Transforming a retail ERP solution to Dynamics 365 Business Central

There are legions of successful ISVs who have built customized solutions for different industry verticals on top of Microsoft’s Dynamics suite of business applications. These ISVs and their customers are confronting two critical challenges: the biggest one is complying with Microsoft’s product strategy of bringing together different business applications into a single, ERP suite, and moving to an intelligent, connected business cloud from an on-premises mode. We helped a European ISV, which is a leading provider of ERP solutions to the manufacturing, trade, and professional services sectors to upgrade and migrate its solutions from NAV to Dynamics 365 Business Central.

In the new scheme of things, Microsoft bought together separate business line functions such as Marketing, Sales, Service, Finance,  perations, and Talent into a single, connected unified suite under the Dynamics 365 Platform, which gave rise to the following challenges:

• Customizations in the form of add-ons are no longer supported
• All customizations must be only in the form of AL extensions
• Changes to base code are not allowed
• Significant manual effort needed to transform old applications to the new code base

Key part of the solution lies in identifying and separating events (which allow you to avoid code customization and reduce the need for costly upgrades), which enables the application to react to specific actions and facilitates separation of customized functionality from business logic. After identifying the applications which have to be moved to Dynamics 365, the following process was adopted:

• Convert customized code in CAL into standard events with hooks
• Clean the code manually before deploying to AppSource
• Convert the customized code into an AL extension using text2AL tool
• Parity testing of the application functionality

Thanks to the engineering and process support provided by coMakeIT, this ISV has successfully executed its migration strategy to Dynamics 365, which delivered the following business benefits:

• Enabled it to rationalize its portfolio of legacy NAV applications
• Leverage the AI, ML capabilities of Azure services
• Productize standard services and expand range and reach through AppSource
• Deliver seamless customer experience with the horizontal and vertical integrations of new Dynamics 365 Business Central platform
• Help digital transformation journey of customers by offering SaaS solutions