A US sales office we met with a couple weeks back had a business model that trips up a lot of ERP conversations: they carry almost no inventory, they buy nothing until a customer commits, and the goods ship straight from an overseas plant to the customer. They never touch the product. If that sounds like your operation, a lot of the standard ERP checklist doesn't apply to you, and knowing which parts to skip saves real money and time.
What this business actually is
On paper it looks like manufacturing (they sell tooling and machined parts), but the US entity doesn't make anything. Orders come in, they source from sister plants abroad or an outside vendor, add margin plus freight and duties, and the supplier ships direct to the customer. That's a trading business with drop shipment, not a manufacturer. The distinction matters because it decides how much of Business Central you turn on.
Buy-to-order means no forecasting engine
Because nothing gets purchased until there's a confirmed sale, procurement is driven entirely by demand. There's no safety stock to plan, no reorder points, and no material requirements planning (MRP) to run. In Business Central terms, you can create a purchase order straight from the sales order and skip the whole planning module. That's a real simplification. MRP is powerful, but it solves a problem this company doesn't have.
Drop shipment: the goods never hit your books as stock
Business Central has native drop shipment handling. You link a sales order to a purchase order, the vendor ships direct, and the system records the receipt and shipment without the product ever landing in your warehouse. That keeps your inventory valuation clean and avoids a common trap where a drop-shipped item gets set up in a way that creates duplicate records across sales, purchase, and inventory. If your entire order book is drop-ship, that's mostly what your item and order setup should be built around.
This client stores a handful of already-purchased spare parts in the office as a favor to a customer with no space. That's not a reason to stand up warehouse management. A single location and simple item tracking cover the odd exception without adding overhead you'd carry forever.
Freight, duties, and the final revised quote
Importers rarely know their true freight and duty cost until the goods actually move. This client quotes conservatively up front, tells the customer the number may change, and then issues a final quote with actual costs before invoicing. Business Central's item charge functionality is built for exactly this: you can attach freight, duty, and other landed costs to the item so the true cost of each job is captured, not just booked to a general expense account. That keeps your margin per project honest.
The RFQ reality: some of it stays manual
One thing worth being upfront about: Business Central doesn't have a built-in request-for-quote (RFQ) module that emails multiple suppliers, collects bids, and scores them for you. For a demand-driven shop, the practical pattern is to create a purchase order (or several) from the sales order, send each straight from Business Central by email, update the pricing when suppliers respond, and route the finalized one through an approval workflow. That gives you a clean audit trail and an approval step without pretending the system does bid comparison it wasn't designed to do.
Where this leaves you
A drop-ship trading business can run on a much lighter Business Central footprint than a manufacturer, and that's a feature, not a compromise. The work is in setting up items, drop shipment, item charges, and approvals to match how you already sell, and in being clear about the couple of steps that stay manual. If you're a small US arm of a larger overseas group trying to figure out how much ERP you really need, we're happy to walk through your order flow and map it out with you.