Business Central: a Top Cloud Manufacturing Solution

I have always been a big fan of Business Central for manufacturing.  In fact, I'm teaching a few manufacturing sessions at Community Summit coming up in a few weeks. I have been evangelizing that Business Central is the top Cloud Manufacturing Solution on the market today.

After telling people how great Dynamics 365 BC is as a cloud ERP for years, I had a moment of panic!  What if I was wrong?  What if Business Central is just a ho-hum run of the mill ERP?  I thought about ways to research this and I determined an approach I think is a pretty good one.

I did a web search (no I didn't use Bing) to find lists of and write an article about the top cloud manufacturing ERP for small business.  Here is my summary.

I located a bunch of sites that had lists of Top ERP systems and started aggregating them.  I realized quickly that some sites were either VAR/partner sites, or were the ERP vendor themselves.  I threw these away.  I decided that posts on social media (by people who looked independent), news organizations, consultants, aggregator websites and other more independent sources were better. 

For my search I was looking for terms like "top cloud manufacturing ERP for Small Business" and "top SMB manufacturing ERP" etc.  I was avoiding the enterprise level products like SAP S/4 HANA and Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain.  If the list of top ERP systems had SAP S/4 HANA, Oracle ERP or other enterprise class products as primary parts of the list I tended to discard it (although for aggregators it was hard to escape).

This is the list of 12 Top Cloud ERP lists I narrowed down to.

As I looked at these sites I realized that Business Central appeared on almost all of them, and so I created a spreadsheet where I listed the sites across the top, and the ERP systems across the side.  I put a "1" in a cell under a site if the ERP appeared there.

This excel sheet was pretty ugly, and had a lot of ERP systems that appeared only once on a list (so the ERP appeared on one of the 12 websites above).  Eventually I decided to just look at those that were on at least 5 of the 12 lists (about 40%).

This is the list (in a more user friendly form).

So now I had the list I could write my blog of the Top Cloud Manufacturing ERP.  Here are the results in summary.

Dynamics 365 Business Central and Acumatica appeared 11 times out of 12 (92% each) on the lists.  I was really impressed with this number.  It is clear that these article authors considered Business Central a top cloud ERP for small and medium businesses.  

NetSuite appeared 9 times out of 12 (75%).  I was kind surprised by this.  NetSuite is the "grandfather" of modern cloud based ERP systems, so I would have expected to see more of it.  I feel like it has moved into more of an enterprise system, and perhaps being first has hurt it as it has a older UI design. NetSuite is a true cloud ERP system as I describe in my Business Central vs NetSuite article.  I definitely consider it one of the top Cloud Based ERP systems on the market today, and it makes a ton of sense to see it as number 3 on the list.

SAP Business One appeared 8 out of 12 times (67%).  I was not as surprised by this.  I think there is a bias in the market towards SAP products in general.  One thing that "bothers" me is that SAP B1 is grouped as a Cloud ERP - but based on my definition, it isn't.  I wrote an article comparing SAP Business One vs Microsoft Business Central if anyone is interested.  I explain my definition of Cloud ERP in the article.

Odoo rounded out the top 5 with 7 out of 12 appearances.  I think of Odoo as being a "Very Small" business product - not Small and Medium Business which the others on this list would be.  Odoo is probably a good choice for a manufacturing company with very simple processes, or one that is quite small (maybe up to 50 staff total).  Based on what I know, it will start to break down when the business complexity increases and pushes more towards the "Medium" of the Small and Medium size company.  You can read my comparison of Odoo vs Business Central to learn more about it.

It is clear from my research that the general public are ranking Dynamics 365 Business Central as the top cloud ERP for manufacturing today.  I'm glad I did this research project, as it's allowed me to be even more confident in telling people about how good Business Central is.  I truly believe that Microsoft has caught lightening in a bottle here, and created a "killer app" in their Microsoft 365 eco-system.