Microsoft Business Solutions Manufacturing for Great Plains® series offers powerful, cost-effective resource planning and management tools that enable you to collaborate with trading partners, manage the entire financial life cycle of the manufacturing business process and build a sustainable advantage in your industry.

To learn more about the features of Great Plains® Manufacturing, choose a module below:

Capacity Requirements Planning

Customization Tools

Engineering Change Management

Job Costing

Manufacturing Bill of Materials

Manufacturing Order Processing

Master Production Scheduling

Materials Requirements Planning

Quality Assurance

Sales Configurator

Sales Forecasting

Or click here to download the Great Plains® Manufacturing Brochure

Capacity Requirement Planning
Capacity Requirements Planning effectively addresses your capacity monitoring and planning needs, displaying capacity used and available, and load percentage information for all work centers in a single, concise, easy-to-read view.

Capacity Requirements Planning provides the summary information you need to spot situations where capacity is short or long, making it easier for you to shift production and manage your resources efficiently, and detailed information is a single click away. You can view capacity information by day, week or month, as far into the future as necessary.
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Customization Tools
With Microsoft Business Solutions Customization Tools, you not only have complete customization and integration control; you also have access to a suite of powerful industry-standard tools and technologies that millions of developers are already familiar with. Built on Microsoft technology, Microsoft Business Solutions–Great Plains® delivers the Modifier with VBA for customizations. For simple to complex integrations, eConnect, Integration Manager, Integration Assistant for Excel, and the Continuum products allow you to connect all parts of your business together.
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Engineering Change Management
Engineering Change Management provides an easy method for collecting, reviewing, and authorizing proposed changes to products and production methods. Engineering Change Requests are used to log all proposed changes, automatically assigning these documents to authorized individuals for review before implementation, which allows you to avoid making changes to your production process before the implications have been considered. Once accepted, Engineering Change Requests are converted to Engineering change orders, which are used to document and control the process of updating inventory records, bills of material, routings—even current manufacturing orders.

Engineering Change Management incorporates revision levels and effective dates, making change easier to manage. User-defined disposition information can be used to specify the expected outcome of each engineering change notice, and engineering change statistics help track the volume of change requests being processed and identify those that are out of date.
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Job Costing
Even organizations that don’t consider themselves job shops often have special projects that may last several months and involve multiple manufacturing orders. Job Costing gives production managers the ability to closely monitor the overall profitability of any job, along with the detailed cost components for each job. Analysis tools help managers to spot variances and unreasonable cost contributors before they become unmanageable. Streamlined data entry makes it easy for data entry personnel to assign transactions to jobs when the transactions are first entered in the system, eliminating redundant, error-prone duplicate entries.
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Manufacturing Bill of Materials
For each item you manufacture, you can maintain an active Manufacturing Bill to track the components you currently use and manage those bills that you have in production. The Engineering Bill allows you to see the effect of changes to your products on the cost of the item. You can use the Super Bill to manage all of the options available on the configurable products that you produce and set up Configured Bills for a customer’s unique requirements. In addition, you can maintain an unlimited number of archived bills, tracking outdated assemblies; this flexibility allows you both to plan for the future and to maintain historical information you may need to refer to again. Finally, you can create Phantom Bills to track subassemblies whose components are critical to track but never exist as a final assembly.
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Manufacturing Order Processing
The Manufacturing Orders module acts as the nerve center for production. Production requests from sales orders, material requirements planning, the master production schedule and manually entered orders all can be used to initiate production, making Manufacturing Orders a powerful tool for shops using make-to-order, make-to-stock and assemble-to-order manufacturing processes.

Manufacturing orders are easy to generate using Microsoft Business Solutions; you can designate each order as a quote/estimate, open, released, hold or cancel. Resources and costs for labor, machines and material are calculated immediately as the order is processed; this information can be compared to actual resources used and cost incurred at the end of the production process to identify inefficiencies in production.
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Master Production Scheduling
Master Production Scheduling (MPS) provides a flexible solution for managing high-level production requirements. Master Production Scheduling can be used to draw information from sales forecasts, netting them together to form a single, comprehensive production schedule. Sales forecasts can be refined in Master Production Scheduling, and Manufacturing Orders automatically created to meet the expected need. Simply review the Manufacturing Orders, and you’re ready to begin production.

The make-to-stock features offered by Master Production Scheduling dovetail with the sales order driven make-to-order functionality of other Manufacturing Series modules to provide a broad-based solution for a wide range of production environments.
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Materials Requirements Planning
Materials Requirements Planning (MRP) brings this traditional tool to entirely new heights through the use of the graphical user interface. MRP is now a virtually paperless activity when using the spreadsheet-like view to analyze your inventory levels at any point in time.

You can view material requirements in the way that best meets your needs by days, weeks or months, or in a bucket-less format, which shows your materials requirements regardless of the timeframe. There is no need to dig through piles of papers or separate order files to find out more about the resource requirements. MRP Quantity Pegging allows you to drill down on any of the MRP quantities to review the source of the demand.
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Quality Assurance
Using Quality Assurance, you can track raw material quality issues and take the necessary steps to ensure suppliers are providing the grade of goods you’ve requested. You can define QA procedures, including step-by-step processes, acceptable quality level tables and disposition codes. Sampling procedures are flexible, allowing testing of a single item used in several tests, one test used on several items, or any combination of the two. Quality Assurance integrates with Microsoft Business Solutions–Great Plains® receiving components, ensuring that only high-quality raw materials are being brought into your plant. Forms for non-standard reports and supplier corrective action requests are online, as well, further streamlining the quality assurance process.
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Sales Configurator
If your company offers products with a variety of optional features, the Sales Configurator can simplify the production process for your employees, and in turn improve your ability to deliver customized products that fulfill customer requirements.

Sales promotions can be configured for component items, and sale prices will be displayed when you create quotes using the Sales Configurator, making it easier to stay on top of promotions and to use them as you close sales. As you add and remove options from the configured bill of materials, the Sales Configurator will recalculate the finished goods’ cost and provide you with an estimated manufacturing completion date.
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Sales Forecasting
Whenever you bring together people to accomplish a task, communication challenges may arise—especially when those people have different objectives and backgrounds. Your sales teams and manufacturing managers probably face these challenges—yet effective communication between these divergent groups is the first step to ensuring product delivery that’s both efficient and effective.

Sales Forecasting brings these two teams closer together. With Sales Forecasting, sales managers can review prior years’ sales and quickly revise projections based on their knowledge of customer needs. Forecasts can be easily changed, reflecting an upward or downward sales trend, and they can be tweaked to account for seasonal influences or promotional activities.
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