Manufacturing Operations ERP for Van **** Industrial, NetherlandsCase Study

Assembly and field service operated as two disconnected worlds. Each configurable machine had an order-specific bill of materials kept in its own spreadsheet, with parts picked informally against it. Service engineers, meanwhile, used a separate scheduling tool and wrote fitted parts on paper job sheets that were typed up later, if at all. Van stock was effectively invisible, so inventory records drifted away from reality every day.

That gap meant nobody could say what a service job truly cost, a serious problem as service grew as a share of revenue. The configurable nature of the equipment also made standard ERP inventory awkward: generating a separate item for every specification combination would have flooded the item master with thousands of near-duplicates.

Invoicing to public sector and larger corporate customers over Peppol was still a manual process. Underneath it all sat a hard operational constraint — assembly could not stop for a big-bang cutover, so any implementation had to be phased around a working production floor. Leadership also wanted development discipline around any customisation, having seen a previous system degrade as changes were made directly without review.

PapaSiddhi implemented Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central across Finance, Inventory, Manufacturing, Sales, Purchasing and Service on a single tenant backed by Azure SQL, giving assembly and field service one item master and one stock ledger. Configurable machines use a base BOM with structured option handling instead of variant explosion, keeping the item master lean while costing each build accurately. Every engineer's van became its own stock location, so parts fitted on site reduce a real location instead of vanishing.

Our developers wrote AL extensions for granular service job costing and for a configuration selector assembly staff use once a customer specification is confirmed. Peppol e-invoicing runs automatically through an access point, the Dutch localisation covers BTW and intrastat, and REST and OData endpoints plus Power BI support reporting. All extension work runs through Azure DevOps with source control and a build pipeline, so changes are reviewed and released rather than edited in production.

Working as a dedicated team, we migrated module by module with a parallel run on inventory, keeping assembly running throughout. Field engineers received a simplified interface for van stock and job completion on tablets, because a full ERP screen in a plant room would have pushed them straight back to paper.