Every employee in the organization has specific roles and responsibilities. An organization has a structure and hierarchy where all the employees of the organization work with. Thus, it becomes important for the organization that their ERP solutions understand the organizational structure. Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is one of the leading ERP solutions for SMBs. The Solution provides a role center, a user’s entry point, and a home page for Business Central, displaying information that is pertinent to the user’s role in the company and enabling them to easily navigate to relevant pages for viewing data and performing tasks.
Role Centers are based on a user-centric design model. Users design the Role Center to give them quick access to the information that is most important to them in their daily work – displaying information that is pertinent to their role in the company and enabling them to easily navigate to relevant pages for viewing data and doing tasks.
All users of Business Central are assigned a profile that reflects their business role, the department they work in, or another categorization. Profiles allow administrators to define and manage centrally what different user types can see and do in the user interface so they can perform their business tasks efficiently. A Role Center is defined by the page that has the “Page Type” property set to Role Center. The Role Center page is divided into two main areas: navigation/actions area and content area. The following figure illustrates the general layout and elements of a Role Center page.
| No. | Area | Description | Usage Guideline |
| 1 | Navigation menus | The top-level navigation consists of one or more root menu items that expand to display links to other pages. The links can be grouped into submenus, enabling you to create a logical hierarchy. The pages targeted by the links will open in the content area of the Role Center. | The top-level navigation should provide access to relevant entity lists for the role’s areas of business. For example, typical root items for a business manager could be finance, sales, and purchasing. You should place the root items in order of importance, starting from the left. |
| 2 | Navigation bar | The second-level navigation displays a flat list of links to other pages. The pages targeted by the links will open in the content area of the Role Center. | You should use these items to link to users’ most useful entity lists in their business process. For example, with a business manager, these could be links to customers, sales orders, and bank accounts. You should place items so that reflect the business process sequence. Try to limit the number of second-level items, and consider placing items in the top-level navigation instead, if the number gets too large. |
| 3 | Action bar | The actions bar provides links to pages, reports, and code units. The links can be displayed on the root level or grouped in a submenu. The objects targeted by these links will open in a separate window in front of the Role Center page. You can define the actions by using the three different areas () controls. | The action area is designed for running the most important or most often used tasks and operations required by users. Actions will typically target card-type pages that enable users to create new entities, such as customers, invoices, and sales orders, or run reports. Place the most important action at the root level, and group closely related actions in a submenu. |
| 4 | Headline | Displays a series of automatically changing headlines that provide users with up-to-date information and insight into the business and daily work. This is created by a Headline Part page type. | Creating Role Center Headlines |
| 5 | Wide data cues | A set of cues for displaying large numbers, like monetary values. This is created by using a cue group control on a Card Part page type, where the Layout property is set to wide. | Wide Cues |
| 6 | Data cues | Provide a visual representation of aggregated business data, such as the number of open sales invoices or the total sales for the month. These are created by using a cue group control on a CardPart page type. | Creating Cues |
| 7 | Action cues | Tiles that link to tasks or operations, like opening another page, starting a video, targeting another URL, or running code. These are created by using a cue group control on a CardPart page type | Action Tiles |
| 8 | Chart | A graphical and interactive representation of your business data that can be sourced by a custom business chart control add-in or an embedded Power BI report. | |
| 9 | CardPart or ListPart page | Displays data fields in a form or tabular layout. | Page Object |
| 10 | Control add-in | Displays custom content by using HTML-based control add-in. | Control Add-in Object |
The administrator can create and manage profiles on the Profiles (Roles) page. Each profile has a card where the Administrator manages various settings for the related role, such as the role name, the user settings, and which Role Center the profile uses. Users can customize page layouts for a profile so that all users assigned the profile will see the customized pages. The administrator, customize pages by using the same functionality as users do when they personalize.
Through the years we have implemented over 200+ successful ERP and CRM solutions for our Microsoft Partners. We act as an Extended arm to Microsoft Partners. We provide Excellency in Microsoft Dynamics 365 related services such as Implementation, Support, Add-on Developments, and much more. We have learned from our experience the importance of role center in an ERP solution and how companies can fully benefit from the Role Center functionality of Microsoft Dynamics 365. We have created a Centre of Excellence through our expertise and experience (leading to a better understanding of the Industry)in working with Microsoft Dynamics.
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