This year, Directions North America 2025 was a stand out event – which is why we’re still talking about it 4 months later. A couple of our Microsoft experts, Mike Bufano and Amanda Maier, headed down to Las Vegas to discover, discuss, and experience the latest Business Central ERP and other solution providers have in store. We decided to review the 5 main topics and share our team’s perspective on each of them, so you can cut through the marketing lingo and see what really matters to your team.
In broad strokes, AI was a big topic of conversation, as were the up-and-coming features but there’s plenty more to share. We’re going to get into what caught our eye at the event, so you know what you can look forward to and plan for in 2025 and beyond.
AI — Integrated and Integral
Copilot has been steadily making itself a household name even outside the AI chatbot circles. It’s now going to be more integrated with Business Central ERP to help with a variety of tasks. With Copilot, your team can get succinct summaries of your data in seconds, get step by step How-To or Help instructions, and even take advantage of an AI sales order agent that can take care of mundane manual tasks like ordering. In an effort to make AI greener, Copilot will also offer sustainability journal entry suggestions to help your company manage its carbon footprint.
What Does Our Team Think?
Prior to this release, our favorite way to use AI was to ask the input to pivot data in a certain way, such as total sales by item category this year, sorted by highest quantity sold. Copilot would then analyze your data and input, then provide a pivot all within Business Central ERP.
We’re probably most excited for this latest major release because of that Sales Agent tool (the Purchasing Agent just got released this month too!). You can make the Sales Agent as fully autonomous as you’d like, giving it access to reading a shared inbox and draft a sales quote based on customer emails, convert a quote to an order, and even send the order confirmation to the client. They keep finding innovative ways to save us all time in Business Central.
We Report That You Get Better Reports
Data consumption within Business Central ERP is getting a lot easier thanks to the improving reporting features. The newly enhanced financial reporting with 2025 Wave 1 gives you greater control over how you display data. You can hide empty rows, format negatives accounting-style, and even print in portrait after you’ve prepared a wonderful report with descriptions, and opening and closing paragraphs. There are also new templates, access to saved Excel templates, and the Word layouts can now access metadata, so it doesn’t need to be encoded in report datasets.
What Do We Love About This?
Sure, some of these changes seem small but in your day-to-day timesaving, they become powerful. If you ever used the financial reports on the screen with drill down and had to scroll through empty lines to get to what you want, again, it seems small but eliminating that little time waster is so welcome. The ability to hide those blank spaces so you can focus on what matters? Amazing in our books. Also, one of the first questions we get asked is if you can view a report in Excel. While you could do that before, the option to run the report in a saved template is taking this to the next level, and we are here for it.
Manufacturing & Distribution in the Spotlight
During the Wave 1 2025 release, which was covered a lot at the event, there were over 24 improvements to Business Central ERP that facilitate manufacturing and distribution operations. Within the supply chain, it can manage the entire workflow with greater flexibility and accuracy:
- You can overpick production orders, allowing redistribution of unused materials to the inventory and posting overpicked goods as additional consumption.
- You can cancel and return production orders and unused materials, allowing you to maintain accurate inventory levels, costing, and records in the face of changes or errors.
- You can rebill subscriptions if there’s a quantity change after invoice issuing, which BC automatically detects and adjusts.
- You can manually schedule production start and due dates with delay buffer and you can configure lead times at the unit, item, or system level.
- You can combine several service shipments into a single invoice for more efficiency.
- You can get more accurate costing now that the standard costs account for SKUs as well as the location produced.
With this release there was also a significant update to the reporting and analysis for manufacturing. Business Central ERP has improved its manufacturing analytics with new KPIs and added new scenarios for planning to Power BI. It also now includes deeper insights, better instruction through teaching tips, and thorough documentation that can help your team through change management and get more out of the system. Higher adoption rates = better ROI.
All that said, manufacturers and distributors will find plenty to love about updates non-specific to their operations as well, but these were some key items we wanted to highlight.
What Stood Out to Us?
Warehouse processes are vital to any manufacturer or distributor. Any way to make that process smoother can have a major impact on a business. A common call that we receive at our helpdesk is that output was posted incorrectly on a production order. So, as we mentioned, the fact that you can reverse that outright within Business Central without creating a support ticket is going to be so handy to our clients.
People Are Loving What Microsoft is Doing
Microsoft has a growing Business Central ERP customer base with 45,000 current companies. Their hard work in rapidly improving the system’s capabilities is clearly paying off. It’s clear they’re committed to pushing that number higher and are all-in on putting their best and brightest on making the solution even better. The new improvements we’ve mentioned, especially the Copilot capabilities, are going to attract more attention.
Our team’s perspective: The ”Little” Platform That Could
Amanda compared this year to her first Directions back in 2019. “When people asked what I did, I got surprising reactions that the only product I worked with was Business Central. Almost all other consultants were working on other products, also. Now, 6 years later, the conference was majority Business Central-focused and watching the customer base grow so rapidly over the years has been fun to watch and be a part of.”
Better Service for Field Service Providers
On top of the manufacturing and distribution focus, there’s a lot of importance placed on improving the integration of Business Central ERP with their Dynamics 365 Field Service CRM in 2025 Wave 1.
- Field Service now integrates seamlessly with Business Central and will now be able to sync things like order types and service lines between systems. Updates on work orders show up as consumption and invoices in Business Central, allowing you to track inventory from those orders as part of your inventory planning.
- You can also see real-time item availability in the Field Service work orders from Business Central, wherever they’re located so you can optimize your scheduling and efficiency, plus the inventory syncing can automate stock level tracking.
Why Is This Exciting?
We’re excited about the Wave 1 and Wave 2 native integration between Field Service and Business Central because it creates an end-to-end solution. You can create service quotes and service orders in Business Central ERP that are automatically added and visible in Microsoft Dynamics CRM. You can use the scheduling dashboard to book a technician, who can then take pictures of their work, write up their parts and labor in Field Service, and then the completed work order will automatically move into Business Central to be invoiced. If cutting out so many manual steps or integrations isn’t exciting, we’re not sure what is!
For those that know Microsoft’s suite of products or are actively using MC, the Directions 2025 event was a big deal. There is so much in store for the platform, a lot of which is already happening now with the 2025 Wave 1 release, that it’s a great time to be involved with the platform. For those considering Business Central, now’s as great a time as any to implement it. Support is strong and, as we said, Microsoft is fully invested in making it a premiere platform in the ERP market. If you have any questions for Mike or Amanda about the event, the specifics of BC, or anything else Microsoft related, get in touch with us.
