Eleven modules, one place to write back

An item carries what is attached to it: the production orders that consumed it, the purchase orders that supplied it, its non-conformances, documents, messages and tasks. A production order carries its routing lines, components and operations, the orders that feed it, the reports filled in against it, and the budget revision that planned it.

The team experiences this as “I can get from anywhere to anywhere in one or two clicks.”

Highlight badges

Item numbers, order numbers, project codes, drawing numbers, and a few other identifiers appear on every page as small clickable badges. Clicking a badge opens a dropdown of every relevant action for that record: jump to Item History, jump to the production order, open the documents for it, raise a non-conformance against it, add a task. Badge colour encodes status.

Inline messages

Messages tagged to a record appear inline on every page that shows that record. A question raised against a production order by an operator shows up on the planner's queue list, the Project Manager's order page, and the quality lead's NCR view if the message is also tagged to a non-conformance. The decision stays on the record it was made against.

Inline documents and tasks

Documents follow the same pattern. Upload once, tag it to the record it belongs to, and it appears wherever that record appears. A task assigned to one record is visible on every record connected to it. A drawing uploaded against an item shows in the item history, the BOM tree of every parent item, the production order that consumes it, and the purchase order if a supplier is making the part.

The hard part

Module dashboards are the easy part of building a Business Central add-on. Connecting the records is the hard part. A dashboard reports what is happening. Connected records let the team write back to the place the answer belongs.