The Business Central support call that always ends at the item card
Every partner knows this call. A manufacturer turns on planning, runs the worksheet for a few weeks, and then the phone rings with the diagnosis already made: MRP is broken.
, Vice President of Operations at , has been answering that call for 18 years. Sabre is a Business Central partner in Cambridge, Ontario that works with manufacturers, and Claridge came to it from the customer side, working production and inventory control at a manufacturer before she joined in 2008.
She described the call on a .
"They're like, ‘MRP is broken. Microsoft has a bug,’" Claridge said. "And I'm like, ‘well, let's look at your data.’ And it's always a data problem."
Business Central is dumb and dutiful, on purpose
The planning engine does exactly what it was designed to do. It reads each item's planning parameters against demand and supply and calculates a suggestion.
Claridge has a phrase for that behavior, and she used it twice in the conversation.
"If it's wrong, it's dumb and dutiful," she said. "So the software is not doing something it shouldn't do. But the inputs that you have, what you've put into that, what it's using to make its decisions or its suggestions - that comes from you."
Dutiful is the part partners and customers can work with. Give Business Central the same inputs, and it returns the same suggestions on every run, which is exactly why a bad suggestion can be traced.
, CEO of , has his own line for the idea.
"Software is consistently wrong and people are sporadically right," he said.
A consistent error repeats. Someone can find it, redirect it and watch it stay fixed. A person's error lands once, in one place, and tends to surface later somewhere else.
Claridge sorts these failures into people, process and technology, and she ranks technology as the predictable one. Business Central, she said, doesn't wake up in a bad mood.
"That's a people problem. That's a process problem. That's not a technology problem," she said.
The people side is the hardest. Two planners in the same department can hold different ideas about what safety stock or a reorder point is for, set up their items to match, and get different results. The software reports that difference faithfully.
The 2 complaints behind the call
, the podcast's host, asked Claridge what customers actually say when they call. She gave him 2 answers.
The first is noise.The planning worksheet fills with action messages, far more lines than a planner can review, and many don't match how the shop floor physically works. Claridge traced that to 2 settings customers rarely touch: dampeners and lot accumulation periods.
The second is suggestions that look wrong. A customer has 1,000 pieces on hand and
can't see why MRP wants more. That's usually a planning parameter, often Include Inventory on the item card, doing what it was set to do.
"They just don't really understand the planning parameters," Claridge said.
She also pushed back on the idea that anyone should carry out every line without looking. The worksheet makes a user accept each action message for a reason: a planner is supposed to check it against what's happening with suppliers and on the floor.
"It's a suggestion," she said.
Set less, pilot more
Claridge's fix starts with restraint.
"I'm a strong believer in set the least amount that you can up and then pilot it through and build it up," she said.
Turn every planning parameter on at go-live, and a strange suggestion has too many suspects. It could be the minimum order quantity, the reorder point, the safety stock or dates sitting in the past. Start with fewer fields active, and each one added afterward shows its own effect.
The piloting happens in a test company, and it covers the combinations no training session reaches. What happens when dates are in the past, or when a location goes negative? Claridge said even 100 training sessions couldn't cover every variation, so the job is to learn what each field does and then stress test how the fields interact.
Her favorite example is a reordering policy of Fixed Reorder Qty. with no reorder point or reorder quantity filled in. She said she asks those customers one question.
"So are we just going let Business Central decide? How's that going to work?" she said.
She's also started telling customers to export item data through configuration packages into Excel and ask Copilot to flag the silly things, like a maximum order quantity set lower than the minimum. Copilot points at the data. A person still has to scrub it.
The item card is the engine
The clearest example from the conversation involved a single item due Monday, Wednesday and Friday. MRP suggests 3 production orders. The planner knows the shop will run the whole week's demand at once, so they create a single order for 100 by hand.
On the next run, MRP suggests cancelling or changing that order. It still expects 33, 34 and 33, because nothing on the item card told it otherwise. A lot accumulation period of 1 week would have.
"If you get something that's a weird suggestion that you know you need to change it, then go back to its engine, which is the item card," Claridge said.
The item card also needs revisiting after launch. Demand shifts; some items are seasonal; safety stock and reorder points that made sense at go-live drift out of date. Claridge said to review them on a schedule sized to the business, and she had a name for the alternative: a "Betty Crocker set it and forget it type situation."
Most customers skip that review, she said. They launch, live with the pain, and work around the worksheet by hand.
What partners can take into the next call
For partners, the "MRP is broken" call is a request for a data review. Sit with the customer on the item card's planning parameters, then pilot each change in a test company before it reaches production.
The same logic runs upstream of the item card. Planning also reads the bills of material and routings attached to each item, and it trusts them exactly as far as it trusts the planning parameters.
Business Central did its job on every one of those calls. MRP only knows what the item card told it.