We’re just launching the Dynamics 365 Business Central 2024 Wave 1 release (version 24) and at the same time Microsoft officially announced the plans for the future 2024 Wave 2 release (version 25) coming in October. The official plan at the moment is the following:
It’s not the time to say more about each of these points, but as you can see there are some important focus points:
- Improving the integration of AI features into the ERP.
- Improving the reporting platform (expect interesting features expecially on document reporting).
- Improving integrations with Dynamics 365 and Power Platform.
- Improving the apps and tenant management and reliability experience.
There’s also an important thing to announce: after an in-depth evaluation of Microsoft’s strategies and capabilities, IDC has positioned the company in the Leaders category within its 2024 IDC MarketScape for worldwide SaaS and cloud-enabled small business ERP applications:
In its annual ranking, IDC has collected strengths and challenges about Dynamics 365 Business Central worldwide implementations and here are THEIR points (absolutely THEIR personal opinions):
Strengths:
- Familiarity/ease of use: Business Central works with the Microsoft 365 applications many small businesses already use every day, such as Outlook, Word, Excel, and Teams, allowing them to collaborate and communicate in the flow of work without duplicate data entry or switching between applications. For example, businesses can process deals from opportunity, to quote, to invoice, to cash within Outlook. This ease of use and familiarity is a major competitive advantage when serving small business employees with limited IT expertise.
- Embedded AI and ML capabilities: Microsoft Copilot in Business Central provides AI assistance using natural language technology and to automate repetitive tasks. For example, Copilot enables product managers to create AI-generated marketing text suggestions. Automation is attractive to small businesses with smaller teams and fewer resources, especially amid today’s labor shortages. According to the National Federation of Independent Businesses, a U.S. organization representing interests of U.S. SMB owners, 43% (seasonally adjusted) of all small business owners reported job openings they could not fill in 3Q23.
- Agility in moving from on premises to cloud: Customers of Business Central can opt to deploy in the cloud or on premises, with a single code base. Business Central customers that initially opt for on-premises deployment can later elect to move to the cloud while preserving all history, extensions, integrations, and other elements without needing an additional license.
Challenges:
- Strict licensing: Several customers noted that there was no or very little room for negations or flexibility in licensing fees or options. One small business noted that it must negotiate through a third-party implementation provider. Another reported: “The process is quite difficult. You don’t have any say in the matter. Your only option is saying Yes or No.” Since small businesses are typically more price sensitive than larger organizations, this often is the deciding factor in the ERP selection process.
- Lack of industry expertise: Since Business Central serves all industries, some clients note that the core-based system didn’t meet their unique industry needs. Customers told us they often need outside apps and customizations to accommodate their work methods and data structures.
- Performance: Some small businesses report sluggish performance and load times, particularly in sandbox environments.
I personally don’t agree on many of these challenges points, but that is…
Despite surveys or reports or personal opinions, there’s a clear fact: Dynamics 365 Business Central is one of the international ERP platform leaders on the market, it’s probably the hottest ERP of the moment and lots of companies of different sizes and businesses are always more inserting it in their short list for future ERP adoptions.
Dynamics 365 Business Central is not Dynamics NAV, Dynamics 365 Business Central should be used (and is used) also from very large customers. And for this reason, I would like that independent marketing analysts like IDC will not place the word “Performance” under the “Challenges” box, but instead under the “Strengths” one.
How we can change that?
There are no doubts that the entire Microsoft’s focus as a corporate is actually “you need to put AI into every single product“, but when thinking about an ERP platform we need to avoid loosing the right road. When talking with partners and (expecially) customers in the last months, the voice from them is clear:
“Yes, AI is cool… but I’m not sure if we’ll use all these features in our daily work”.
And to the question “What you would like to have more in the actual Dynamics 365 Business Central platform for your every day business?” the answer is again more than clear:
“We need an ERP that is able to satisfy our workloads in a faster and reliable way. If we’re fast, all our users are happy. If we’re slow, users begin to become disaffected with the ERP despite all the fancy features.”
Large corporates don’t want fancy features… they want to be fast! They want to be able to process big amount of works in a reliable and fast way. They want a platform able to scale accordingly to their workloads.
And how can we achieve this? Moving the main focus and energies in the red box here:
Here is where Microsoft can really change the game!
We can talk for ages about these topics, but now I would like just to add some ideas and “personal thinking”.
The Azure SQL database can actually scale quite infinitely and we have great new platform additions like Hyperscale elastic pools, Azure SQL triggers for Azure Functions, automatic mirroring with Fabric etc.
I think it’s the time to start seriously thinking on having a Dynamics 365 Business Central Standard and Premium tier, with different scalability possibilities (different elastic pools and scalability ranges for DTUs). The Premium tier should be sized to accomodate very large workloads, tipical for companies with hundreds of users.
But scalability of the platform is not enough. We also need to have a scalable code. And scalable code for me means essentially:
- New posting routines tailored to handle large batches without lockings.
- Serious asynchronous batches.
Quite often you can see users saying that “Today Dynamics 365 Business Central is particularly slow” but if you analize the backend, resources on CPUs and Database are low. The infrastructure is absolutely ok. Who causes the “slowness effect” are mainly lockings due to massive posting or massive batch operations (so the code layer). We all probably agree that a good consultant should instruct users to do massive operations in particular hours during the day or using background posting, but this is not always possible.
How to achieve that?
Probably a posting redesign is needed, mainly with the scalability target as the focus. Posting a single invoice is different than posting 100.000 invoices and the code should handle that accordingly by changing the posting behaviour if executed in bulk.
Job queue should be redesigned to be more enterprise-ready and we should have a native way to handle parallel batch processing. There are often scenarios where a single thread of processes cannot do the work fast enough and in those cases having multithreading in batch jobs can help on processing records faster. Obviously, multithreading batch jobs are useful when yout tasks can be splitted into “autonomous” parts, but often this is true.
What could be a possible approach on having a multithread batch job? I would like to be able to define a work item (like posting an invoice or executing a report) and then create a parallel batch configuration by specifying the task to execute and how many thread I need for this task:
This could help on handling many massive processing (together with the right locking on the database).
P.S. don’t forget that performances are also affected by how partners write code.
Together with that, there’s also another key aspect that it’s on every Business central project a big point of discussion: how to handle corporate reporting? On enterprise scenarios, Power BI on top of Business Central APIs is not an option.
We need to have a native way to handle a real data warehouse. Integration with Data Lake (Fabric) must be a top priority nowadays, because BI reporting is quite always a performance killer aspect in every large project. What is there in my mind? Something like the old BC2ADLS project: I want to select what part of my Business Central database should be exposed to a Data Lake and then create a data warehouse easily and externally. Microsoft has a top class BI platform on Azure and we need to use that platform for corporate reporting, not overloading the ERP. This is a point that I would like to see emphasized in bold in a roadmap.
Last aspect: at the moment we’ve a lot of AL wrappers around standard APIs for a lot of tasks (like AI integration). Is it always the right approach? I’m not sure about that…
Microsoft owns the datacenter layer and can do everything here. I think that often could be powerful and more efficient to create low-layer extensions (.NET code or other stuffs like that running on the NST natively) and then provide AL objects on top of that instead of wrappers around standard APIs. As said before, AI is the main example I’m thinking here. Give us an “object” doing complex things under the hood and then new AL methods that wraps that things (like embedding a document, tuning a LLMs etc) and things will be more scalable and efficient quite often.
At the recent BC AI Hackathon for example we demonstrate that if something is done at the platform level, things could really fly and scale…
All dreaming? No… this is something that can be done for sure, it’s just a priority list that should be adjusted 😉
P.S. These are absolutely personal opinions and random-thinking… curious to know what you think too.
Stefano Demiliani 