Substitute Items with Copilot

Depending on the size of your item catalog, it can be a challenge to find item substitutions when an item is out of stock or cannot be quoted or delivered for some other reason.

In Business Central we have the ability to create item substitutions. So if an item is not available, the substitution kicks in. Like 2014 in Brazil. Do you remember? Mario Goetze was also a substitute…

To get rid of the challenge of finding the right substitute, not everyone is Jogi Löw, you can use Copilot to help with this particular feature.

Let me show you:

Just open the item substitution entry and you’ll find the Copilot button.
Just click on “Suggest with Copilot” and you’ll get your result pretty fast:

Ok, so far two results, but let’s take a closer look and enable Confidence:

So just by a margin of 0.05 in the score, confidence drops from high to low and even skips medium. Well….ok, just accept that at this point.

And what exactly were the search terms? Let’s have a look:

In the BC Launch Event, Microsoft defined the rules something like this

So let’s compare the result with the high confidence to our item we want to replace:

So we have the category with Desk & Table, which are kind of close, and from the attribute values I would say color and material description match. And the measurement is not that different.

So all in all our substitute with the high confindence has the same category (Desk, Table), color, material and almost the same mesaurements.

Imagine if you have a lot, and I mean A LOT, of items in your system. Copilot can help you get some ideas for replacement. Or you have a new colleague who does not know your whole item catalog and needs some support.

Of course the results have to be checked, as always. But by now this can be really helpful.

Here is a short video on how to use the Suggest Item with Copilot feature