physical inventory counts harder than they already are? The inventory app from Insight Works enables inventory managers to simplify inventory and cycle counts with comprehensive data entry, reconciliation, posting, and analysis tools.

  • Easily perform manually-entered or barcoded inventory counts and cycle counts.
  • Automatically reconcile and post lot or serial number discrepancies.
  • Predefine count sheets or allow users to complete ad hoc, inventory counts.
  • Create formal recount sheets to track count issues and resolutions.
  • Retain historical statistics for prior counts to judge trends and performance.
Inventory Count Card
Planning

Material Requirements Planning (MES)

Optimize your manufacturing process with a series of enhanced planning apps

Material Requirements Planning (MRP) is critical to every manufacturer. With apps from Insight Works, you get a robust set of tools that saves you time and gives you better insight into your resource requirements. The Insight Works apps enable production planners to create realistic forecasts based on historical data, visualize and edit complex BOM hierarchies, optimize inventory levels, and more.

Enhanced Planning Worksheet

Enhanced Planning Worksheet

A powerful tool to save time and to assist in Material Requirements Planning (MRP) within Business Central.

Item Planning Review

Item Planning Review

Optimize inventory levels and avoid excess or slow-moving stock by analyzing historical trends and current reordering strategies.

Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet

Enhanced Forecasting Worksheet

Generate more realistic Business Central production forecasts based on historical item usage trends.

Multi-Level BOM Viewer

Multi-Level BOM Viewer

Easily visualize and edit complex BOM hierarchies to help streamline your bill of material management and engineering operations.

Scheduling

Advanced Scheduling

Streamline scheduling with an advanced finite capacity scheduling app

Traditional methods of planning and scheduling are error-prone, time-consuming, and non-responsive, resulting in schedules that do not accurately reflect the actual capabilities of the shop floor. Insight Works’ advanced finite scheduling app for Business Central transforms production planning and scheduling from an inaccurate and time-consuming task into a responsive, repeatable, and highly accurate decision support activity.

  • Improve customer service levels by producing more realistic production schedules
  • Unlock revenue potential by improving resource and equipment utilization
  • Minimize the cost of production
  • Reduce WIP, finished goods inventory, and lead times
  • Increase throughput, machine utilization and inventory turns
Scheduling for Business Central
Graphical Scheduler Color Coded
Graphical Scheduler Details

Visualizing Production Schedules

Visualize each workstation, enabling managers & staff to manage production scheduling more effectively

Insight Works offers manufacturers who have less sophisticated processes a lightweight app that enables production managers and staff to visualize the work planned at each workstation, thus managing production schedules more effectively. More than just a visualization tool, users can easily drag and drop an operation on a production order to a new work center and time. As work is rearranged, associated operations will automatically update to reflect a new production schedule.

  • Optimize your scheduling with drag-and-dropyour content goes here
  • Quickly find operations with the built-in filter
  • One-click access to details
  • Use color coding to identify the status of operations
  • Easily view associated operations

Downtime Planning for Maintenance

Minimize disruptions to your manufacturing process with intelligent maintenance planning

Many manufacturers will schedule equipment shutdowns based on a preventative maintenance schedule with little regard for how the shutdown disrupts production. With the right app from Insight Works, current production schedules are considered when creating maintenance schedules. For example, a current production schedule may show a specific piece of equipment not used for half a day in a week’s time. In this case, a work order will be slotted in to take advantage of the downtime.

  • Track and manage production assets and equipment.
  • Effectively schedule maintenance to minimize maintenance and repair costs.
  • Predict and budget for future equipment and maintenance costs.
  • Simplify and minimize the cost of asset lifecycle management.
  • Reduce asset downtime due to equipment maintenance or failures.
Maintenance

Production Asset Maintenance

Turn Business Central into a robust maintenance management system

Manufacturing is an asset-heavy industry, so maintaining equipment plays a critical role. When machines go down, schedules are disrupted, deadlines are pushed, and the bottom line suffers. With apps from Insight Works, Business Central becomes a robust production asset maintenance platform to help keep your equipment in check and operating smoothly.

  • Define preventative maintenance schedules by equipment/tooling/asset and maintenance type. For example, a CNC machine’s monthly maintenance will differ from quarterly, semi-annual, and annual maintenance.
  • The calendar view makes it easy to create and visualize the maintenance schedule.
  • Optimize maintenance schedules automatically based on production schedules. In other words, schedule maintenance when it is least disruptive to production.
  • Automatically generate maintenance orders based on the preventative maintenance schedule.
  • Define spare parts lists for equipment maintenance.
  • Define specific work instructions to include on maintenance orders.
  • Create break/fix work orders for maintenance.
Shop Floor

Manufacturing Execution System (MES)

Data collection and acquisition for better decision making

Business Central with apps from Insight Works creates an MES that facilitates data collection on the shop floor by using barcodes and web-based terminals to easily collect and track data. Data includes employee time, machine time, rework time, material consumption, material output, and more.

Business Central powered by Insight Works apps significantly reduces the labor costs and entry errors associated with manual data entry. Employees use barcode scanners or touch screens to speed up shop data input for time, material, quality, and more.

Shop Floor Insight
  • Eliminate manual time entry with barcode scanning for Production Orders, Jobs, Service Orders, and Fixed Assets
  • Capture operational data on the shop floor including consumption, output, scrap, and quality
  • Record time and attendance based on employee shifts with exception reporting

  • Record and report on non-productive and rework time for better insight into lost productivity

  • Easily approve time with exception-based supervisor approvals
  • Automatically calculate overtime and shift differentials for integration with payroll systems
Quality Inspection for Business Central

Quality Control

Highly configurable, built-in quality control

The Insight Works MES solution for Business Central includes a versatile quality control module. Whether you need to collect information for audits, comply with 3rd party regulations, track batch information, check that shipments are prepared correctly, or ensure parts are produced within spec, Insight Works has you covered.

Pass and fail parameters can be assigned to specific jobs with the ability to log actual results. The quality control module helps to reduce rework, produces a more consistent product and increases overall customer satisfaction.

Managing Safety on the Shop Floor

Improve and maintain shop floor safety while tracking corrective actions and hazard assessments

Your safety program is a critical part of your business, and proper record keeping is crucial to keeping it compliant with regulatory agencies and industry groups. With the right app from Insight Works, managing aspects of your safety programming with Business Central is easy. Improve shop safety by recording and publishing hazard assessments, logging and implementing corrective actions, and tracking employee certifications and training.

  • Enhance the quality and effectiveness of your safety program
  • Improve shop safety by tracking corrective actions and hazard assessments
  • Manage compliance with governmental regulations
  • Track and analyze all safety-related incidents and activities
  • Generate or print an employee’s entire HSE history, including certifications and incidents
  • Properly plan for employee re-certification
Routing Analysis

Analyze Routings

Evaluate your actual production times to your planned production times to improve costing, sales margins, and scheduling

Routings play a vital role in the manufacturing process. The adage that you can only improve what you can measure holds true when using Insight Works apps in your manufacturing process. Using Business Central to plan your routings is a great place to start. Comparing routings to actual production times enables manufacturers to streamline their operations.

Production Consumption and Output

Leverage handheld devices to accurately record output and consumption for production and assembly orders

Insight Works makes it a snap to track production consumption and output. Using mobile computers, employees scan items for specific production orders and serial numbers, capturing any lot or serial number information for the consumed item against specific serial numbers being produced. Employees can also output directly to license plates (e.g., pallets) for simplified put-away of produced items.

Consumption

License Plating

Easily track entire pallets, boxes, or containers of manufactured goods, including mixed lot/serial numbers

License Plate Management (LPM) from Insight Works allows users to track and generate labels to reference entire pallets, boxes, crates, or containers that contain mixed items or mixed lot/serial numbers. License plating can be particularly advantageous to manufacturers who deal with many different parts of a project or mass-produce widgets and need to track groups of products.

  • Overcome supply chain challenges, speed up shop floor transactions, reduce errors, and more.
  • Distinguish each product carton or item with a unique license plate number (LPN) in a warehouse setting.
  • Identify goods in transactions such as receiving, moving, production or shipping.
  • Reduce the number of scans necessary to enter a transaction.
License Plating
reporting

Reporting

Performance reporting at your fingertips

With the Insight Works solution for manufacturing, users can easily track Right First Time (RFT), rework, scrap, output and Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE).

When it comes to rework, time and costs can be assigned to specific categories or departments. This is useful in determining the root cause of the rework which leads to modifying processes to streamline operations and increase efficiency.

Shipping

Complete Shipping Solution

Easily add carrier integration, real-time shipping rates, package management, and shipment tracking to Business Central

Streamline tedious and error-prone shipping tasks by seamlessly integrating Insight Works apps into your Dynamics 365 Business Central system. Shop floor employees will reduce manual entry errors by scanning packages directly into Business Central. You will realize money and time savings by working directly with multiple carriers.

  • Savings in the warehouse from streamlined processes that provide information in real-time
  • Includes real-time rate shopping from multiple carriers
  • Detailed package management
  • Enhanced accuracy in shipping fees based on actual package dimensions
  • Carrier integration with over 100 carriers, including UPS and FedEx
  • Simple interface with scanning support
Shipping
LTL Options on Sales Order

Hundreds of LTL Carriers Supported

Manage all your LTL shipping details from within Business Central using apps from Insight Works

When outbound LTL shipping is vital to your business, there is little room for error, and that’s why companies turn to apps from Insight Works. Designed specifically for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, Insight Works apps help manage your entire outbound LTL shipping process. Jumping between multiple online shipping portals and Business Central is cumbersome and prone to errors. Insight Works apps eliminate the need for third-party websites and enable you to administer your LTL shipments right inside Business Central.

  • Save significant time by rate-shopping in real-time from over 300 supported LTL carriers.
  • Print shipping labels and manage the Bill of Lading (BOL) documents from Business Central.
  • Manage shipping details like blanket service, reefer requirements, power tailgate services, white-glove service, delivery specifics, and more.
  • Store package details including types of packaging (for example, pallets, crates, drums, boxes, etc.), the goods, and quantities of goods found within each package.
  • Schedule pickup and delivery times.
  • Track your LTL shipments from pickup to delivery and identify when there may be claim backs for late and non-delivered shipments.

Support for Hazardous Materials

Easily manage your hazardous material classifications and associated Business Central inventory items

Apps from Insight Works help manage hazardous materials while complying with regulations for businesses that produce or handle hazardous materials. Users will correctly classify items with formal, detailed hazardous material information using the Insight Works apps for Business Central.

  • Efficiently manage your hazmat codes and associated information
  • Generate WHMIS labels from Business Central
  • Streamline the shipping of dangerous goods
  • Store your Safety Data Sheets (SDS) in Business Central
WHMIS Label

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)

Get business done faster, smarter and more accurately with EDI

Insight Works’ apps for manufacturing supports Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) through integration with leading EDI providers. When your organization relies on automated systems to maximize operational efficiencies, you can count on Insight Works to give you complete and real-time data. All data required for Advance Shipping Notices (ASN) is collected and managed apps from Insight Works and made available to EDI systems for transmission.

Hardware

Complete hardware solutions

Huge selection of mobile computers, barcodes scanners, labels printers, and accessories... Insight Works is your one-stop-shop.

For anyone looking for barcode scanning-related hardware, including mobile computers, handheld scanners, label printers, and accessories, look no further than Insight Works. Whether you have experience with scanners or are new to this type of hardware, Insight Works can help you procure the proper hardware for you.

Insight Works only carries quality brands and great prices from vendors including Datalogic, Honeywell, Zebra, and others. When you buy your hardware from Insight Works, you also get support to ensure our apps are working properly.

hardware
Next Steps

We have the apps!

The Business Central manufacturing solution from Insight Works is made up of different apps, thus, making for a very modular solution. Users can select the apps they need and forgo those they don’t. With apps from Insight Works, you’ll supercharge Business Central into a robust ERP for manufacturing.

Ready to get started?

If you like what you see and you’re ready to configure Business Central with apps from Insight Works, the best place to start is with your Microsoft Partner. Your partner will help identify exactly which apps you’ll want and then streamline the integration.

Got questions? We have answers.

If you don’t see the functionality you need, or you’re looking for clarification and more details, we want to hear from you. Complete and submit the form below and we’ll get your questions to the right person to answer.

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