Lot and Serial Number Information Improvements in Business Central

For my last blog post on improved Non-Inventory Items in Business Central I discussed how manufacturing companies use the feature for tracking consumable parts.  The improvements to Business Central 18 and Business Central 19 made small but meaningful changes to the way you can work with Non-Inventory Items. 

This post (along with a number of others) is meant to dig into some specific features I think are handy for manufacturers that have been released in 2021.  I summarize more of these features in a separate article I wrote with a roundup of 2021 Business Central manufacturing improvements.

In this post I want to talk about Lot and Serial number tracking, and in particular the Lot No. or Serial No. information documents.

Using Lot and Serial Numbers in Manufacturing

Many Business Central manufacturers (and some distributers) use Lot and Serial Numbers extensively.  In my experience it's only about 20-30% of discreet manufacturing companies need this feature.  It's used in two ways:

1. The Lot or Serial Numbers are used for components or raw materials
2. The Lot or Serial Numbers are used for the parts produced by the manufacturer

In general this is most common in make to stock and make to order manufacturers. If you want to understand a bit more about this kind of production manufacturing you can read my blog about make to stock manufacturing features.

Lot and Serial numbers are really important for tracking back to the production process and being able to dig into data if a customer provides either a Lot or Serial number. 

Automatic Creation of Lot and Serial Number Information

The trouble with previous versions of Business Central is that when you create a Lot No. or Serial No. there was no where to explicitly add user fields and data.  There was a Lot Information card or Serial No. Information card - but they had to be created manually.

In Business Central 2021 Release Wave 1 (aka Business Central 18) Microsoft added the automatic creation of Lot and Serial Number information to the base system.

This might seem like a small change, but it makes life much easier for "out of the box" customers using this information to track data about their Lot/Serial numbers.  In combination with a few user defined fields it can make a difference for day to day use.

Typical information that manufacturers (and sometimes distributors) keep about their Lots or Serial numbers might include:

• Chemical test data
• Electrical characteristics
• Material grades or Mill Certification data
• Date of Manufacture
• Warranty end date

Etc.

It's much easier (and cheaper) to add a field to a page if the data is pre-created, and this change helps reduce costs for every customer who's needed this kind of information kept.