The programming language for extending Business Central, written against a published extension model rather than by modifying base code.
Extensions are installed alongside the base application and survive updates by design, which is what makes Business Central's continuous update cadence workable. The constraint is the other side of the same coin: you can only extend where the base application offers an extension point.
Microsoft's marketplace for business applications, where Dynamics 365 customers browse, filter and install third-party apps.
AppSource is a discovery surface as much as a distribution one — buyers filter by category and industry and read ratings there. Notably, its category taxonomy has no "optimization" entry, so vendors describe themselves in the buyer's vocabulary rather than their own.
The rule Dynamics 365 Business Central uses to resolve a sales price: the lowest permissible price with the highest permissible line discount on a given date.
It ranges over prices that already exist — entries someone has recorded in a sales price list, a customer price group or a line discount. The system selects among them deterministically. It does not evaluate whether any of those prices was the right one to have entered, which is a separate, data-driven question.
Microsoft's ERP for small and mid-sized organisations, extended in the AL language and updated on its own release cadence.
It is a different product from Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, not a smaller edition of it — different data model, different extension language, different administration. Treating "Dynamics 365" as one product is where a large share of expensive platform decisions begin.
Microsoft's brand for the AI assistants embedded in its products. In Dynamics 365 it names an in-app chat surface, not a single capability.
What a Copilot can reach is decided by what it has been connected to, so two deployments carrying the same name can differ completely in scope. The in-app panel answers over product documentation by default; answering over a customer's own transactional data is a separate configuration, not an included behaviour.
Microsoft's low-code environment for building custom agents — defining their instructions, knowledge sources, tools and publishing targets.
It is where an organisation moves from the assistant Microsoft ships to one scoped to its own processes. Agents built here consume metered capacity, so their running cost is a function of how often they are called and how much work each call does.
The setting that decides the shape of every replenishment order for an item — per requirement, batched into a period, held between a minimum and maximum, or not planned at all.
Assigned on the coverage group and overridable per item and site. It is the single most consequential planning parameter, and it is usually inherited from an implementation default rather than chosen per item class.
A Business Central grouping that lets one price apply to a set of customers rather than to each customer individually.
Paired with customer discount groups, it is how most mid-market Dynamics installations express commercial policy. The grouping is manual, and it is rarely revisited once set, which is where realised price starts drifting from intended policy.
Microsoft's managed data platform underneath Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, providing storage, security and an API surface inside the customer's own tenancy.
Dataverse-native apps run inside the governed environment rather than beside it, which is usually the detail that decides an IT buyer: no export of customer, pricing or inventory history to an external service.
A replenishment method that positions decoupling buffers at chosen points in the supply chain and plans to buffer levels rather than to a forecast.
Dynamics 365 supports it as a coverage option, with prerequisites: it depends on Planning Optimization and carries its own licensing qualifiers. It is a methodology with a certification body behind it, not merely a checkbox, and adopting it changes how planners work as much as how the engine runs.
Forecasting future demand — a separate discipline from master planning, which consumes the forecast rather than producing it.
The forecast lives in its own application with its own algorithms and its own versioning. Whether a sales order consumes the forecast it was forecast against, or is planned on top of it, is a configuration decision — and getting it wrong double-counts demand.
Microsoft's enterprise ERP for finance, supply chain, manufacturing and commerce, extended in X++ and administered separately from Business Central.
Sometimes written F&O or "Finance & Operations apps". It carries the deeper supply-chain functionality — master planning, warehouse management, production — and a correspondingly heavier implementation. Choosing between it and Business Central decides the extension language, the update cadence and the administration model at once.
How much actual supplier delivery dates move around the planned lead time held in the ERP.
ERPs store a single planned lead time per item or vendor. What determines the buffer you need is the spread around it, which is measurable from receipt history against purchase orders. It is usually larger than expected, and it is the term most often assumed rather than measured when safety stock is set.
Microsoft's long-standing portal for managing Finance and Operations projects, environments and deployments.
Its responsibilities are moving to the Power Platform admin center, and new project creation has already been closed for new customers of several products. Anything written on the assumption that a task happens in LCS needs re-checking against the current administration surface.
A percentage reduction applied to a sales line in Dynamics 365, configurable by item, customer or discount group and layered on top of the resolved price.
Line discounts, invoice discounts and one-off overrides compound. The price actually invoiced is frequently some distance from list, and the gap between the two is where margin is lost without anyone having decided it should be.
A Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management rule that decides which warehouse location is used for a put-away or pick operation.
Location directives are how the ERP executes a placement policy consistently. They enforce the decision; they do not derive it. The question of which policy would minimise travel is answered from order history, not from configuration.
The cumulative difference between the price a business intended to charge and the price it actually invoiced, once discounts, overrides and stale price lists are accounted for.
It is rarely one large concession. It is many small ones that no single approval caught, visible only when realised price is compared against list across a long enough history and segmented by customer and item.
Dynamics 365's name for MRP: the run that nets demand against supply and emits planned orders according to each item's replenishment policy.
It is a calculation, not a decision. It executes the coverage settings, safety stock and time fences it was given, faithfully and fast, and has no opinion about whether any of them are still right. The policy is where the judgement lives, and the engine does not supply it.
An open protocol that lets an AI agent call a system's functions as named tools, instead of driving its screens or scraping its output.
A server exposes tools; a client model calls them with structured arguments and receives structured results. For an ERP this matters because the alternative — automating the user interface — breaks whenever a form changes. Microsoft ships an MCP server for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, which is what makes an agent's reach a configuration decision rather than a scripting exercise.
The calculation that turns demand, current inventory and planning parameters into suggested supply orders.
MRP is deterministic and does exactly what its parameters instruct. It is not a forecasting engine and it does not evaluate its own inputs: given a safety stock level that is too low, it will plan faithfully to that level and the stockout will look like bad luck rather than a bad parameter.
Microsoft's policy of keeping every Finance and Operations customer on a continuously updated version, rather than allowing long-lived releases.
Updates arrive on a published cadence with a bounded pause allowance. It guarantees everyone is on supported code; it does not guarantee that a given feature will not change, which is why regression testing becomes a standing commitment rather than a project phase.
The route a picker takes through a warehouse to collect the lines on an order.
Pick path length is a function of two things: the sequence the system releases lines in, and where the items are stored. Optimising the route alone hits a ceiling set by placement, which is why slotting and routing are usually solved together.
The current master-planning engine for Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, running as a cloud add-in rather than inside the ERP database.
It replaced the built-in engine, which Microsoft has stopped investing in. Because it runs as a service it is cloud-only, and a subset of the older engine's behaviours is deliberately not carried over — which is why a migration is a fit assessment rather than a switch.
The Business Central screen where MRP is run and its supply suggestions are reviewed before being turned into orders.
The worksheet compares net inventory position against open demand and the safety stock buffer, then proposes supply. Planners commonly describe running it and then working through a flood of cancellation and rescheduling messages — a symptom of planning parameters that no longer match reality.
Microsoft's low-code application platform — Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI — built on Dataverse and used to extend Dynamics 365 without modifying the ERP core.
For a Dynamics IT buyer this stack is the credibility layer: it is governed, it is already licensed, and it does not introduce a new security boundary.
Microsoft's twice-yearly feature release cycle for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, published in advance as a release plan.
A plan date is not a ship date. A release plan entry can list a preview and a general-availability month and carry no released marker against either, and reading the plan as a commitment is how a roadmap becomes a promise nobody made.
The inventory level at which Dynamics 365 planning suggests a replenishment order.
A correct reorder point covers expected demand across the replenishment lead time plus a buffer for variability in both. Business Central stores the number; it does not compute it from demand or lead-time history.
The Business Central setting that decides how an item is replenished. Four options: Fixed Reorder Quantity, Maximum Quantity, Lot-for-Lot, and Order.
The policy determines the shape of the supply suggestion; the planning parameters determine its size. Choosing the right policy per item is a judgement call that has to be made thousands of times, which is why in practice one policy is often applied across a whole item category.
A Business Central field holding the minimum quantity of an item you want to keep on hand. It also acts as the reorder point when no reorder point is specified.
MRP reads the field and plans replenishment to honour it, every run, faithfully. The number itself was typed by a person — usually at implementation, when there was no history to derive it from — and on most systems has not been revisited since. Nothing in the planning engine has an opinion about whether it is still right.
The Business Central table holding agreed prices, pointed at a customer, a customer price group, a campaign or all customers, and bounded by date.
Price lists are a system-of-record construct: they store a decision a person already made. They are combined with sales line discounts at order entry, and the best price principle picks the winner.
The permission set assigned to a user or an agent identity in Dynamics 365, controlling which data and operations it can reach.
For an agent this is the entire blast radius: there is no separate agent-permission layer beneath it. A narrower role also tends to make an agent more accurate rather than merely safer, because it shrinks the space of things the model can wrongly choose between.
The probability, chosen deliberately, of not running out of an item during a replenishment cycle.
A business decision rather than a statistical one, and it should differ between an item that halts a production line and an item a customer will wait a week for. Without a stated service level, "optimal" inventory has no meaning: you can always eliminate stockouts by holding more and always cut stock by accepting more of them.
A distinction between software that stores and enforces a decision (the system of record) and software that computes what the decision should be (the system of intelligence).
An ERP is a system of record by design: it holds the price list, the bin, the reorder point and the contract, and applies them consistently. Deriving those values from history is a different job with different requirements, and it is normally done in a companion application rather than inside the ERP.
A horizon that limits what master planning may see or change — how far ahead it plans, and how near-term it is permitted to overwrite.
Several exist and they do different jobs: a coverage time fence bounds planning, a freeze fence protects near-term orders from being rescheduled, a forecast fence governs where the forecast stops driving demand. Setting one from a default without comparing it to total lead time is a common and expensive mistake.
Deciding which storage location each item occupies, so that the travel required to fill orders is reduced. In Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management it is also the name of a built-in feature.
Travel is roughly half of order-picking time, and where inventory lives determines how far anyone walks. The ERP records and enforces the location; deciding which location an item should occupy, given how it is actually ordered, is an operations-research problem rather than a configuration one.
The programming language for extending Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations, with a class and table model specific to that ERP.
Existing X++ business logic can be surfaced to an AI agent as a named tool, which is how an organisation exposes rules it already trusts rather than asking a model to re-derive them. The commitment is real: X++ skills are specific to this product and do not transfer to Business Central.