One extension, ten modules: four years of Business Central for a short-shelf-life food manufacturer

A short-shelf-life food manufacturer has run one Business Central extension since 2022, with ten modules across sales, inventory, warehouse, purchasing, manufacturing, planning, and finance. We built and maintain it, keep it upgrade-safe with event subscriptions, and ship it as a steady run of small releases.

2022 – present · Business Central · 4 min read · Published October 2026

Industry

Food manufacturing

Period

2022 – present

Scale

196 objects

10 modules

48 report layouts

Platform

Business Central online, AL; Insight Works Warehouse Insight, Shop Floor Insight and Advanced Inventory Count; Lanham EDI and E-Ship.

Services

Customization & Extension DevelopmentSystem IntegrationERP Optimization & AutomationDedicated Support and Managed Services

Building blocks

Insight Works Warehouse InsightShop Floor InsightAdvanced Inventory CountLanham EDILanham E-Ship

The client and the extension

The client is a food manufacturer producing short-shelf-life products for grocery retail and foodservice customers. It runs Business Central online with three Insight Works apps (Warehouse Insight, Shop Floor Insight, and Advanced Inventory Count) and two from Lanham (EDI and E-Ship). The standard product and those apps cover a lot, but not everything this business needs.

The gaps reach across the whole system. Shelf life differs by sales channel. Retailers want advance ship notices in their own formats, built from the license plates on each shipment. Pallet tags have to print as production output is recorded, and the production plan starts from imported forecasts. Since February 2022 we have built all of it into one extension rather than a set of separate apps, and we still maintain it. The same package extends sales, inventory, warehouse, purchasing, manufacturing, planning, and finance.

Ten modules, one package

Each module covers one area, but they share data where the work crosses departments. License plates from the warehouse feed the ASNs, shop-floor timestamps drive the output journals, and the shortage reasons recorded in sales appear on the invoices.

Staying upgrade-safe

On Business Central online, Microsoft and the ISVs release updates on their own schedule, and the extension has to keep working through each one. Two practices keep it upgrade-safe:

• Hook in, never modify. The extension subscribes to events in standard Business Central and in the ISV apps instead of changing base code, so an update can replace their code without overwriting ours.
• Check the extension against new versions. We ran compatibility passes for versions 26, 28, and 29, including one for the September 2026 change to the manufacturing cost API.

Recent releases

1. Jan 2026A custom sales-order layout with pro-forma pallet totals.
2. Apr 2026An ETA date on posted invoices, so BI reports can use it.
3. May 2026Lot numbers on sales lines.
4. Jul 2026A shipping label report.
5. Sep 2026Pagination for the transfer-order layout.
6. Sep 2026Descriptions for shortage reasons.

Outcome

Four years in, the package holds 196 objects and 48 report layouts across its ten modules, and it compiles with 0 errors on Business Central 28.2. Work continues as small, continuous releases like the six above. Version 1.0.1.87 shipped in September 2026, and every module still ships in the same package.

Takeaways

• Use one package with clear module boundaries. The ten modules share one set of utilities and one release cycle, while each covers one area of the business.
• Keep business codes configurable. Values such as customer classes, routes, and shortage reasons belong in setup, where the business can change them without a release.
• Treat compatibility passes as regular work. Versions 26, 28, and 29 each got one, and the extension compiles with 0 errors on 28.2 today.