Global market survey confirms both a strong cloud momentum for Dynamics 365 Business Central and an ongoing need to serve manufacturing clients on-premises.

AACHEN, NRW, GERMANY, June 15, 2021 /EINPresswire.com/ -- THIS is one of many findings of the "State of Business Central and Manufacturing Report" which recently was published by NETRONIC Software from Germany. The report is the result of an extensive market survey. It includes results from 318 respondents coming from 58 countries on all five continents. Both Dynamics NAV / Dynamics 365 Business Central manufacturing customers and partners responded to the 40 questions on dissemination and usage of this ERP system in the manufacturing industry.

CLOUD ADOPTION. 35% of all responding Business Central partners say that more than 50% of their new manufacturing clients are cloud-based. On the other hand, 44% of all partners only land less than 25% of their new manufacturing clients in the cloud.
These figures suggest that especially for the manufacturing industry it is important to offer an ERP system both cloud-based and on-premises. This is confirmed by the answers given from Dynamics manufacturing customers of whim 61% said that they do not plan at all to move their ERP to the cloud.
The report also drills deeper into the cloud-based manufacturing opportunity for Dynamics 365 Business Central partners. 42% of those partners who land less than three new customers per year say that less than 10% of these are cloud-based.
The biggest cloud opportunity seems to be with those partners who on average win 6 to 10 new customers a year: 47% of those partners with higher new customer volume say that most (>50) of their new customers are cloud-based.

REASONS FOR ERP SELECTION. The responding customers confirmed that the primary reasons for introducing an ERP system are rather generic than manufacturing-specific.
Overall, the need for more cohesion in Business and Finance was the biggest reason why customers invested in an ERP system from a manufacturing standpoint. It represented 27% of the total tally for this question. The 2nd biggest reason was the need for better transparency of their business at 25%, which is somewhat related to the 3rd reason (22%), which was the need to enhance the efficiency of administrative and core production processes.
Trailing behind are the reasons that represent the typical challenges of managing a manufacturer, that “grew too fast” such as the issues in handling growing orders (11%), managing capacity (8%), and fulfilling customer delivery dates (7%).

ERP SYSTEM AND PRODUCTION SCHEDULING. Production scheduling does not necessarily belong to the core strengths of any ERP system. However, production scheduling is oftentimes crucial for efficient and effective manufacturing operations.
37% of the customers surveyed do not use any specific tool to manage the schedule in terms of making short-term updates. They just update the respective production orders or production order routing lines in the Dynamics NAV or Business Central system.
Opposite to this, a total of fifty-four percent (54%) of all respondents apply a dedicated tool to handle short-term changes in their schedule (total of blue segments). There is still a lot (22%), who use Microsoft Excel to manage their schedules. We also saw that 20% of the customers are using NETRONIC schedulers, while 12% of those surveyed said that they are currently using another scheduling tool.
This confirms the dominance of NETRONIC visual scheduling add-ons and extensions for Dynamics NAV and Dynamics 365 Business Central customers.

Martin Karlowitsch
NETRONIC Software
martin.karlowitsch@netronic.com