The company with 10-50 employees upgraded from NAV 5.0 to Dynamics 365 Business Central (version 14 "Spring Release 2019").
The company from the trade and logistics sector, which consists of several companies, offers industrial services that can be summarized under the terms warehouse management, assembly and packaging services. It also provides a range of catering services for schools and companies. The company uses the purchasing/sales (retail), production, project planning and logistics modules in the NAV standard. In addition, the payroll accounting and SAP order import modules programmed specifically for the customer are used. An in-house solution (app for Labelscan) was also developed for logistics. This is an offline online solution: the transport driver scans the goods before they are loaded onto the truck and the goods are scanned again when they are unloaded. This makes it possible to determine whether the goods have been transported in full. The result is synchronized with the database at the head office so that goods can be reordered and redelivered immediately if necessary.
Upgrade challenges
The upgrade project presented us with the challenge of transferring the entire old data structure from NAV 5.0 to Business Central Spring Release (version 14). The following objects also had to be converted:
A) Convert the forms to Pages.
B) Convert the DataPorts to XML ports.
C) Converting the reports into ForNAV reports with barcode usage by ForNAV.
D) Creating an AL extension: Last but not least, the complete redesign of the code as an AL extension (no hybrid development AL - C/AL) presented us with challenges.
The individual steps of the upgrade
The upgrade took about 2 months and was implemented in the following steps:
- Complete new installation of Dynamics 365 Business Central
- Converting the customized objects to AL
- Data transfer from the old system using "Rapid Start". Rapid Start" is a tool for defining data packages, e.g. article master data, exporting them to Excel and then importing them into the new system via mass upload.
The upgrade also included the license model changeover and the associated adjustment of the authorization model (e.g. the removal of tables and the addition of new tables, etc.). - Test with new license
- Training of employees in the new Business Central environment
Conclusion
To summarize, we did not encounter any "show stoppers" when switching to the extension technology during the upgrade to Business Central. The solution could be transferred 1:1 to Business Central without any major complications.
The major advantage for the customer of switching to extension programming is that none of the objects supplied by Microsoft are modified, instead all adjustments are made in separate extension objects. This saves the cost-intensive merge effort (object comparison and adaptation of the objects) for future version upgrades!
