Your partner might call it the design phase, the requirements gathering phase, or the fit-gap analysis. Whatever the label, it is the same thing: the foundation everything else gets built on. D365 F&O discovery is where your implementation is won or lost.
This is the phase where you, as an IT leader, truly learn how the business really works. Where the warehouse manager explains the undocumented workaround they have used for 8 years. Where Finance admits the consolidation process runs on VLOOKUPs.
This blog is for the IT leader who is about to enter the discovery phase, or who is already in it and sensing something is not quite right. It is written from your side of the table, not the partner’s. Because while your partner runs the workshops, you own the outcome. And at a manufacturing company moving towards a sophisticated ERP platform, the outcome depends entirely on what happens in those early weeks.
Why D365 F&O discovery matters more than any other phase
Everything downstream is built on what comes out of discovery. Your partner builds configurations based on what they learn in these workshops. Test scripts get written against the processes documented here. And the training materials reflect the design decisions made in this phase. If it captures a sanitized, theoretical version of how your business is supposed to operate, every phase that follows inherits that gap.
At manufacturing companies, this gap is enormous. The distance between documented processes and reality is wider in manufacturing than in almost any other industry. Your warehouse team has been running a modified receiving process for years that nobody in IT knows about. Meanwhile, production planners have a sequencing logic that lives in someone’s head, not in any system. And the finance team has month-end close steps that were invented to work around the limitations of your legacy ERP and have been running on muscle memory ever since.
If your partner does not capture these realities during D365 F&O discovery, they will configure D365 based on the theoretical version. And you will spend UAT discovering that the system does not match how your business works. UAT is an expensive place to discover design flaws. Discovery is a cheap place to prevent them.
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The one rule: the people who do the work must be in the room
If you take one thing from this blog, let it be this. Put the person running the warehouse in the workshop, not the VP who oversees it. The AP clerk, not the Controller. Your planner on the floor, not the Supply Chain Director. Leadership knows what the process should look like. The people on the floor know what it actually looks like. And it is the actual version that your D365 system needs to support.
Most manufacturing companies get this wrong. They send leadership because those are the people with availability. But leadership has not touched the day-to-day process in years. Nobody told them about the workaround in the receiving dock, or that the production schedule gets manually adjusted every Tuesday afternoon, or that AP bypasses the standard workflow for half their invoices.
Your partner will configure D365 based on what the people in the room tell them. Wrong people, wrong configuration. Not maliciously. Just incomplete.
What good D365 F&O discovery actually looks like
Good D365 F&O discovery at a manufacturing company has a few consistent characteristics regardless of which partner you are working with or which methodology they follow.
It starts with your processes, not the system. The partner should be asking “how does this work today” before they show you how D365 handles it. If the first workshop starts with a D365 demo, that is a red flag. Discovery is about understanding your business. The system comes later. A good partner listens first, then maps what they heard to D365 capabilities, then identifies the gaps.
It documents the exceptions, not just the happy path. Every process has a standard flow and a dozen exceptions. At a manufacturing company, the exceptions are where the real complexity lives. What happens when a supplier ships the wrong quantity? When a production order needs to be split mid-run? When a customer returns product that has already been partially consumed? The standard flow is easy. The exceptions are what break implementations.
It captures the workarounds. Every legacy system has them. Your team has been compensating for system limitations for years. Some of those workarounds are brilliant and should be preserved. Some are unnecessary and can be eliminated by D365’s native capabilities. But you cannot make that decision unless you know the workarounds exist. Good discovery surfaces them deliberately, not accidentally during UAT.
It takes the right amount of time. For a mid-size manufacturer implementing D365 Finance and Supply Chain Management, decent discovery could take 4 to 10 weeks, depending on complexity. If your partner has allocated 2 weeks, they are planning to cut corners. The right duration depends on how many modules you are implementing, how many sites you are rolling out, and how complex your operations are. But 2 weeks is almost never enough for a manufacturing company.
How to spot a discovery process that is being rushed
It does not always feel like rushing. Sometimes it feels like efficiency. Here are the signs:
- Your partner is running workshops with pre-built agendas that leave no room for tangents. In discovery, the tangents are the most valuable part. The tangent is where the warehouse manager says “actually, we do not do it that way” and the real process gets captured. A rigid agenda that moves through topics on a timer is optimized for the partner’s schedule, not your business’s complexity.
- The partner is leading with D365 demos instead of questions. If they are showing you how D365 handles accounts payable before they understand how you handle accounts payable, they are fitting your business to the system instead of the other way around. There is a time for demos. It is after they understand your processes, not before.
- Only leadership is in the workshops. If the partner has not asked to speak with the operational users, or if they accepted a room full of directors without pushing back, they are not going deep enough. A good partner will specifically request time with the people who do the work. If they did not ask, they are either too polite or too inexperienced. Either way, the result is the same: incomplete requirements.
- The fit-gap analysis is mostly “fit.” If your requirements gathering shows that D365 handles 95% of your needs out of the box, either you have a very standard business or the discovery was not thorough enough. At a manufacturing company with any real complexity, there should be meaningful gaps to address. A fit-gap that is almost entirely fit is usually a sign that the right questions were not asked.
I wrote about what this dynamic looks like when it compounds in 5 early warning signs your D365 F&O implementation is drifting.
How to prepare your internal team for D365 F&O discovery
The quality of discovery depends as much on your preparation as it does on your partner’s methodology. Here is how to set your team up to get the most out of this phase.
Document your real processes before the partner arrives. Not the process maps from 2019. How things actually work today, including the workarounds, the exceptions, and the unofficial steps. This does not need to be formal. A simple walkthrough written by the person who does the job is more valuable than a polished Visio diagram that nobody recognizes.
Identify the people who know the workarounds and protect their time. These are usually your most experienced operational people. They are also your busiest. If you do not carve out their time for discovery workshops, they will not be there, and the workarounds will not get captured until UAT when it is expensive to fix. Talk to their managers. Get coverage for their day jobs. This is a leadership responsibility. We covered how to assess whether your team is set up for this in build an internal D365 ERP team for your implementation.
Give your team permission to be honest. This sounds simple but it matters. In a room with their VP, the partner, and the project manager, your AP clerk is not going to volunteer that they bypass the standard process for half their invoices unless they feel safe doing so. Create the environment where honesty is expected, not punished. The best discovery workshops are the ones where someone says “I know this is not how we are supposed to do it, but here is what actually happens.” That is gold. Protect it.
Brief your team on what discovery is and why it matters. Most operational users have never been through an ERP implementation. They do not know what a fit-gap analysis is. They do not know why the partner is asking them to describe their daily workflow in granular detail. A 30-minute briefing that explains “this is how we make sure the new system works for you” goes a long way toward getting engaged, honest participation.
Discovery is YOUR responsibility
Your partner runs the workshops. But you own the outcome. Wrong people in the room? Your problem. Undocumented processes? Your gap. Team holding back because honesty feels risky? Your culture to fix.
The IT leaders who get the best results treat discovery as active leadership. They sit in the workshops. They check whether the partner captured what was actually said. They push back when complexity gets skipped over.
If something feels off, trust that instinct. Discovery is the cheapest place to get things right. Every other phase is a more expensive place to fix what was missed.
The questions in 5 questions to answer before you talk to any D365 F&O vendor can help you assess whether your organization is prepared.
If you are heading into D365 F&O discovery and want to make sure your internal team is prepared, or if you are mid-project and sensing gaps, let’s talk about independent consultants at D365contractors.com:
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