Production Portal
The standard Business Central production journal was designed for someone sitting at a desk. On a floor running three shifts it becomes a clipboard that a supervisor types up at the end of the day, which means the ledger is always a shift behind the plant.
Production Portal puts the journal on a tablet at the line. Operators pick their order, post output and consumption as it happens, and log the reason the line stopped while they still remember it.
The ledger stops being a day behind the floor.
The shop floor, logged in.
- Category
- Manufacturing
The gap it closes
What you live with until you fix it.
- Output posted the morning after the shift that made it
- Consumption estimated from the BOM rather than counted
- Downtime reasons reconstructed from memory at the end of the week
- Supervisors keying in what operators wrote on paper
- WIP figures nobody on the floor recognises
How it works
4 steps. No clipboard in any of them.
- 01
The operator picks the order
A live queue of released production orders for that work centre. No searching, no order number copied off a printout.
- 02
Output and consumption post at the line
Quantities entered on the tablet write straight to the Output Journal in Business Central, the same journal, just reached from where the work happens.
- 03
Stoppages are logged as they happen
When the line stops, the operator picks a reason from your list. Downtime becomes a dataset instead of an anecdote.
- 04
The ledger stays current
WIP, output and consumption reflect the floor in near real time, so planning and finance work off the same numbers as production.
What’s in it
Features.
- Live production order queue
- Output & consumption posting
- Downtime & stoppage logging
- Runs on shop-floor tablets
Technical specification
Specs.
- Deployment
- Cloud or on-premise
- Devices
- Shop-floor tablets, touch-optimised
- Posting target
- Standard Output Journal, no custom tables
- Offline
- Queues locally, posts on reconnect
Who runs it
The floors this was built on.
Proof
What it looks like in practice
- Output posted from the line, not the office
- Live
- Shifts covered without a data-entry clerk
- 3
- Custom tables, posts to standard BC journals
- 0
“Our supervisor used to spend the first hour of every shift typing up the last one. He does not any more, and the WIP figure is finally one the floor recognises.”
Common questions
Production Portal, answered.
Does it work offline?
Yes. Entries queue on the device and post when the connection returns. A dropped Wi-Fi signal in a plant should not stop the line being recorded.
Does it modify the base Business Central app?
No. It posts to the standard Output Journal through published interfaces. It is an AL extension, so it survives release waves.
Will it work with Dynamics NAV?
Yes, it was built for both. Plenty of manufacturing clients are still on NAV, and this is often what they run before a Business Central migration.
Start here
See Production Portal on your own data. Not a canned demo.
We will run it against a process you actually have, and tell you plainly whether it earns its licence in your plant. If it does not, that is a useful answer too.