AL MES

Overview

AL MES brings real-time shop-floor production execution into Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Operators start, pause and finish the operations of a production order directly on the shop floor from a touch or mobile client, and AL MES turns that activity into standard Business Central output and capacity postings - automatically, and with the operator's labor time correctly shared when one person runs several operations at once.

Without a shop-floor execution layer, production feedback is usually written on paper job tickets and re-keyed in the back office: late, error-prone, and unable to tell machine time from operator time. AL MES closes that gap with an API-first capture model and a posting engine built entirely on the standard Business Central capacity ledger.

Key features

• Shop-floor capture via Web API - Start, Pause and Finish of routing operations from a touch or mobile operator client.
• Timed routing entries - every action recorded with start and stop timestamps and produced or scrapped quantities; the engine reconstructs the real active time.
• Automatic Output Journal posting - output, run time and scrap generate standard Capacity Ledger Entries with no custom posting code.
• Two-axis capacity - separate machine and operator capacity lines, so machine load and labor are measured and costed independently.
• Co-working time distribution - when one operator runs several operations at once, AL MES splits the wall-clock time across them in proportion to the quantity produced, deferring posting until the whole group is finished.
• Built on standard manufacturing - routing lines, machine and work centers, capacity ledger; no parallel data model to maintain.
• Italian localization included.

Business benefits

• Real-time, accurate feedback from the floor - no paper tickets, no late re-keying.
• True labor costing - operator time allocated fairly even when one person tends several machines at once.
• Machine vs operator visibility - independent capacity lines for load analysis and a clean equipment and labor cost split.
• Standard accounting - everything posts through the standard output and capacity engine.

Typical scenarios

• Tooling and precision machining - one operator runs several CNC operations in parallel; labor time is split across the parts by quantity produced.
• Cutting and sawing - several production orders opened and closed together, posted consistently.
• Surface treatment and coating lines - batch operations under operator supervision, with the time shared across the jobs that ran together.

What makes AL MES different

• It solves the hard part - operator-time allocation across co-worked operations (union-find plus sweep-line, proportional to output, deferred until the group is complete), exactly what generic time tracking cannot do.
• Two-axis capacity out of the box - machine and operator capacity posted as distinct lines.
• API-first by design - a Web API meant for a touch or mobile shop-floor client.
• Standard capacity engine - postings land in the standard Capacity Ledger, nothing parallel to audit.

Technical information

• Supported product - Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central (28.0 or higher)
• Availability - Cloud (SaaS)
• Languages - English (en-US), Italian (it-IT)
• Integration - Web API (REST/OData) for the shop-floor operator client
• Dependencies - AL License and Trial Management, AL Message Passing (AppLibra)
• AppSource certification - in preparation