A couple weeks back we sat down with a controller and an operations lead at a CNC equipment manufacturer that's planning a move off its current ERP. One thing they'd figured out the hard way was worth writing up, because a lot of manufacturers hit the exact same wall: how do you quote a product that comes with dozens of options and configurations without either buying an expensive configurator or drowning your item master in thousands of one-off assemblies?
The problem: too many permutations to model as separate items
This company sells equipment that ships with a lot of mix-and-match parts (different cables for different situations, various options that matter to production but not to the customer). Their old vendor offered two answers. One was to buy a configurator tool. The other was to build a separate assembly for every possible configuration.
Neither fit. The configurator was priced for a web storefront where customers self-serve, and this company doesn't sell that way; only internal salespeople would ever touch it. And an assembly per configuration meant thousands of records nobody could realistically browse to find the right one at quote time.
The workaround they built
They landed on what NetSuite calls an item group: a single line on the quote or sales order that contains many underlying items, priced as a unit, with the ability to remove items at the point of quote. Their insight was to flip the mental model. Instead of asking a salesperson to remember to add every part a configuration needs, they load the full list and have the rep remove what isn't needed.
You can't forget to add something when it's already there and you're just taking away what you don't need.
That one change made the data coming from sales into production accurate enough that it rarely needed corrections. The right parts got packed, built, and tested because the sales order reflected the real configuration, even when the customer didn't care about the details.
How this maps to Business Central and Dynamics 365 Sales
When you're evaluating a move, the question isn't whether the new platform has a feature with the same name. It's whether the platform can reproduce the outcome: an accurate configuration flowing from quote to production without a giant item master.
On the CRM side, Dynamics 365 Sales has a bundles concept that groups products into a single sellable unit, which is a reasonable place to reproduce that quote-time behavior. What deserves careful design is the hand-off: when a quote becomes an order and lands in Business Central, does the bundle stay bundled, and how does that drive work orders and invoicing? For many manufacturers, the bundle matters at the front of the process (making quoting fast and accurate) and stops mattering once it's an order moving through production. That's a design decision worth making on purpose, not by default.
Before you commit, ask to see your own configurable-product scenario walked from opportunity to quote to sales order to work order. Watching your real permutations flow through is far more useful than a feature checklist.
The point most buyers miss
A workaround that works isn't automatically something to carry forward, and a native feature isn't automatically better than the workaround you already trust. The right move is to name the outcome you need (accurate configuration, fast quoting, clean production data, no SKU explosion) and then test how the new platform delivers it before you build anything.
If you're weighing a platform change and you've got a configurable-product headache like this one, we're happy to talk through how it would look in Business Central and Dynamics 365 Sales before you're committed to anything.