My Bio

The Author


Me!

Hi! I’m Marcelo Borges. A developer at heart and an ERP enthusiast, I’m a Technical Consultant turned into a very passionate Functional Consultant.

I have been working with Microsoft Business Central and its former versions since 2005. I have experienced Business Central in both sides of the table: as a System Administrator in an end-user company, and as consultant for Microsoft Partners who resells Business Central.

As of August 2024, I have been working as a Solutions Architect, in New York City, for an American consulting company for a bit over 7 years now. My primary role is to bring my almost-20-years of Technical/Functional expertise into my projects. My focus is mainly on Sales and Purchasing, Inventory, Warehouse Management, Manufacturing and 3rd Party Shipping Solutions. The type of challenges I like most is implementing Business Central in companies with challenging Warehouse scenarios: RF Guns, multiple shipping solutions, and inefficient processes.

Among other non-computer-related hobbies (🚲🏃‍♂️🏐✈💤🏞), I 💗 love 💗 to develop on my free time, which is going to be the main driver for this website.

History and Career Path

Originally from Brazil, I got into computer systems at a very young age. At age 11, I had already been playing around with a Database Management system called dBase, which had Tables, Forms and Reports, just like Business Central. When a friend of the family briefly introduced me on how to write actual .EXE files to run in MS-DOS, my mind was permanently blown 😯!


dBase III Plus

From that day on, I got more and more into computer systems and databases (I was self-taught in some of them), and with a lot of free time, I had a lot creativity to channel through different programming languages 🤓. Until I reached Navision, I had already played with dBase, Clipper, Visual Basic, C, C++, MS-Access, Java, SQL and Oracle Databases (aside from a few other minor languages I saw in college). I had also developed a mini-ERP for my mom’s business in Real Estate management.

In 2005, 1 year prior to my graduation in Computer Science college, I was offered an internship opportunity to learn “a new language” that was not very famous in Brazil. While all my classmates sought after popular programming languages (like Java, C/C++, .NET, etc), I decided to gamble a little and spend some time at this company learning this unknown language. Well, this unknown language happened to be Navision’s C/AL 😯.

I worked as a full-time intern for one year, until graduation, when this consulting company decided to hire me as an employee. I worked with them for another year, as a technical consultant, learning a lot of the backstage of Navision, in many different industries and projects. With all the experience I grabbed from my functional colleagues, I had also acquired some solid knowledge in the most commonly used areas of Navision 3.7.


Navision 3.7

In 2007, I took a break from Navision, as I needed to move towns in Brazil, in search for quality of life. The city I had moved to, had zero opportunities with Navision, and that kind of upset me, as I had really gotten into it. However, in early 2008, one of the customers for the consulting company that I had worked for, contacted me, offering a job as their Nav System Administrator. Even though I loved the new city I was living in, I loved that job offer more, and it didn’t take me long to say yes to that opportunity.

From 2008 to 2013 I worked with this company mainly as a System Administrator (apart from becoming an IT Manager for a couple of years), but with time, I became part of their global Nav development team. I was given leeway to exercise both Functional and Technical work in their Navision system. Their main Nav partner was based in Germany (as the company was a Swiss company), but we also had our local Brazilian partner. Since Brazilian businesses are crazy regulated by law, it had a lot of local requirements. At some point, we needed to remove the Brazilian localization from Navision and we needed to integrate it with a local software that would take care of all the invoicing process and tax reporting to the government.

Fun fact: towards the end of 2011, due to the complexities in Brazilian laws, Microsoft decided to abandon their investments in Navision for Brazil, and they channeled all their energy to our rich cousin, Axapta – It was not until recently that they decided to officially bring Brazil back into their catalog of official localizations. 🎉

During that System Administrator and Global Developer job, I participated in some of their big moves in their own Navision realm: Migration from their old FDB databases to SQL Databases, and to Migrate from Nav 3.7 to Nav 2009 R2. They also had their very own Manufaturing customization (it could almost be seen as a full fledged ISV) that was rolled out to 27 countries, and every 3 months, we had Service Pack projects to deploy all the latest fixes and feature improvements to all 27 countries. That was a VERY fun job that I really loved a lot 💖.

For not so fun reasons, I needed to change jobs in 2013, and I went back to the consulting side of the table. This time, I had joined the company that used to be responsible for the official Brazilian localization back when Microsoft still supported Navision. This time, I was hired to be a developer for the support team. Even though Microsoft halted most Navision initiatives, we were still allowed to do Navision business with companies that already used Navision, and, branches of worldwide companies that had Navision on their headquarters.

Therefore, there was, still, a LOT of work in terms of Brazilian localization. I worked with this consulting company for over a year, and I supported many of their different customers and industries, bringing them all my functional and development expertise, mixed in with thorough testing and detailed documentation. Towards the end of my time there, they were also assigning me to a few implementation projects that were in need of a seasoned developer.

In the end of 2014, I landed a job opportunity in New York City, for a French cosmetics brand that used Navision 2009 R2 as their ERP. Again, I was being brought back to the End User/System Admin/Inhouse Developer side of the table, in another company with offices in multiple countries, and it was for the best: it was in this company that I acquired all of my knowledge in Logistics and Operations. This company had some of the best ISVs for Receiving, Shipping and EDI in the market at the time, but they had very poor systematic processes. Their experience with Navision was very limited, and I saw right off the gate that they were not using it properly. I saw this great opportunity to start improving processes, and to start seeing some real improvements on their overall operations. Even though they did not use Navision in their headquartes in France, they did use it in Asia as well. I oversaw their asian Navision operations for a year until they were able to hire a (great) resource to do what I did in the U.S..

This all brings me to mid-2017, when the current company that I work for, contacted me in search for a functional consultant with experience in ISVs I mentioned before. For the first time, I was hired to officially be a Functional Consultant, but they knew that I had tons of Navision development experience as well. I had been assigned to each and every one of my projects, as a functional consultant, and little by little, whenever possible, I tried to sprinkle some of my development experience here and there.

Truthfully, there were times I was forbidden to develop 😅, but with time and trust, I got the leeway to develop more freely. In some projects, Project Managers wouldn’t want me to develop at all, but once they saw the benefits of having one person tackling some complex-issues with less back-and-forth between multiple parties (tech-func-customer), they started allowing me to do it a bit more.

I started getting into Business Central AL Extensions from the beginning, since I didn’t want to lose touch with it, but, I’m still always assigned as a functional consultant to my projects, and I still always work closely to the lead developers in each project.

Even with the few opportunities I get to develop at work, I still miss developing a lot 💔, so that’s one of the reasons why I’m bringing Business Central Repositories to life! ⭐

I hope you enjoy it! 🍻



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