How Do Pharmaceutical Companies Use Dynamics 365 Business Central?

I want to show you how life sciences pharmaceutical companies can use Dynamics 365 Business Central to help better manage their companies. So let’s take a look at it.

Projects

Tracking Expenses and Timesheets

We’re going to look at projects and how you can use projects to track expenses but also track timesheets and turn around and bill clients for those if you need to.

Using Dimensions to Track Project Costs

The Business Central chart of accounts and account string includes a main account plus one or more dimensions, and you can easily use one of those dimensions to track project costs. So I’ll show you how to do that easily.

Creating and Approving Timesheets

Next, let’s look at a project where we will track time against a particular project against different tasks in that project and then we’ll turn around and bill that back to a client we might have that we’re doing some R&D for.

Inventory Management

Lot Controlled Items and Bill of Materials

Next, I want to take a look at inventory. We’re going to look at lot-controlled items, a simple assembly, and then we’re also going to look at how you can do a product recall based on that information.

Running MRP Process

First of all, let’s look at some items. This is my item list. This is our finished good item. It includes all the information about this finished good item. I have some pricing in here, I’ve got some cost in here. This is also lot-controlled and it has a bill of material. It’s an assembly bill of material.

Creating Purchase Orders

The first thing I want to do is run an MRP process. It’s very simple in Business Central. I’ve already run it. These are the items that I’m interested in. I’ve got these items in different item categories and you can see it’s specifying that first of all, I create a work order for the finished good item.

Receiving and Identifying Lot Numbers

I’m going to go ahead and execute this plan. We’re going to create assembly orders and we’re also going to create purchase orders. Let’s go ahead and do that. First of all, let’s take a look at the purchase orders.

Creating Assembly Orders

Next, let’s take a look at the assembly order that was created from the MRP process. This is the assembly order right here. It’s pretty straightforward. I’ve got the individual component items listed, the amounts, quantities, and this one is ready to go.

Specifying Lot Numbers for Finished Goods

Because this is lot-controlled, I need to specify the new lot number for the new finished good item that we’re going to create. I also need to specify the component lot numbers that I’ll use in the production process.

Posting and Completing Assembly Orders

I’ve gone ahead and selected all the component lot numbers, so I’m ready to finish this up. I can adjust the quantities if I need to do that, but this one’s okay, so I’m just going to go ahead and post it.

Product Recall Process

Identifying and Tracing Bad Lots

Now let’s take a look at the product recall functionality within Business Central. The scenario is my vendor has contacted me and indicated that one of the items that he sent me, one of the lots, is not any good. So I need to find out which products I put that into.

Contacting Customers

Here’s the lot number that I’m looking for. This is a finished good item that contains a component that had the bad lot. So I’m going to search on that. I can trace it. It gives me the results here. It turns out that the top one here, this is the one that the vendor informed me was bad. So what I can do is I can see that this went out on this shipment right here. Let me specify that. I’ll show the document and now I know who the customer is that has the bad product. I’m going to reach out to them and have them send that back to me.

Conclusion

So we looked at how life sciences pharmaceutical companies can use Dynamics 365 Business Central to better manage their business. We looked at projects, how you can collect costs by different projects, and also how you can use timesheets and turn around and bill clients for that time. We looked at inventory, specifically lot-controlled items and assemblies, how we can take a number of components, put them into a finished good, and then we looked briefly at a product recall process where Business Central will track the bad lots all the way through the production process. So if you’ve got a problem with a bad product or a bad component, you can track that down and find it.