CAD to Business Central Integration
Let CADTALK get your systems talking, so your engineers do the work they were hired to do.
The Problem
Manufacturing at volume is already unforgiving. The product doesn't change much from run to run. But when an engineering change does happen, it has to reach every job on the floor accurately, every time. Business Central runs the business once that change lands inside it. Getting it there accurately, every time, is still on your engineers.
Here's what actually happens.
The design gets finalized in SolidWorks, Inventor, AutoCAD, Creo, Solid Edge, or another major CAD platform. Then someone (probably an engineer) opens Business Central and builds it by hand: item cards, production BOMs, routing lines, one at a time. By the time production starts, your most expensive technical talent has spent hours re-keying data that already existed the moment the design was done: the same handful of part families, order after order.
Ask around your engineering team. You'll hear some version of, I didn't go to school for data entry. They're right. And every hour they spend re-keying a BOM that already exists in CAD is an hour they're not spending on the design work you hired them for.
The real cost of the manual handoff
In discrete and make-to-order shops, this happens on every engineering change order, on every run. Three things tend to happen:
The Cost adds up Fast
Manual BOM re-entry runs roughly $234K a year in lost engineering capacity for a 10-person team (hours that could go toward design instead of data entry).
Engineering Changes don't Always Make it to the Floor
If a revision doesn't flow from CAD into Business Central accurately, production builds the old version, and no one catches it until the part doesn't fit.
One Wrong Entry Multiplies
A single BOM error doesn't cost you once. It costs you across the entire production run built from that BOM.
Business Central is a strong system, built for exactly this kind of complexity. The gap is what feeds it.
A Different Data Pipeline
Same Business Central. Same engineers. A different data pipeline.
CADTALK reads the approved design straight out of your CAD or PLM environment and writes it into Business Central, structured and production-ready. It's configurable, not custom. The rules live in an engine your team can inspect, so a BC upgrade doesn't break it
Standard rules applied by your engineers (how variants get numbered, when a component needs a new revision, which parts get which routings) get captured once, in a system the whole team can see. That's what changes. The knowledge moves out of one person's head and into a process everyone can trust.
A 10-engineer team recovers roughly $234K a year in engineering capacity, sees lead times drop 80%, and hits payback in 2 to 4 months. In production environments, not a demo.
Built for How Repetitive Manufacturing Actually Works in Business Central
CADTALK is listed on Microsoft AppSource and writes straight into Business Central's production BOMs and routings, no RapidStart imports and no re-keying, handling the exact pattern discrete and make-to-order manufacturers deal with daily: stable products, frequent engineering changes, and BOM accuracy that has to hold across every run. If you're running Business Central alongside SolidWorks, Inventor, AutoCAD, Creo, Solid Edge, Tekla, EPLAN, Altium, or another supported CAD, PDM, or PLM system (including SolidWorks PDM, Autodesk Vault, PTC Windchill, Siemens Teamcenter, Arena PLM, or Dassault Enovia 3DX), this is the gap CADTALK was built to close.
Your engineers get their time back. Business Central gets the data it needs to actually do its job. And the next engineering change doesn't wait on someone finding a spare hour to type it in.
See what the handoff looks like automated for your CAD and Business Central combination.
