Building Foodware 365 for Business Central SaaS

That’s it, we’re done. Project Texel has come to an end. And starting the new year, it’s time to look back. 2019 has been a great year for the team, for the product and for our processes. We’ve shared blog posts and videos on all these three subjects. What is it like to be a team member of project Texel? How do we incorporate new processes to ensure a high-quality solution for the food industry? How do make use of the advantage of having access to the power of the platform supplied by Microsoft? All with one single shared goal: Foodware 365, the foremost food solution, worldwide.

Getting to know Business Central

Over a year ago we’ve started with a ramp up phase. For us it was getting to know the new Business Central solution, the whole Dynamics 365 platform and to forget all our old habits on developing in Navision. Having the possibility to start from scratch is a huge privilege and challenge, only using the knowledge of the food industry that we gained the past 20 years and combining that with all the new technology possibilities available from Microsoft.

Setting a higher standard

Together with the team we defined new processes and set a new standard on delivering solutions. As described early last year, it’s much more than only lines of code. More than ever it’s important to have a sustainable solution that can follow Microsoft’s upgrade rhythm to make sure the end user can upgrade his or her environment in that rhythm as well. And by making the development process more agile and structured we are now able to add new functions and features with every release. This gives us to the ability to continuously add value for the end user to the solution, ensuring the challenges they have can be tackled.

Follow your continuously changing world

That’s the beauty of a true SaaS and extension-based solution: having the ability to continuously follow your changing world. Simply add functionality if a new possibility comes along that needs its own specific functionality, without going through the process of a reimplementation.

I’ve seen our team grow during the year. Where the newly defined processes were guidelines that needed to be followed (and remembered), during the year they’ve adopted these guidelines and they nearly became second nature. We’ve continuously been critical to each other and adopting the processes based on new experiences.

Using the whole Microsoft Power Platform

Foodware 365 is not just a Business Central solution, but it is all over the Microsoft Platform, depending on the need of the user’s business processes. That means that we’ve added functionality to Outlook, to ease the registration of non-conformances based on a customer e-mail. We’ve incorporated Planner and To-Do, to make sure actions are brought to attention. We made use of Power Apps and Power Automate to make easy to use processes, for example our Quality Check app which runs on IOS and Android portable devices. This all results in a set of extensions that together make one unified Food solution. Looking back, we’ve been building a great team, a great process and a great solution. We’ve asked a lot from the team, leaving behind their common way of working as they’ve been used to for the last decade. It’s great see to what they achieved the past year and I’m happy to be part of that process.

We’re done with building Foodware 365, but are we?

I’ve started this blog with “We’re done”, but actually we’re not. We are never done, in an ever-changing cloud world, the picture changes every day. New technical features become available, new challenges arise and new trends derive. Looking forward we will continue developing new Foodware 365 apps, now with the power of Aptean. By combining all the food industry and technical knowledge and experience together from all new colleagues I expect great things to happen. Still chasing that same goal: the world’s foremost food solution.