Why Electronics Manufacturers Trust Us
Gold
Microsoft Certified Partner
150+
Certified Consultants
350+
Implementations Delivered
10+
Years Serving Canadian Manufacturers
Choosing Dynamics 365 ERP for Electronics Manufacturing: Business Central or Supply Chain Management
Microsoft delivers Dynamics 365 ERP for electronics manufacturing through two products, and the one that fits follows from how your products are designed, built and sold.
Dynamics 365 Business Central
Dynamics 365 Business Central is suitable for a contract assembler, or a manufacturer with one plant and a set product range, where the list of parts behind each product stays the same for long stretches. It covers what a mid-sized operation needs day to day: scheduling and running production, inspecting parts and finished units, and tracing every component by lot or serial number.
Explore Business Central
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management
Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management is for an OEM or larger manufacturer where engineering change orders keep arriving, customers specify variants or custom designs, and production or purchasing crosses plants and legal entities. Engineering Change Management lives only in this product.
Explore Supply Chain ManagementYour ISED radio approval, your CSA-recognized safety marks and your customers' supplier qualifications belong to your products and your own quality processes. Dynamics 365 for electronics manufacturing holds the supporting data: component lots, serial numbers, BOM revisions and test results, ready for whoever asks.
Talk to Us About Your Production RequirementsWhat Canadian Rules Mean for Dynamics 365 ERP for Electronics Manufacturing
Several federal and provincial rules apply to electronics in Canada, and which ones reach you depends on what you build and who buys it. Each leans on records that an ERP for electronics manufacturing should already hold.
Electrical safety certification
Products sold or imported into Canada need to meet the Canadian Electrical Code, shown through the mark of a certification body accredited by the Standards Council of Canada. The certification body does the testing. Your Dynamics 365 ERP keeps track of which certified design revision each unit was built to.
ISED radio and interference rules
Anything with a transmitter, such as a Bluetooth, Wi-Fi or LoRa module, is certified through an ISED-recognized certification body and carries an IC number on its label, with RF exposure assessed under RSS-102. Digital apparatus covered by ICES-003, along with other interference-causing equipment, is exempt from certification and registration. It runs on a supplier's declaration of conformity, a bilingual CAN ICES / NMB label on each unit, and test reports kept for as long as the product is sold in Canada.
Consumer product safety
For consumer electronics, the Canada Consumer Product Safety Act requires manufacturers, importers and sellers to report a reportable incident to Health Canada and their supplier within two days of becoming aware of it, follow up with a detailed report within ten days, and keep records of suppliers and sales for at least six years. Health Canada can also order a recall.
Bilingual labelling
Prepackaged consumer products carry the product identity and net quantity in both English and French, with the dealer's name and place of business in either language. Commercial and industrial products are exempt from these packaging rules.
Provincial electronics stewardship
End-of-life electronics fall under provincial extended producer responsibility programs, and the rules differ by province. In Ontario, Regulation 522/20 requires producers of designated information technology, telecommunications and audio-visual equipment, and of lighting products, to register with the Resource Productivity and Recovery Authority and report on what they place on the market. Reliable sales data by product and province makes that reporting manageable.
The Controlled Goods Program
Organizations that examine, possess or transfer goods and technology listed under the Defence Production Act register with the Controlled Goods Program run by Public Services and Procurement Canada. Electronics manufacturers in defence and aerospace supply chains are the usual candidates, and records of where controlled items are held and where they went sit naturally in the ERP.
What Dynamics 365 ERP Can Do for Electronics Manufacturers
An electronics ERP earns its place by answering two questions fast: what is in this BOM revision right now, and which component lots sit inside the units already shipped. Everything below supports those two answers.
BOM structure and revision control
Picture the BOM as a tree: the finished product at the top, sub-assemblies below it, individual components at the leaves, and each branch tied to the routing that builds it.
Business Central lets that tree carry several versions, each with its own start date and approval status, so a revision goes live on the day you choose.
Supply Chain Management tightens control further. Engineering Change Management logs the request, runs it through approval and sends the new product version to production only after sign-off. Together they make up the bill of materials software for electronics manufacturing that a revision-heavy business needs.
Component sourcing and stock
Component inventory management software sits in the same system as your BOMs, so stock by warehouse and bin, reorder points and supplier lead times all connect to what you are about to build. Say a distributor pushes a delivery out by a month. Business Central's availability views and planning messages show which production orders and customer deliveries lean on that part, and linked substitute items offer an approved alternative.
Traceability
Serial number tracking software comes standard in both platforms. Numbers are captured when stock is received or when a finished board comes off the line, and every later movement carries them along. A field return can be walked back to the component lots used in that unit, and a supplier's bad lot can be walked forward to every customer who received a product containing it.
Quality control
Since the 2026 release wave, inspection is built into Business Central itself through a Quality Management module. Checkpoints, graded results and quarantine holds can all be shaped around the IPC-A-610 class a customer specifies.
Heavier quality programs move to Supply Chain Management, which brings quality orders, formal non-conformance management and sampling based on statistics.
Order-driven production
Some electronics are built only after a customer orders them. Business Central handles that with its Order reordering policy: the customer's sales order triggers the production order, and the output is reserved for that customer. Supply Chain Management adds configure-to-order, where a configuration model turns a customer's choices into a specific variant the moment the order is keyed, and engineer-to-order work, which runs as a project: the engineering comes first, and production orders follow once the design is settled.
Planning and costing
MRP and master production scheduling check demand against real capacity. Production costing then carries component prices and labour and machine time into unit cost, so a supplier's price change shows up in your margin quickly.
Business Central vs. Supply Chain Management for Electronics Manufacturing
This table shows the two products side by side, so you can check which one fits and share it with the team who will use the system.
| Aspects | Business Central | Supply Chain Management |
|---|---|---|
| Best suited to | Contract manufacturers, single-site assemblers | Multi-site OEMs, complex engineering environments |
| Manufacturing style | Discrete manufacturing (Premium licence) | Discrete manufacturing at enterprise scale |
| BOM and engineering change | Multi-level BOMs, production BOM versions | Engineering Change Management with approval workflow and release control |
| Lot and serial tracking | Native | Native, with multi-attribute tracking |
| Quality management | Native inspection templates and quarantine | Quality orders, non-conformance management, statistical sampling |
| Order-driven production | Make-to-order through the Order reordering policy | Make-to-order, configure-to-order and engineer-to-order |
| Organizational scale | One facility, one legal entity | Multiple entities, sites and currencies |
| Starting licence (Canada) | Premium: $149.20 CAD/user/month | Standard: $284.90 CAD/user/month |
Read the table by locating yourself on four lines: how deep the BOMs go, how quickly revisions arrive, the kind of orders you take, and your plant count.
One plant, a BOM that holds still and a steady product range lean toward Business Central Premium. Revisions every week, customer-specified variants or several plants lean toward Supply Chain Management.
Plenty of engineering teams work in a dedicated PLM tool and expect a released revision to land in the ERP on its own. In Supply Chain Management, Engineering Change Management is the receiving end: it takes engineering products from the design stage and releases them to each legal entity that builds them, with partner-built PLM integration frameworks on Microsoft's marketplace doing the data transfer. Business Central accepts those revisions as production BOM versions, brought in through integration or keyed in manually. We settle the right route during discovery.
Get a Platform RecommendationHow Does Dynamics Square Help You Find the Right Fit
Picking the wrong electronics manufacturing ERP software is expensive, and fixing it later takes a lot of time. Your team ends up building workarounds for a system that was made for someone else, and those workarounds slowly become the way everyone works.
So before we recommend anything, we ask about your business. How many levels deep does the parts list (the bill of materials) behind each product go? How often does engineering change a design? Do you build ahead of time, only when a customer orders, or to each customer's own specifications? How many factories and companies are involved, and what do your customers expect from you? The right Dynamics 365 product becomes clear from your answers.
Book Your Free Fit Assessment
How We Implement Dynamics 365 ERP for Electronics Manufacturing in Canada
Dynamics Square delivers every electronics manufacturing ERP implementation in Canada on Microsoft's Success by Design framework.
Discover
It is time spent with engineering, purchasing and the shop floor, charting BOM structure, revision habits and the parts that cause the most shortages today.
1
2
Initiate
At this stage, we agree platform, scope and governance, and name who owns BOM and item data.
Implement
It covers configuration, migration and validation of BOM and item records, plus connections to PLM, EDI and supplier portals.
3
4
Prepare
In this step, your planners, buyers and line leads work real orders through the system, get trained, and agree a go-live date clear of your peak build weeks.
Operate
It comes after go-live comes and Dynamics Square stays close for the first engineering changes, supplier substitutions and planning adjustments.
5
Clean BOM and item data underpins every later feature, so a Dynamics 365 implementation for electronics manufacturers should start there.
Pricing
The table shows Microsoft's 2026 monthly price per user in Canadian dollars. Your total depends on how many people need full access to run production, purchasing and inventory, and how many only need to view records or approve requests, since the Team Members licence costs a fraction of the full ones. Once we have spoken, we put a firm figure in a quote.
Business Central
Essentials
From $108.50CAD/user/month
Core financials, sales, purchasing and inventory
Premium
From $149.20CAD/user/month
Essentials plus production orders, BOMs, routings, MRP, MPS and native Quality Management
Team Members
From $10.90CAD/user/month
Read, approve and light self-service access
Supply Chain Management
Standard
From $284.90CAD/user/month
Full discrete manufacturing, Engineering Change Management and advanced quality management
Premium
From $407.00CAD/user/month
Standard plus advanced analytics and financial planning capability
Licences are the smaller line in the budget. For a contract assembler running one plant on Business Central, plan on roughly $35,000 to $65,000 CAD once implementation is added. A multi-plant Supply Chain Management build, with PLM integration and heavy BOM migration, can run to $175,000 CAD or beyond.
Get a Custom QuoteWhy Canadian Electronics Manufacturers Choose Dynamics Square
Projects open with your BOMs and supplier list, since the quality of that data caps how well everything else performs
Business Central gets our recommendation whenever it fits, even when the larger Supply Chain Management project would pay us more
Our consultants work in both products every week, which keeps the comparison honest
After go-live we stay for the early engineering changes, supplier substitutions and planning adjustments
Ten-plus years with Canadian manufacturers have made the paperwork of selling across provinces, from bilingual packaging to provincial tax, familiar before kickoff
Frequently Asked Questions
Electronics manufacturing ERP is the core business system for a company that designs, assembles and ships electronic products. It holds the multi-level BOM, component purchasing, the production schedule, inventory, quality results and the books in one place, so a change made by engineering is visible to the buyer, the planner and finance at once. In a sector where one missing part can hold up a whole build and customers ask what is inside every unit, that shared record is the point.
Yes, across a wide span of sizes. A contract assembler or single-plant manufacturer is well served by Business Central, while an OEM running several sites with heavy engineering change moves up to Supply Chain Management. BOM depth, change frequency and plant count should drive the choice, so those are the first three things we look at together.
Yes, in both products a finished unit can sit on top of sub-assemblies and components several levels down, with a routing at each stage of the build. When a BOM changes, Business Central switches to a new production BOM version on a date you set, and Supply Chain Management sends the change through Engineering Change Management for approval before release.
Yes, mark an item as lot or serial tracked and the system asks for the number whenever stock moves, from goods receipt through to final shipment. That gives you two directions of search: start with a supplier lot and see every unit it ended up in, or start with a returned serial number and see every component lot inside it. For consumer products, the same records support the six-year supplier and sales record-keeping that the Canada Consumer Product Safety Act sets out.
Yes, Business Central's Order reordering policy waits for a customer's sales order before planning any production, then reserves the output for that customer. Supply Chain Management covers the heavier cases: configuration models convert a customer's choices into a specific variant as the order is keyed, and engineer-to-order work runs as a project, with design finished before production orders begin.
Know Exactly What Went into Every Unit You Ship
Put your BOMs, component stock and serialized builds on one platform, and let your team answer the next engineering, purchasing or customer question straight from the record.
Book a Free Consultation Today