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

The business has two halves that had never been connected. Assembly builds configurable equipment where each unit has a bill of materials that varies by customer specification, previously managed as a spreadsheet per order with parts picked against it informally. Field service engineers attend installed equipment carrying stock in their vans, and parts fitted on site were recorded on paper job sheets typed up later, if at all. The result was inventory records that diverged from reality continuously, with the service van stock effectively invisible. Because service revenue was a growing share of the business, the inability to cost a service job properly was becoming a strategic problem rather than an administrative one. Configurable BOMs are a genuinely awkward fit for standard ERP inventory — a variant explosion approach would have produced thousands of near-identical item records. Peppol e-invoicing to their public sector and larger corporate customers was handled manually. The project also had to run without stopping assembly, which ruled out a hard cutover.

We implemented Business Central covering Finance, Inventory, Manufacturing, Sales, Purchasing and Service, with the two halves of the business sharing one item master and one stock ledger for the first time. Configurable equipment is handled through a base BOM with structured option handling rather than exploding every specification into its own item, which keeps the item master manageable while still costing each build accurately. Service van stock is modelled as its own location per engineer, so parts fitted in the field reduce a real stock location rather than vanishing — this single change is what closed the inventory gap. We built AL extensions for the service job costing detail the standard product does not carry at the granularity the business needed, and for a configuration selector that assembly staff use when a customer specification is confirmed. Peppol e-invoicing was configured to run automatically, and the Dutch localisation handles BTW and intrastat reporting. Development ran through Azure DevOps with proper source control and a build pipeline, so extension changes are reviewable and releasable rather than edited in place. Migration ran per module with a parallel period on inventory. Field engineers were given a simplified interface for van stock and job completion, because a full ERP screen on a tablet in a plant room is not usable and would have driven them back to paper job sheets. Related: Business Central implementation, ERP integration, and our manufacturing practice.