Most “how to hire a D365 consultant” articles recycle the same guidance:
“look for communication skills… evaluate cultural fit… ensure stakeholder alignment.”

Food & beverage manufacturers already know this. Wait- EVERYONE knows this.

What they don’t get are answers to the questions that actually matter: the ones you discuss with your CFO, your plant manager, and maybe your therapist after someone disappears mid-project.

This FAQ focuses on what’s unique about hiring D365 F&O food and beverage consultants. The questions you actually need answered as you build your internal ERP team.

The Money Questions: What D365 F&O Food and Beverage Consultants Cost

How much does a D365 F&O consultant cost for food & beverage?

Rates tend to trend higher than standard manufacturing because your consultants need specialised knowledge:
catch weight, allergen management, co-products, lot traceability, recipe scaling, compliance, temperature-controlled logistics… the list is long depending on what your operations need to do.

Typical ranges:

• Independent contractors: $150–$200/hr (functional), $150–$200/hr (technical), $200+ for Program Managers or Solution Architects

• Mid-tier partners: $250–$350/hr

• Large consulting firms: $250–$450+/hr

Contact Ryan if you would like specific pricing for D365 contractors for your business.

Our data (following over 200+ F&B customers in North America) suggests that the talent pool is steadily growing for people who have successfully implemented D365 F&SCM in the food and beverage industry.

Because often food manufacturing is discrete + process + compliance + perishability all layered together. There just aren’t many true experts!

A proper D365 F&B consultant understands the details across the supply chain:

• Co-products and by-products

• Catch weight pricing

• Recipe scaling across batch sizes

• FEFO requirements

• Lot and sublot genealogy

• Shelf-life planning

• HACCP and SQF quality structures

Few people know all of this and F&O.

A VP at a major coffee company (who have been live on F&O for many years now) put it bluntly:

“There aren’t many true F&B experts. It’s a small world with D365 specifically.”

Should we hire someone who’s still “learning” food process manufacturing?

Not on your project budget. Nor should you take a risk on someone learning the D365 system on your budget either. Although out of the two- it’s better to train people the system who already know the industry in our experience. Internal SMEs can cross-train brilliantly.

If you bring outside help in, and a D365 consultant can’t clearly explain:

• The difference between formula and BOM

• How shelf-life impacts MRP

• Why catch weight breaks planning if configured incorrectly

…then they aren’t ready to hit the ground running for production-critical food environments. And for the price you’re paying, they need to be!!

The Technical Questions

Do we need a D365 consultant familiar with food & bev industry EDI?

Almost certainly.

Food & beverage retailers expect clean, accurate, automated EDI.
Your consultant should already know:

• EDI 852 (Product Activity Data)

• GS1-128 label requirements

• GTIN setup

• ASN workflows that match real-world shipping

• Customer-specific compliance rules

The majority of food manufacturers we speak to struggle with EDI integration during D365 ERP projects. If that’s you, you’re not alone.

Can a general manufacturing consultant handle recipe-based production?

Rarely. With close collaboration with internal SMEs within your business.

Formula management requires understanding:

• Potency

• Yield variance

• Formula versions

• Batch order reservations

• Rework and reprocessing

• By-products and waste handling

A major coffee company explained how they adapted D365 purchase agreements to track multi-year commodity contracts because out-of-the-box tools weren’t sufficient.
This is the nuance you only get from consultants who’ve actually done the work.

For context, Gartner reports that 70% of ERPs fail to meet expectations in some capacity- add in the complexities of food & beverage and we’d bet that number rises.

The People Questions: Finding the Right D365 F&O Food and Beverage Consultants

Do we really need different D365 consultants for production, supply chain, quality, finance, and warehouse?

Yes.

Thinking of your ERP team like a kitchen should be quite easy, right?
One chef can’t do pastry, grill, butcher, and sauce perfectly.

You need:

• Production planning

• Warehouse/FEFO

• Quality & compliance

• Finance (commodity costing, rebates, brokerage)

A “generalist senior consultant” rarely performs well across all four. Certainly not Finance AND Operations.

How do we get D365 contractors to stay on our project?

You can never guarantee they will, nor anyone else for that matter. But you can do things to increase the odds- feedback we get from the contractors in our community is universal: “Pay me a fair rate, provide interesting/challenging projects, in a good work environment… why would I leave?”

But giving challenging work to someone who is not qualified is where it can break down quickly. To avoid this…

Ask them about:

• Their most difficult food implementation

• How they solved catch-weight-driven MRP issues

• Shelf-life problems they’ve corrected

• Past go-live challenges in perishable environments

You want to hear some of these items for reassurance:

• Real plant-floor stories (good and bad)

• Cross-functional experience (Ops + IT)

• References in your sector

• Can ask great questions to pinpoint the pain or risk in your current-state

Should our D365 consultant be remote or on-site?

A hybrid model (usually) works best. But someone who won’t travel at all isn’t an option (it isn’t 2020 anymore!).

On-site is essential for:

• Plant Go-live

• Warehouse slotting and pick-path mapping

• Plant/Recipe/Batch order walk-throughs: be concerned if your D365 consultant doesn’t insist on doing this tour

Remote is fine for:

• Configuration

• Testing

• Reporting

• Integrations

Our data shows hybrid reduces cost by ~35% without hurting delivery. It also opens up the talent pool, and when you add in the Food & Beverage industry experience- this helps a LOT.

How many F&O food/beverage implementations should they have done?

Minimum of 1 that mirrors the most complex piece to your business: food, beverage, or CPG etc.

Ideally multiple- but again these are hard to find unless you use niche staffing experts (wink wink 😉 )or have access to a community such as D365contractors.com.

What’s more important than pure numbers of D365 projects is the quality of the outcomes they have delivered for businesses like yours in the past.

The Timing Question

When do we bring in an internal D365 resource?

The companies that get this right plan for internal D365 experts from day one, not as a “maybe we’ll hire someone after go-live” panic move when nobody internally can explain why things work the way they do. And the Partner consultants move onto their next project.

Internal capability is essential. It’s how you stop being dependent, how you retain context when partners rotate resources, and how you make sure your system evolves with the business instead of becoming something everyone’s afraid to touch. Or doesn’t trust.

Partner resources are great when:

• They’ve done your exact sub-vertical

• They recognise seasonality’s impact

• They understand FEFO

• They know PLUs without Googling

The Reality Check Questions

What’s the biggest mistake manufacturers make when hiring for D365 resources?

Believing anyone who interviews with the attitude that “all manufacturing is the same.”
It isn’t. Industry matters, more to the point: sub-industry matters.

A shop floor producing bolts & screws operates completely differently to one making peanut butter, or beers. Two of my favorite things…

But your discrete-manufacturing friend’s “rockstar” consultant might freeze when they see:

• Three UoMs for one SKU

• Batch order rework

• Temperature-zone warehousing

• Date-code and lot expiration logic

The Strategic Questions

Should we prioritise industry experience or F&O technical expertise?

Why Industry experience wins every time.

A food-process expert can learn your configuration quickly.
A system expert will take months to understand perishability, compliance, and recipe science.

Even Microsoft acknowledges industry depth as a differentiator.

Independent Consultants vs. Partners

Forgive me for making it sound like it’s one of the other. It isn’t. The conversation should be around their differences and what’s best for your project.

The difference, usually, isn’t capability- it’s structure, long-term availability and capacity.

Independent specialists often:

• Have 10–20 years in your sub-vertical

• Come from a hands-on operations background

• Make themselves available for as long as you need them (and come back later if things break!)

Partners bring:

• Methodology and track record of delivering successful projects in your sub-sector

• Governance and full accountability to delivering what they say they will

• Big teams of F&O talent for the implementation phase (but who usually can’t come back later, once they’re onto the next project, they’re gone!)

Use each for the right purpose.

Should we use contractors or full-time staff?

The best-performing organisations use:

• 1–2 internal super users for each major business function

• Contractors & Partners for implementations, upgrades and integrations

• Fractional specialists for long-term support on big decisions (eg Solution Architects)

This creates a balance between internal ownership and external expertise.

BUT If You Can Only Afford One Specialist…

Hire a F&O production planning consultant who understands food manufacturing.

If production planning breaks, everything breaks:

• Customer promises

• Ingredient purchasing

• Waste and yield

• Warehouse slotting

• Costing

Fix planning, and you stabilise 70% of your downstream problems.

If you made it this far…

Don’t you have any real work to do?!

Kidding!

Food & beverage ERP isn’t generic manufacturing.
Your consultants shouldn’t be generic either.

If you need D365 F&O consultants with real food & beverage experience, email Ryan right here.