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Hi all,
I’m looking for real‑world approaches from anyone who’s tackled a “2 become 1” scenario in Business Central where item structures and sub‑assemblies are the main challenge — particularly in high‑mix / engineer‑to‑order environments.
Our context:
- Manufacturing business using sub‑assemblies extensively - 90,000 unique sku in 4 years
- Very high volume of unique parts per customer order - one order can have 300 lines to ship, each line can be made from one or more parts that are sub assembled
- Many components are effectively one‑time or order‑specific
- Legacy setup has grown organically, and we’re trying not to carry bad habits into the consolidated model
- We need to be able to ship the sub assembly parts on a pallet to a paint plant, return and sub assemble
The big question we’re wrestling with is:
How do you design a clean, scalable item and sub‑assembly strategy in BC when 80–90% of parts are unique per order — especially during a system consolidation?
Some of the specific areas I’d really value insight on:
1. Item vs “Non‑Item” thinking
- Do you still create items for every unique manufactured part, or move towards generic / template items + variants / dimensions?
- At what point does item cardinality become unmanageable in BC? we have 90k skus in 4 years and are producing 300k+ parts a year in a high volume, small routing time situation (most stages in our routings take 10 minutes or less per stage)
2. Sub‑assembly strategy
- Do you:
- Create true sub‑assembly items (with their own BOMs & routings), or
- Treat sub‑assemblies as logical groupings only (phantom BOMs / routing operations)?
- How do you avoid BOM explosion and admin overhead when every job is different?
3. Order‑specific BOM generation
- Are people:
- Dynamically generating BOMs at sales order / production order stage?
- Using configurators, CPQ, or external tooling to write BOMs into BC?
- If so, how do you keep this governed and supportable during upgrades?
4. Historical data vs future model
- In a “2 become 1” scenario:
- Did you preserve old item structures for history only, or
- Force everything into the new item model?
- Any strong lessons on what not to migrate?
5. Costing & reporting
- How are people handling:
- Cost roll‑ups when sub‑assemblies are unique every time?
- Margin visibility without drowning finance in noise?
- Standard costing, actual costing, hybrid… what actually held up?
6. What would you do differently?
- Looking back:
- What item/sub‑assembly decisions became technical debt?
- What simplifications paid off long‑term?
I’m not expecting a silver bullet — more interested in patterns, guardrails, and decision frameworks that work in the real world when BC is pushed into high‑mix, low‑repeat manufacturing.
Any war stories or examples very welcome.
Thanks in advance.
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