OroCommerce Microsoft Dynamics 365 Integration: Business Central and Finance & Operations

Summarize this article

Microsoft Dynamics 365 covers two very different ERPs: Business Central for small and mid-sized companies, and Finance and Supply Chain Management (often called Finance & Operations) for larger organizations. Both are common among manufacturers and distributors that sell B2B. Here is how to connect them to OroCommerce, the B2B commerce platform.

Which Dynamics 365 are you running?

Business Central is the successor of Dynamics NAV, and Finance & Operations the successor of Dynamics AX. They do not share the same data model or the same APIs, so an integration built for one does not work for the other. The first step of any project is to confirm which product, which version and which customizations you run.

What flows between OroCommerce and Dynamics 365

• From Dynamics 365 to OroCommerce: customers and contacts, items and inventory by location, prices and discounts, order status, shipments and invoices.
• From OroCommerce to Dynamics 365: sales orders, new customers and addresses, and payment information.

How to connect the two systems

• Business Central provides standard REST APIs, OData web services and webhooks that notify other systems when records change. Custom API pages can expose your own fields.
• Finance & Operations exposes data entities through OData for transactional exchanges, and the Data Management Framework for high-volume batch imports and exports.

On the OroCommerce side, a complete API and an integration framework based on message queues handle asynchronous processing. The integration can be built directly, or through an integration platform (iPaaS) with connectors for both systems.

Dynamics 365 specifics to plan for

• Pricing. Business Central manages price lists, customer price groups and discounts. Finance & Operations uses trade agreements. In both cases, decide whether prices are calculated in the ERP and pushed to OroCommerce price lists, or requested in real time.
• Companies and legal entities. Many Dynamics 365 setups run several companies or legal entities. Map them carefully to OroCommerce websites, organizations and customer accounts.
• Updates. Microsoft updates Dynamics 365 regularly. Use standard APIs where possible so the integration survives updates.

Common pitfalls

• Underestimating the customizations already in your ERP, which the integration has to take into account.
• Synchronizing everything in real time when some data only changes daily.
• No monitoring of failed messages, so errors surface only when a customer calls.

Integration is often the largest line in an OroCommerce budget, as we explain in our article on what drives the cost of an OroCommerce implementation.

Planning an OroCommerce Dynamics 365 project?

Synolia is one of OroCommerce’s founding SI partners and has delivered dozens of OroCommerce projects, most of them connected to an ERP. Our team in Santiago, Chile works on US business hours, in English and Spanish. Talk to our team about your Dynamics 365 integration, or read more about our approach to ERP integration.