As service firms grow, Business Central scheduling becomes more challenging.
Hendrik Bulens, managing partner at Dime Software, argues that AI can speed up planning, but the human scheduler must remain in control.
For many customers, spreadsheets work well. That is, until their organization’s growth breaks them.
“Our main competitor is Excel,” Bulens told PartnerTalks. In field service, professional services, and engineering, teams often plan in Excel, Outlook, or even on paper until the volume rises, changes come faster, and the whole process starts leaking time, billing accuracy, and visibility.
BARC describes its Planning Survey as the world’s largest and most comprehensive survey of planning software users, and notes that Excel remains one of the world’s most widely used products for planning and analytics, even as many users report limits in scale, performance, and flexibility. In Business Central scheduling, those weaknesses hit close to the money because planning touches jobs, stock, people, timesheets and invoices. Once a company is managing multiple versions of the truth, planning stops being a workaround and starts becoming a constraint.
That’s where specialist ISVs still have room to grow. Dime.Scheduler is a visual scheduling layer for Business Central and other back office systems, and says it now supports 5,000-plus users through 200-plus certified resellers across 30-plus countries. Bulens said smaller firms in rapid growth hit “the Excel issue” first, then begin losing track of actuals versus projected time, future stock requirements and contractor capacity.
The AI question, of course, is unavoidable. If Business Central scheduling software is getting smarter, does the human planner disappear? Bulens doesnt think so. Dime is building optimization algorithms and a recommendation API, but he said the goal is to “let the planner in the driver’s seat” because algorithms can still miss “subtle things that only humans can get.”
That lines up with the broader market. McKinsey says AI-driven schedule optimizers can reduce downtime, improve productivity and minimize service disruptions. Salesforce reports that 90 per cent of decision makers at organizations with field service are investing in specialized technology to improve mobile worker productivity.
That leaves Microsoft Partners with an opportunity to sell Business Central scheduling as operational control, then use AI to make planners faster, sharper and more consistent. The spreadsheet era still has plenty of life in it. That is exactly why the next scheduling sale is there to be won.
