Business Central Integration Guide for Production Scheduling with SkyPlanner APS

The integration runs on two interfaces Business Central already ships:

1. API v2.0 for commercial and inventory data. It exposes items, itemVariants, itemLedgerEntries, locations, unitsOfMeasure, salesOrders, salesOrderLines, purchaseOrders, purchaseOrderLines, vendors, customers and employees. It has no manufacturing entities, so production data comes through the second interface.
2. OData v4 web services for manufacturing. Any Business Central page can be published as an OData v4 web service on the Web Services page. Choose object type Page, the page ID and a service name, then select Published. The endpoint is live, with no AL code and no extension to deploy. The integration publishes the standard pages for released production orders, Prod. Order Routing Lines, work centers, machine centers and routings, served under /ODataV4/Company('{name}')/{ServiceName}.

Published pages are read and write. Microsoft: “If an editable page is exposed as a web service, the data in the underlying table can be accessed and modified by an OData call,” with PATCH for updates. That is how planned dates go back into Business Central, through the same page and the same validation a planner uses.

Skip SOAP. Microsoft has deprecated SOAP web services, and publishing Microsoft UI pages as SOAP is removed in 2026 release wave 2 (v29).

Business Central supports webhook subscriptions through POST /api/v2.0/subscriptions on API v2.0 entities such as items and salesOrders. The rules:

• Creating a subscription requires a handshake: your endpoint must return the validationToken with 200 OK.
• Subscriptions expire after three days. Renew with PATCH, and the handshake runs again.
• Notifications carry the resource path, changeType and your clientState, not the full record. You read the record afterwards.
• Notifications are delayed: Business Central online waits 30 seconds after the first change, and more than 1,000 changed records in that window arrive as one collection notification.
• Maximum 200 webhook subscriptions per environment online.

Production orders, routing lines and purchase orders are polled every few minutes on the published pages and on purchaseOrders. Filtering to open orders and paging keeps the request count well inside Business Central’s limits.

SkyPlanner sends webhooks when state or the schedule changes, so the write-back side is event-driven.

1. Initial master data load. Pull Certified routings and production BOMs, work and machine centers from the published pages, and items and units of measure from API v2.0. Map each work or machine center to a SkyPlanner workstation deliberately: decide whether a work center with three machine centers becomes one workstation group or three workstations.

2. Order sync. Read Released production orders (and Firm Planned, if you schedule them) with their routing lines and components from the published pages, plus open purchase order lines from API v2.0. SkyPlanner treats ordered material as available on the PO delivery date and updates stock when the PO is marked Delivered, so the schedule checks both stock and incoming purchases.

Never schedule Planned production orders: Microsoft says Business Central “deletes them the next time you run planning.” The Planning Worksheet keeps proposing supply, and SkyPlanner schedules the firm orders against real capacity.

3. Schedule write-back. The standard Prod. Order Routing page is published as an OData v4 web service. For every operation the engine placed or moved, SkyPlanner sends a PATCH to that routing line with the If-Match ETag. It sets Starting Date-Time and Ending Date-Time, plus Type and No. when the operation moved to an alternative machine.

The PATCH runs the page and table triggers, so Business Central validates the fields with its own logic, exactly as when a planner edits the Prod. Order Routing page. The production order line’s Starting and Ending Date-Time follow. Business Central keeps quantities, status and costs.

4. Shop-floor confirmations. Operators log work with SkyPlanner Mobile Confirmations or the Production Timer, and the timelogs keep the schedule current. Output can be reported in Business Central as before, from the Production Journal or Output Journal.

If you want output and consumption posted fully automatically, a standard Business Central API page is added for output journal posting. SkyPlanner then posts setup time, run time and output quantity per operation. Posting updates Capacity Ledger Entries, and output on the last routing operation adds the item to inventory.

Pick one channel for output posting. Posting from both SkyPlanner and the Business Central Production Journal duplicates entries.

5. Ownership and conflict rules. Write them down before go-live:

The main conflict source is Refresh and Replan on production orders. Microsoft: “If you use the Refresh action to recalculate production order lines, Business Central deletes the existing production order lines and calculates new lines.” Replan can change capacity need as well, and recalculating components “deletes previous changes in the components.”

Treat a refreshed order as a new version, re-sync it, and let SkyPlanner reschedule. With Autopilot, SkyPlanner reschedules automatically when production changes.

• Units in routings. Setup Time is per production order, Run Time is per produced item, and each has its own Unit of Measure Code. Wait Time and Move Time do not consume work center capacity. If the work center unit is Days, one day is 24 hours, not an eight-hour shift. Convert on import or every duration is wrong.
• Stale calendars. Capacity exists only after Calculate Work Center Calendar has run for the horizon. Check the Calendar Entries Available Until field before the initial load.
• Machine center capacity hidden. With Consolidated Calendar off, only the work center’s own capacity is planned: “The machine center capacity is excluded.” Read machine center capacity directly rather than trusting work center totals.
• Capacity and Efficiency. Business Central calculates duration as Run Time / Efficiency / Capacity, and calculated calendar entries already include both. Map Efficiency to SkyPlanner workstation efficiency once, not twice.
• Alternate Work Center is informational. Microsoft: it “isn’t automatically included in planning processes.” Model alternatives explicitly as SkyPlanner alternative workstations.
• Throttling. Online limits apply per user, and a service principal counts as one user: 6,000 OData requests in a 5-minute sliding window and 5 concurrent requests. Page size is capped at 20,000, a $batch at 100 operations, and an operation times out after 8 minutes. Exceeding the rate returns 429. Batch, page and poll deltas instead of running full reloads.
• Licensing. Manufacturing exists only in the Premium experience. Users on Essentials cannot sign in to a company set to Premium.