Bills of materials and formulas, routes and operations resources, and the production order lifecycle that ties them together — plus how a production order accumulates cost and where variances come from.
Manufacturing is where the abstractions of the previous modules meet a physical process, and where a design that looked reasonable on paper either survives or does not.
D365 offers two structures for the input side, and the choice is about the nature of the process rather than its size.
The route is the sequence of work. A route version, like a BOM version, is dated and tied to the product.
A production order — or a batch order, its process-manufacturing equivalent — is one actual run. It moves through statuses, and each transition does something real.
The costing sheet is the structure that declares how overhead is applied — surcharges as a percentage, or rates per unit of time — over cost groups that classify the elements of cost. This is why overhead is part of the calculated cost rather than something a report adds afterwards.
Master planning reads BOMs, routes, lead times and coverage settings to generate planned production orders alongside planned purchase orders. The quality of that planning is entirely a function of the master data underneath it — which is why the product and inventory modules come first in this path.
Manufacturing in D365 separates what goes in from what happens, and that separation is what keeps the model honest as processes change.