In configure-to-order manufacturing, a quote leaves sales and something different arrives on the shop floor. The production BOM reflects the standard item, not the configured one the customer ordered. Someone reconciles the gap manually, after the fact, under pressure. Here is why it happens and what a connected system does differently.
Why do Business Central quotes and production BOMs end up out of sync?
The missing link is the handoff between sales and production planning. Configure-to-order breaks the standard assumption — the finished product doesn't exist yet as a standard item. Its BOM and routing have to be assembled from the selections made during the sales process.
Without a formal configuration tool, that assembly is manual. The same customer conversation gets interpreted twice, by different people, with different results:
- The BOM reflects the base item, not the configured item. Manufacturing builds the standard product. The customer receives something different from what they ordered.
- The quote and BOM were built independently. Both are internally consistent. They don't match each other.
- A rule that should have caught an incompatible combination didn't. The error reaches production.
- Costs on the quote don't match costs in the system. Finance reconciles the difference at month end.
What does this misalignment actually cost?
Rework is the visible cost. The invisible cost is larger. It lives in engineering time spent rebuilding BOMs from quotes that should have generated them automatically. It lives in the informal rule requiring sign-off on complex orders because the team has learned not to trust the handoff. It lives in quotes delayed because the salesperson is waiting on confirmation that a proposed configuration is actually buildable.
None of this shows up as a line item. All of it shows up in capacity, throughput, and margin.
What changes when sales configuration connects directly to production output?
When option selection, BOM generation, and configuration rules operate as a single workflow, manual reconciliation disappears. The salesperson selects options. The system validates the combination in real time. The BOM and routing generate automatically. The production order is created with the correct configuration already embedded.
Quote accuracy improves because invalid combinations are excluded during selection, not discovered on the shop floor. Cost accuracy improves because the BOM derives from the same selections as the quote. Manufacturing receives exactly what sales produced — not a reconstruction of it.
What should a Business Central configure-to-order tool actually do?
- Rule enforcement during selection, not after submission
- Automatic BOM and routing generation from selected options, covering both production and assembly BOM types
- Cost calculation from the configuration itself, consistent between quote and BOM
- Support for nested configurations where parent settings propagate correctly to sub-assemblies
- Integration with Business Central MPS and MRP from the moment the order is created
Product Configurator handles both BOM types, enforces rules at the point of selection, generates BOMs and routings automatically, and connects to standard Business Central planning functions.
Read the full blog: Business Central Quotes and Production BOMs: Why They Don't Match
