Mastering Business Central: Learning, Growth, and AI in a Changing Landscape

Mark Smith: 0:14
Welcome to the Power Platform Show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guest inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Now let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from Florida in the United States. He works as a senior Microsoft Dynamics NAV and Business Central developer. He's an implementation specialist. He is always eager to learn new technologies and methodologies and share his expertise and insights. He aims to shape the future of enterprise solutions with Microsoft Business Central and helps clients achieve their business objectives and vision, which we're going to unpack on the show. You can find links to his bio and socials in the show notes for this episode.

Brad Prendergast: 1:06
Welcome to the show. Brad, Thank you for having me. I've been looking forward to speaking with you.

Mark Smith: 1:10
Looking forward to have you on the show. Tell me, if you look across your career and life, what's been the most influential training that you've done? It could be a book, it could be a podcast course, anything what jumps to mind as you found. Whatever you learned as part of that definitely impacted you heavily.

Brad Prendergast: 1:31
Yeah, geez. There's a lot of training that I've gone through and there's training in many different forms over the course of my career. I think the type of training that I found has been most helpful to me is the type of training that can reinforce a skill, whether that be through you know, some people call it muscle memory and learning and understanding. You know, muscle memory is not really there, it's just. You know you still have to go with your brain doing it. It just becomes a little bit more fluid. So the most influential training to me it depends on the topic.

Brad Prendergast: 2:03
I think a lot of times when it comes to technical training, I prefer to have more hands-on type training. Sometimes it could be a guided structure training, so from, for example, business Central, which is what I specialize in and even in development, or even the application use, which is what I specialize in and even in development, or even the application use, having a combination of exercise with a meaning, meaning you have a topic instead of just saying, hey, here's a feature, just have something. This is a task that needs to be done, so this could be in the written form, with something that you can follow through and then something where you can go through and have an understanding of what you need to accomplish, therefore. So if the objective is to you know something simple like create a sales order and ship, you know, products from a warehouse to a customer overseas right, so you have a task you can go through and then you understand the logical steps that you need to follow within the application to complete it. So that's the type of training that I prefer. I do also like to look at some you know, it's 2024, some of the online videos and in the videos. I like the videos because it's a similar process If somebody is having that same function, where you can pause and stop and replicate and do it yourself, right, but it's still an objective that you have for it, versus just showing something that's clicking.

Brad Prendergast: 3:17
So you actually have a process or an objective that you're trying to achieve and meet, which also helps me retain it. And then also that's professionally. Personally, I like to read a lot of books, so the books will train me. Yes, yes, I read a lot of books on. I'm actually reading a really good book now on why we sleep, so it's a great book. I'm actually reading a really good book now on why we sleep, so it's a great book, but I like to read books like that to help you just even manage your daily life, how you can become for lack of better terms better with life and giving back to the community.

Mark Smith: 3:50
Interesting, interesting If you look across your career. What's been the biggest inflection point for you where you know you could point to a time or a place or a person and things change from that point forward. Your career path took a new direction, maybe, or it ramped up to a new level Anything jump to mind.

Brad Prendergast: 4:12
I've had several inflection points, I think, and I think that comes with maturity and age and just progression in life, because I don't know, if you can tell, I'm a little bit older now than I was when I was younger, but when I first started my career I had some great mentors that. I'll take it back a second and I get often asked the question and a lot of people ask these types of questions what would you tell your younger self? And this will go back into your question what would you tell your younger self? And sometimes I'd say I'd probably punch myself in the face and say listen to more people, because sometimes when you're younger you think, oh, this person doesn't understand or they don't get it. But now that I'm on the other end of the spectrum, understand or they don't get it. But now that I'm on the other end of the spectrum, a lot of things that I heard from people along the way, you know the whole adage had I known then, what I know now actually resonates to be true, because some of the decisions that I made thankfully, you know, I became successful in my career. Maybe I would have done something slightly different, but would I be at the same point today I don't know, but early on I had some great mentors when I first started consulting. That taught me, you know, one of the big things I tell everyone today is I had an individual tell me you know, do what you enjoy, do it well, and the money will follow. You know a lot of people. Their goal is sometimes to be, you know, financial. I want to make this much money, I want to do this. But then it becomes a job and it becomes work, whereas if you do something that you are passionate about, you enjoy doing it. Therefore, others see that you enjoy doing it and you do well with it because you want to do it. So that was a big inflection point early on.

Brad Prendergast: 5:44
And then I think another inflection point happened. You know, I guess I don't know midlife. I don't know if you can define the midlife, it's just you start to realize just what's important. Uh, you know what? What do you stress about? What do you focus on? Realize just what's important.

Brad Prendergast: 5:57
What do you stress about? What do you focus on? What's important to spend your time on? What's important to stress about? You can't stress the past because it's already happened. You can't stress the future because it hasn't happened yet you can only worry about today. And what do you worry about? And the thing that you're stressed about, how important will it be a year from now? How important will it be six months from now? So I just take a step back and that's another inflection point was maybe about seven or eight years ago is when I realized that type of methodology and it helped me also again continue to progress, because I'm a little bit more relaxed and a little more sound in some of the decisions that I make, because I'm a little bit more relaxed and a little more sound in some of the decisions that I make.

Mark Smith: 6:40
Nice, Nice, Tell me your biggest contribution life, career what would you say is your? Yeah, not what you'd say, but what kind of jumps to mind when I ask that question what's your biggest contribution that you feel that you're most proud of?

Brad Prendergast: 6:56
Jeez.

Brad Prendergast: 6:57
You see, these are good questions and sometimes you can think the contribution, contribution where I think everybody strives, I think again, as you progress psychologically, it's again you want to give back, you give back to the community, you give back to society, you give back to everyone.

Brad Prendergast: 7:14
So my biggest contribution is I've always strived to just help people understand, whatever it may be, whether if to talk through and listen to them, if they have a challenge and to work through them with them the challenge may be given a different perspective, and then to also just share experience and knowledge with others, not that they have to follow it, but just maybe give them some insight into maybe looking at some things from a different perspective or understanding some experiences. I mean, I don't know if you can call that a contribution, but I look at it. It's a little bit deeper than saying this one thing that I've done in my life that I'm the most proud of. But to me it's more of just now, understanding and talking with people and just helping people move forward. You know whether it's through, you know, mentorship, training, knowledge sharing or even sometimes just listening to the event yeah, yeah.

Mark Smith: 8:09
If you look at your career across nav and business central and if we just looked at this year, 2024, what are the key elements of your day in the life or week in the life? What are you generally focused on? What are you specializing in? What are you creating? What does it look like this year? The BC landscape from your point of view.

Brad Prendergast: 8:34
The BC landscape is constantly changing, so the day to day, the week, the time, there's always a different challenge. I mean professionally, I work with helping business central implementations become successful and that's through system architecture or design and development of extensions or even integrations with other systems to help them become successful. Also, with the changes in the product there's. I spend a lot of time internally sharing knowledge because the application keeps changing so I keep up to date with the application, spend a lot of time focusing on what is new in the application because of the updates that come out monthly and I know they have two waves a year but all of the features don't come out in those two waves. Some of them come out monthly. So just trying to share with everyone so that they are aware of it, to help become better versed within the application, to point some of the things out. So my day-to-day is pretty much development, design, architecture, as well as sharing Business Central knowledge and within the whole ecosystem.

Mark Smith: 9:42
Talking about ecosystems, I don't work with Business Central. That's unfortunate. It's been one of those. Hey, it's one of those Dynamics products. My career always as I'm sorry took me down the CE path and that's been my background. But of course, the landscape has always had the offerings from, you know, ax, great Plains, nab In the mix. I've been definitely across them, knowing their, their functional areas and things like that.

Mark Smith: 10:11
What's the level of change happening? You know, I see the level of change in my area that is happening, which is, you know, this term of drinking from a fire hose is is often talked about the rapid rate of change We've gone through 18 months to two years of heavily as in from Microsoft AI taking over everything and Copilot taking over everything and really product roadmaps almost been deferred, but it's almost like it's starting. My observation it's starting. They're starting to get back to the pre-AI stuff again, because it's not like any of that went away. And sometimes when I look at Microsoft, I'm like you know, you've done this massive pivot in the last 18 months to two years. If this hadn't come along, what would the parallel you know, revolving doors type thing what would that journey been if we had just stayed the course for the last two years and AI hadn't entered the picture, where would it be in our you know product lifecycle? But what's the level of change going on in BC and how are people keeping up with it?

Brad Prendergast: 11:17
That is the challenge and I speak with many on that. The level of change is significant because of a number of reasons. A lot of features and functionality added, which to me is a great benefit to the application because it reduces the need to have, you know, customizations is what a lot of people work. But to have extensions written, I mean you still may need to have some extensions to satisfy those unique custom business processes that may not be within the core application, but at least they're adding a lot of features to the core application which will help reduce and minimize that. But they're adding so many features with each of these wave releases it is very difficult for someone to keep up completely, which is to go back you talked about.

Brad Prendergast: 11:59
You haven't worked with Business Central. You work primarily with CE. It's important to be aware of some of these applications because of the integration and the talk with them. But in order to excel in an application, you have to pick what's important to you and pick what you want to focus on. And you talked about even the product roadmap with Microsoft.

Brad Prendergast: 12:17
I mean, I think product roadmaps are difficult because you can't predict the future in a sense. So you can put a roadmap out goes back to what I mentioned about the future before. You can put a roadmap out a year from now, two years from now, which is something that you would like to do, but if there's a pivot in the world I guess you could say a focus or something happens that becomes important, whether it be regulatory, whether it be just how individuals think something is important, or a new technology gets introduced, such as AI, you may have to slightly pivot from your roadmap because that's important to the success of your product. So it is like drinking from a fire hose there's a lot of information coming through. How do you keep up? You can keep up, I think.

Brad Prendergast: 13:01
To me, you have to keep up. You just have to keep up with finding the source that's going to give you clear and concise. Thankfully, microsoft, from the business central side, has been doing wonders with the documentation and saying what's new and then picking what is new and what you would want to explore and understand, and picking out what is key to the success of what you're doing, because the application is growing and I'm sure even like the CE or some of the other applications, it's just growing rapidly. So it's just a matter of picking the pieces of it that you want to know but also maintain awareness. So if you do come across a situation when you're working on an implementation or somebody asks a question, at least you can say, ah, they did add this. Oh, I recall this, and then you can go back and look at it and investigate a little bit more detail when you have it, because if you try to keep up with everything and master everything, I don't think you'd ever sleep.

Mark Smith: 13:56
In your perception, where does BC sit in the Microsoft landscape from their field sellers perspective? And I ask this because I've seen a, over my career, phenomenal growth in the number of folks now in the field selling power, platform, selling dynamics 365, f&o selling dynamics 365, sales service, field service, et cetera. I don't know if I know a single person in Microsoft that is tasked with selling Business Central, or I've never come across them for whatever reason, and so my question is is Business Central really 100% partner-led initiative, in that it's the partners that go out and sell it and implement it? Or are you aware of folks in Microsoft and I talk about the Microsoft field as opposed to the Microsoft engineering right that build the product? But are you aware of folks that have a KPI, a metric, to move BC licenses?

Brad Prendergast: 15:02
I'm not aware of that, as if there's individuals that their sole function is to sell Business Central. I am aware of individuals that are there to support partners in selling Business Central. So from my perspective and from what I'm aware of and again it's just my awareness that it's partner-led, I mean customers. Obviously. If somebody finds it they can go online and they can order it. They'll still get, you know. I mean, there's ways that they can get there, but it's primarily partner-led.

Brad Prendergast: 15:29
But Microsoft supported and what I've noticed, the big change as Business Central becomes more and more popular. Microsoft has really gotten close with the partners as well as even talking with some of the customers to support with some of these implementations. And it's almost different than some of the other products, because you can buy Word, you can buy Excel, but you really don't get to talk to them. But now if you go to conferences or if you even send them emails, they'll interact with you from the engineering team to help give you support that you need. So from what I see, they are there more to help support the partner, sell the product and then also support the product to make the product better for the customers that use it and also help with the customers as well. So it's the partners excuse me the partners to be successful selling it and implementing it, and then also the customers to be satisfied with the application they have.

Brad Prendergast: 16:25
So I see it more as a support role with here's the collateral, here's the information. So I see it more as a support role with here's the collateral, here's the information. If you need some help, somebody in the room with you to talk about, if it's a large scale implementation or something else, they would support you with it. It is funny, though I hear commercials, I listen to finance news, whatever. You hear commercials for some of the other products, then I'm waiting for the day that I hear a commercial for Business Central, or I hear a commercial even for FNS CM I think that's what they call it today or something else, because you hear some of the other applications right that are sold from the ERP space and you know, one day I think they'll be there and then say you know, contact us, we'll get you. You know a partner or something.

Mark Smith: 17:02
Interesting. What is the core underlying system that BC sits on, and what I mean by that is, in the CE side we have a thing called Dataverse, and Dataverse is not just storage, it's a multi-storage technology. It's Cosmos DB, it's Elastic SQL, it is Azure SQL, it is blob storage, it is compute, it is automation, it's a workflow compute, it's front-end compute, it's scalable. That is how we define Dataverse. What's the equivalent for?

Brad Prendergast: 17:41
BC. Well, with Business Central, you have two options with the implementations at this point. You can use Business Central Online, which is hosted in Azure from Microsoft, or you can have Business Central On-Premises Business Central On-Premises, which would run on someone's local hardware.

Mark Smith: 17:57
So what's the database they're installing?

Brad Prendergast: 18:00
Locally it would be SQL. It's a SQL database as the backend for On-Premises and some individuals have on-premises installation that are hosted elsewhere. As far as I know from you know sometimes you know from the conversations that I had of course I'm not with the engineering team Azure SQL is going to be the backend for the data for Business Central Online and then with all of the compute and all those other pieces with it running in Azure, you get the advantage of that as well. They do have some events to you know they're starting to branch out to allow some interaction with Dataverse as well, but primarily now it's, you know, azure SQL.

Mark Smith: 18:34
As far as I know, Is there any kind of another thing we hear a lot from our side is the integration with Fabric and that you know One Lake type story and you know making the data that would sit in BC available to the wider org. Is that something you're coming across on your side of things or is it a different size?

Brad Prendergast: 18:56
It's starting to get into that. You know there are ways that you can have some of that information available, which is important. I think any application that you use, I don't think you'll have one application that's going to serve every single purpose. The applications are going to be a tool, and if you look at the whole Dynamics 365, because even Business Central they call it Microsoft Dynamics 365, business Central it's a tool to serve certain functions, but now they've opened it up to work with Power Platform, with Power Automate and Power Pages and API, so that they're all interconnected. So, to go over to your point of, there are some ways that you can get some of the information available in Fabric and also read some external data now, with the release of some of the reporting that they've done from within Business Central as well too. So I don't think it's as integrated as maybe CE, but I think they'll probably get there. I'm sure that they have some underlying architectural challenges, also because they're supporting both an on-premises version as well as an online version.

Mark Smith: 19:54
When they went and changed from NAV, and my understanding and correct me if I'm wrong the concept of going to BC was that it was going to be cloud enabled from the get-go and that was the big move that Microsoft was making. Rather than being partner hosted or on-premise hosted, it would be in the cloud. At that point, did they fundamentally change? Did they build it from the ground up to be a cloud first, where, when we look at AX, ax was kind of like virtualized first. It's definitely on-prem code base that was moved to the cloud right when Power Platform, for example, if you look in the it's cloud native right, it was born as part of the cloud, something that Salesforce really went to market in the it's cloud native right. It was born, you know, as part of the cloud, something that you know Salesforce really went to market in the early days. It never had an on-premise equivalent. What's that from a VC perspective?

Brad Prendergast: 20:50
Well, I can tell you what it appears to be. It appears to be that they've moved it to the cloud, but I'm certain for them to have, you know, the Azure connectivity that they had to reconstruct some of the inner workings of it. You know, I've had some conversations with some of the engineers about the underlying architecture but what they've done with it, but I'm not fully versed with what they've done to reconstruct it From the backend. From the application point of view, a lot of the same. They did switch the language from Cal to AL, which is similar in structure, and I think that's purposeful because they're continually adding functionality and features, even to the language, to go back to the drinking from the fire hose. So not only have an application changes, you're having development changes for those that create extensions. So I think that for change, on the surface it looks a lot similar and it's gradually progressing to be more of a cloud-based application with support for online, Because even today, when they release some new features, as it is, some of the new features that they're offering are only available online versus on-premises.

Brad Prendergast: 21:59
So there's starting to be a divergence of functionality in a sense, but not completely. I mean it's still the on-premises version is fully functional for an organization like anything else. Which do you prefer? Which do you use? Which better suits your business? A lot of people talk about well, online's better. Some people will argue on-premises is better, but to me, better is a metric by who, for whom right?

Mark Smith: 22:47
it's the person that's going to use the tool and what are their requirements and what do they need that's interesting because in the ce world right, which was 100 on-prem as in, as in, where I started 20 odd years ago with it but I never even hear the word on-prem anymore For I don't know six, seven years ago there was a massive kind of when are we going to have on-prem parity? Because all the functionality was coming in with the cloud version and not on the on-prem. Now it's like I can't even tell you. If on-prem exists as in, like could I go and do a fresh on-prem build today? I don't even know Like that's how far remote I've never heard about.

Mark Smith: 23:31
I'd never consider a new implementation being an on-prem. The largest or the only on-prem instance I can think of is something I did for the military that had to be on the hard network, which just to get it to the hardware network took three year process after the software was built or tailored for them, you know, to get it on the military classified network. And that's the last kind of on-prem that I in my mind that I can think of. Every implementation I only hear of the cloud. I never hear Microsoft ever talk about on-prem these days. So it's interesting that it's still very much part of the BC landscape.

Brad Prendergast: 24:09
It is. I think it's starting to move more and more online just because of the ease, and I think some of the I think they did a good job with this approach because I think it allowed it to go to the cloud. They were able to work through the application on the cloud. It's how it works with different. Instead of saying, okay, here's a new cloud feature, everybody go to it. Or you know the cloud application, go to it, everybody switch. This is your migration path. You give them the option of on-premises versus and again, this is my opinion give them the option of on-premises if it suits, whatever comfort they may have. Or again, if you mentioned the military in your example, there may be a security requirement where it is completely managed and isolated from any outside contact. I use the word contact, but also in that, those that started adopting the cloud, they were able to work through the application in such a manner that they continuously enhance it and work with the performance issues because that's a lot of things individuals are concerned with and kind of work out how it works with scalability, how it works with redundancy, and now I am seeing more and more implementations.

Brad Prendergast: 25:13
Look for the cloud-based version of the application just because it's easy, you can have the reduction of maintenance and management of network infrastructure, for example. With it being in the cloud, you can access it easily anywhere, and they have been adding some great management tools. And security has always been a big one, so they continually enhance the security. Again, you have the benefit of Microsoft and the security for it too. So I think there will be a day where it will be predominantly online. That's again my opinion. I see it being just for the ease and even for them to work with the application, because somebody's on-premises, if they come out with a new update, somebody has to go through the process of updating that system, whereas if it's online, just you know, schedule it, you go through it, test it for sure, you know you schedule it for live from your sandbox. So I'm a big fan of the online. Again, like I, some will have on-premises needs today. Maybe in the future those needs will change, but online is much easier.

Mark Smith: 26:13
What are your thoughts and I'm going to pivot here, Not what are your thoughts how are you using AI personally?

Brad Prendergast: 26:19
Personally, I use AI as a tool. And how do I use AI? We're doing development. We've been using AI for development with GitHub, copilot. It's been great AI geez. Anytime you do a search engine now, even if you use Google, you get the AI summary at the top first, which gives you the link.

Brad Prendergast: 26:40
I use AI as an assistant, which I think is where it's going and where it's becoming, because if I want to draft something, sometimes use it as an assistant, which I think is where it's going and where it's becoming, because if I want to draft something, sometimes use it as an outline and it will help get me something started. And again, I have the conversations about AI and some will say, well, yeah, I didn't do this, I didn't do that. But if you look around and say it's like a tool Using a hammer, using an air gun, it's what tools you use for the job. And if I can use AI, as I had mentioned, if I'm writing something or coming up some content to blog about or something or even a session, maybe it gives me a topic or an outline to start with, and then my creativity, my natural creativity, can flow from there, or even some documents that I, you know, will read through, which I found was great. You a read-through, which I found was great.

Brad Prendergast: 27:24
I was away for a few days, had a lot of email threads. Ai was able to say, hey, summarize these emails, and it gave me a good summary and what I've done with that. Again, with it being a tool, it's not always going to be perfect. I'll take the notes and talk with somebody that was on thread, that was managing it in my absence, and say is this the gist of what happened? And most of the time they do say yes, it's pretty accurate.

Brad Prendergast: 27:48
So I use AI for that summary, like that, even some meetings, depending on the meetings, to summarize the meetings or take notes for the meetings. And, of course, who doesn't use AI to create pictures? It's fun to create photos, so I use it in a lot of areas of my life to try to just even get some information or search information. It's a little bit easier now than you know. Again, web browsing, you can find the links, you can go to the links, but now if you, you know, summarize a web page, even, like I said, if you're using Google, for instance, for searching, google will give you the AI summary and then the links to the actual pages that I can go to from there.

Mark Smith: 28:22
Any tools that you like particularly you talk about images any tools that you prefer.

Brad Prendergast: 28:27
Tools for images, ai tools. Yeah, I just use GitHub Copilot and then I use Copilot. It's primarily using. I did have the good old ChatGPT subscription before Microsoft released the Copilot and now I strictly use GitHub Copilot and the Microsoft Copilot that's built in with Outlook and Teams, and even the application on my phone and then on the browser. I use a Mac, so it has to be on the browser. If I do use a Windows desktop, I'll use the Copilot on the desktop.

Mark Smith: 28:57
Interesting. What excites you about the next six months?

Brad Prendergast: 29:01
What excites me about the next six months? I'm interested to see what's next with the application, interested to see what's next with the application, interested to see what's next with AI and some of the tools, and then also just trying to relax, I don't know.

Mark Smith: 29:15
Yeah, Now correct me if I'm wrong and I didn't see it in my notes here. Do you have a podcast? Yes, yes, Tell us about that as we wrap.

Brad Prendergast: 29:25
Absolutely. There's a co-host of a podcast named Dynamics Corner Started with an associate of mine and became good friends over the years as well with Chris Rieras. We started the podcast I think about three years ago now maybe you know, time's a blur and we started off just wanting to talk with members of the community as a sense of giving back and let members of the community talk about something that they're passionate about. We talk with partners, we talk with ISVs, we talk with customers, we talk with everybody just to hear everyone's perspective on, maybe, the technology, the application, and we do try to focus on the dynamic space. But we talk about other things as well too. As far as implementations of applications, we have conversations about what it takes with the human factor, the people factor, and also sometimes the technical aspects of doing something within Business Central, creating something with Business Central or some of the other tools.

Brad Prendergast: 30:19
We do quite a few recordings. We try to release one every week. Sometimes we release two each week, but we do it for a lot of fun and it's been great to have the opportunity to meet many, many people around the world through the conversations, some that it's great to meet and see at the conferences. You get to talk with them, you begin corresponding with them and even become friendly with them. In a digital world, it's very easy to meet and talk and correspond with somebody regularly and then finally get to meet them in person. You feel like you've known them your whole life. So it's again, it's this dynamics corner and it's more of a community. You know. Give back, as I guess you could say, is what we call it.

Mark Smith: 30:58
I love it. We'll make sure we get the much for coming on the show. Thank you, I appreciate you having me. Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash NZ365 guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.