Business growth is a mission many organisations pursue in their bid to drive market share, improve profitability and realise their long-term vision.

However, growth is rarely an easy journey. You’ll often come across obstacles that prevent growth or that emerge once growth has happened. Both can still your progress and cause operational headaches.

For smooth growth that brings long-term results, you need two core things: a sensible strategy and tools that scale with you.

Microsoft designed Dynamics 365 Business Central to support and fuel growth. It enables you to expand capacity across back office operations as your business evolves, mitigating many of the risks and stresses. Endless integration and customisation possibilities also make it a flexible platform, tailored to your changing needs.

In this guide, we explain in detail how Business Central helps your business grow.

The issue with business growth_

While growth is largely viewed as a positive step for every business, it does bring specific internal challenges.

These include:

• Scaling challenges: As a business grows, it becomes more complex to manage operations, maintain quality and ensure efficient processes. This is particularly difficult if your systems do not scale with you.
• Financial strain: Growth often demands significant investments in resources, technology and talent, which can strain financial resources. It’s crucial to stay on tops of your finances during this phase.
• Cultural challenges: As a business grows, it may need to adapt its culture to accommodate new employees, different work styles and evolving business needs. You need tools that bring everyone together and encourage collaboration.
• Risk management: Expanding into new markets or launching new products can introduce new risks that need to be carefully assessed, monitored and managed.
• Resource allocation: As you grow, you may find your teams are more stretched, especially if you haven’t yet had a chance to hire new staff. It’s crucial to carefully allocate resource so core tasks are covered.
• External changes: Economic downturns, inflation or changes in regulations and compliance requirements can add complexity and affect growth plans. It’s crucial to stay on top of these changes and be proactive.
• Supply chain disruption: Disruptions in supply chains, such as those caused by external events or issues with specific vendors, can impact production and delivery timelines. You need to monitor this so you can prepare for incoming issues.
• Technological disruptions: Rapid technological advancements can make it challenging to keep up with the latest trends and innovations. If your systems become outdated, you could lose your competitiveness which reverses growth.

These challenges are incredibly common for businesses undergoing growth periods. However, if they aren’t addressed properly, it can lead to progress stalling or even declining growth. This is why you need solutions and processes in place to minimise the impact.

Why ERP is crucial to growth_

Every business has multiple systems they need to consider when following their growth trajectory. So, why is Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) the one you need to prioritise?

ERP is the backbone of a business. It encompasses all core operational areas, including finance, supply chain, manufacturing, field service and project management. It also touches customer service, sales and more. So, by mastering ERP, you can drive capacity and efficiency in these areas as you expand.

ERP systems offer the ability to streamline operations, improve decision-making and enhance overall efficiency. By centralising data and automating processes, these solutions eliminate data silos and ensure consistency across different departments. This unified approach allows businesses to gain a comprehensive view of their operations, identify bottlenecks and make informed decisions that drive growth.

Plus, ERP solutions can overcome many of the challenges associated with growth. This includes centralising information of new locations, products and customer or providing automation capabilities to free up employee time as demand rises.

ERP systems also play a vital role in financial management. They provide real-time insights into financial performance, enabling businesses to make data-driven decisions. With accurate financial data at their fingertips, companies can optimise resource allocation, identify cost-saving opportunities and make informed financial choices during growth stages.

A smart ERP solution should also enable you to predict future trends, such as revenue, costs or inventory levels, so you can prevent blockages stemming from growth before they pause progress.

In short: master your ERP technology and growth becomes a whole lot easier.

Dynamics 365 Business Central: the ideal growth solution_

An intelligent, effective ERP solution is crucial to both fuelling your growth and enabling it to occur smoothly. And when it comes to ERP software, Dynamics 365 Business Central is the market leader for good reason.

It offers specific capabilities and features that encourage and support business growth, while driving efficiency across your operations and aiding planning.

These include:

• Comprehensive functionality: Business Central covers a wide range of business functions, including finance, sales, purchasing, inventory, manufacturing and more. This means you can manage all aspects of your business from a single platform for constant context.
• Industry-specific solutions: You can customise your Business Central deployment with industry-specific solutions and add-ons tailored to various industries, ensuring it meets the versatile needs of your business and addresses niche challenges.
• Cloud-based: As Business Central is a cloud-based solution, it can easily scale up or down as your business grows. You can add users, modules and storage capacity without significant upfront investments.
• Flexible deployment options: You can choose between cloud-based and on-premises deployments, giving you the flexibility to select the option that best suits your business needs.
• Ease of use: Business Central boasts a user-friendly interface that is easy to learn and navigate, even for users with limited technical expertise. Plus, mobile access allows teams to stay connected anytime, anywhere.
• Seamless integration: It integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft products like Office 365 and Power BI, providing a unified experience and enhancing productivity. Plus, the open platform allows for easy integration with third-party applications, giving you the flexibility to customise your solution to your specific needs.
• Real-time insights: Business Central provides real-time insights into your business data, covering finance, stock, supply chain, customers and more. This enables you to make data-driven decisions and predict future trends that may affect growth.
• Improved efficiency: Business Central can automate core tasks and streamline processes, helping you to improve efficiency and reduce errors. This also enables you to free up resource for strategic work.
• Enhanced collaboration: Business Central fosters collaboration among teams, allowing visibility of shared data and bringing processes together. This improves communication and decision-making.
• Futureproofed: Business Central is regularly updated with new features and functionalities, via Microsoft’s twice-yearly wave releases. This also leverage new technology like automation and AI, ensuring your business stays ahead of the curve.

With these features, you can get the insights you need to pursue growth across your business while driving collaboration and efficiency. You can also streamline processes, introduce automation, leverage innovation and utilise data, which will also support you during the process and ease growth obstacles.

How to better leverage BC to support growth_

Business Central has plenty of in-built features that naturally support growth and enable scalability. However, businesses that want to level up their aspirations can also leverage Business Central’s advanced features and integrations to encourage faster results.

Here’s how to secure better growth, using Business Central:

1. Harness the power of automation_

Business Central includes automation across integral tasks and workflows. You have the option to customise this automation further, using tools like Power Automate.

Using automation, you can streamline repetitive tasks like invoicing, purchase orders and expense reports.

This automation has many benefits for your business, including improving accuracy, minimising the risk of human error and boosting productivity.

By empowering accurate decision making and improving resource issues, you can enable your team to focus on growth tactics rather than being bogged down in admin. This also allows you to do more with less, helping you to move faster towards your goals.

2. Leverage AI and machine learning_

Business Central can work in tandem with Copilot, Microsoft’s 24/7 AI assistant. This enables you to introduce AI power to your ERP for greater automation and analysis.

Using AI, you can gain deeper insights into your business data to identify trends and opportunities that propel growth, such as ways to improve customer satisfaction, upsell products or boost profitability.

You can also uncover predict analytics that forecast sales, inventory needs and cash flow. This enables you to better plot when to make growth moves and identify incoming obstacles, for more informed decisions.

Finally, you can use AI to further automate core tasks, such as financial reporting and stock management. This reduces the administrative burden, giving you more time to focus on strategy.

3. Optimise your supply chain_

Having a strong supply chain is crucial for meeting increased demand and addressing customer expectations.

Business Central offers a host of supply chain tools that can help you better manage the supply chain. This includes real-time inventory levels, helping you to see what stock is moving in and out of your business. This enables you to prevent stockouts or overstocking, by keeping track of predicted demand.

With this insight, you can also optimise product schedules to meet needs. This helps you to manage costs by obtaining only the supplies and resources you need, so no costs are wasted.

Finally, Business Central has tools to assist the procurement process. By leveraging features like price lists, discount schemes and RFQs, you can streamline the purchasing process and negotiate better deals with suppliers.

4. Enhance financial performance_

Managing your finances is crucial when undergoing growth. Fortunately, Business Central provides real-time visibility into your financial health.

On top of this, it offers accurate forecasting. You can use AI insights and advanced analytics to predict future financial performance. This enables informed decisions about when to take growth steps and how to mitigate the knock-on effects.

With this increased financial insight, you can more easily manage cash flow and reduce working capital requirements. This will enable things to keep moving smoothly.

5. Foster collaboration and communication_

As Business Central is a centralised platform, it can provide a single source of truth for all business information. However, it is crucial you migrate all data into the system and update it regularly to ensure accurate insights.

By managing your data and placing it into Business Central, you can enable seamless collaboration and communication between teams and departments. It then becomes easier to work together to pursue growth goals, while everyone has access to the data needed to identify opportunities accurately.

6. Invest in training and support_

While Business Central has many features to support growth, it’s crucial your business users know how to use them. Invest in training across Business Central for everyone who will be using it regularly.

This will enable them to implement best practice across the system, so you can get greater ROI and results, pushing growth further.

Explore the benefits of Business Central_

Leveraging automation, AI, data insights, connectivity and more, Business Central is the perfect companion to growth. By using it to master your ERP, you can overcome many of the scalability issues organisations face.

Its advanced customisation options mean it can be tailored to your specific needs and challenges, enabling you to gain a bespoke system that serves you.

If you are considering Business Central for your organisation, or you already have it but want to utilise it better, our event Unlocking the power of Microsoft Business Applications can give you the insights you need.

Join us in Birmingham on 20th March to find out more about Dynamics 365 and the integrations that can drive performance across your operations, including AI and automation.

During the day, you’ll hear from experts from Infinity Group, Microsoft and other companies using Dynamics 365 to provide in-depth information and answers your questions. Industry and pain point-specific workshops will also provide tailored guidance and give you a chance to network with likeminded business leaders.

Find out more and register for your space here.