Author: Ryan Carolan

The Hidden Costs of Staying on AX 2012: Why Food & Beverage Manufacturers Are Paying More by Delaying Their D365 Upgrade

Posted on by Ryan Carolan

Do We Really Need to Upgrade from AX 2012 Right Now?

So: You’re the VP of IT at a food manufacturer. Your CEO just asked if you “really need” to upgrade from AX 2012 to Dynamics 365.

You know the spreadsheet he’s looking at shows AX 2012 as the cheaper option. Stay put, avoid disruption, keep the budget flat.

But here’s what that spreadsheet doesn’t show: the warehouse supervisor who spent three hours yesterday manually reconciling inventory because the system froze during wave picking. The finance team that closes the month five days slower than your competitors. The $180,000 you’ll spend this year on AX contractors who charge premium rates because of those 174 customizations…

AX 2012 isn’t just old. It’s quietly expensive in ways that never make it into the cost comparison deck.

This article breaks down the real financial impact of delaying your D365 upgrade, especially for food and beverage operations dealing with catch-weight, lot tracking, cold storage, and the other lovely complexities that make the industry special.

Infographic showing an iceberg labeled “Direct AX 2012 Costs” above water and a large section of hidden costs below the surface, including warehouse productivity loss, premium contractor rates, finance inefficiency, compliance risk, technical debt, and talent scarcity. Branded with d365contractors.com.
The true cost of staying on AX 2012: most F&B manufacturers only see the visible fees, while hidden operational losses and risks make upgrades far more expensive to delay.

Want to get access to the best independent D365 consultants for your food & beverage project? Let’s talk.

GET FRACTIONAL D365 TALENT

Why Are So Many F&B Manufacturers Suddenly Talking About An AX Upgrade?

Three things happened in the last 18 months that made the AX upgrade conversation unavoidable:

First, Microsoft ended mainstream support for AX 2012 in October 2021, and extended support ends in October 2027. That sounds far away until you realize a typical D365 implementation takes 12-18 months, plus another 6-12 months of planning before that. If you’re not having the conversation now, you’re behind.

Second, the AX talent market collapsed faster than anyone expected. Between 2022 and 2024, the number of available AX contractors dropped by roughly 40% based on our network data. The people who remain can charge whatever they want because they know you have limited options. Every F&B manufacturer we talk to mentions struggling to find AX resources at reasonable rates (but we can help!).

Third, and this one catches people off guard, your competitors already moved. The PE-backed F&B companies upgraded 18-24 months ago because their investors demanded it. They’re now operating with better warehouse efficiency, faster financial closes, and lower IT support costs. When your board sees competitor earnings calls mentioning “digital transformation” and “operational efficiency gains,” guess what question they’re going to ask you?

The conversation isn’t suddenly happening because Microsoft is pushing it (though they are). It’s happening because the economic case for staying on AX finally flipped from “probably fine for now” to “actively costing us money every month.”

AX 2012 Hidden Costs: Your Customizations Are a Monthly Tax

Food and beverage companies didn’t customize AX 2012 because they wanted to throw money at consultants. They did it because AX couldn’t handle their business out of the box. Although they were probably encouraged by their Partner too…

Catch-weight inventory. Date-controlled stock rotation. Shelf life calculations. Lot attributes for allergen tracking. Warehouse flows that account for temperature zones. EDI integrations with retailers who change their requirements every quarter. The list goes on.

Those customizations made AX work for you. But now they’re a tax you pay every single month.

Here’s what happens: Every custom object in your AX environment requires maintenance. When Microsoft releases a patch, someone has to regression test your customizations. When a developer leaves, the next person spends weeks trying to understand what the previous consultant built. If you want to add a new feature, you first have to figure out if it will break something else.

One F&B manufacturer we spoke with calculated they were spending $240,000 annually just maintaining customizations that had been built between 2013 and 2016. Not improving them. Not adding capabilities. Just keeping them working.

The problem compounds over time. The longer you stay on AX, the more technical debt accumulates. The eventual upgrade becomes more expensive because you have more custom code to refactor or rebuild.

Why Are AX Contractors So Expensive Now?

Remember when finding an Dynamics AX resource was relatively straightforward? Those days are gone.

The AX 2012 talent pool is shrinking fast. Most of the ERP talent in this space want to work with D365 now, or they’re going independent (and don’t care as much if the rate is fair!). The result is basic supply and demand economics, except the supply is disappearing and the demand is concentrated among companies who desperately need help.

We track contractor rates daily at d365contractors.com. Five years ago, a solid AX technical resource might have been $120 per hour. Today, that same skillset commands $175 to $200, sometimes more. Not because the work got harder, but because the person doing it knows they’re one of the last people who can (and is still willing to) do it.

Here’s the bigger issue: Many AX contractors now charge senior-level D365 rates for legacy support work. They’ve correctly figured out that companies with aging AX systems are in a bind. You can’t easily move to D365 overnight, so you’re stuck paying premium rates for maintenance on a system that’s losing value every month.

For food and beverage companies with heavily customized environments, this talent scarcity hits harder. You don’t just need any AX person. You need someone who understands manufacturing, ideally your specific segment. Finding an AX resource who knows catch-weight and understands how GS1 compliance works in a cold storage environment? Good luck with that. (But we can help!)

Why Is Our Warehouse Performance Getting Worse on AX?

If you’re running a food and beverage operation with any complexity in the warehouse, you’ve probably noticed AX 2012 struggling to keep up. AX performance is an issue for most.

Temperature-controlled storage across multiple zones. High-volume picking during peak season. Mixed-unit inventory where the same item exists as cases, each, and pallets. Catch-weight receiving where every incoming pallet needs to be weighed and recorded. Supply chain windows measured in hours, not days.

AX 2012 was built before this level of warehouse complexity became standard in F&B. The result is systems that work fine until they don’t.

The symptoms show up in consistent ways: Mobile scanners timing out during picks. Slow replenishment calculations that leave pickers waiting. Outbound wave processing takes 15 minutes when it should take one. Picking lists that freeze and require someone in IT to clear stuck records. Workers who’ve learned to override the system because it’s faster than waiting for it to work properly.

One operations director told us his warehouse accuracy dropped to 91% because pickers stopped trusting the system’s location recommendations. They’d been burned too many times by stale data, so they started using their own tribal knowledge instead of following system guidance.

The cost here is measurable. Take a facility with 50 warehouse workers. If AX performance issues cost each worker 10 minutes per shift, that’s 8.3 hours of lost productivity daily. At a fully loaded labor rate of $25 per hour, you’re losing about $208 per day. Over a year, that’s $54,000 in wasted warehouse labor.

That’s just one facility. Many F&B companies run multiple warehouses.

Why Does Month-End Close Take So Long?

In food and beverage manufacturing, finance operates under intense pressure. Margins are thin, typically between 2% and 8% depending on the segment. Inventory turns fast. Waste, spoilage, and write-offs need real-time visibility to prevent them from destroying profitability. Retailer chargebacks show up fast and require immediate investigation.

AX 2012 makes all of this harder than it should be.

Finance teams report consistent problems: Financial dimensions that break when someone modifies them incorrectly. Manual reconciliations between AX and the WMS because the integration doesn’t sync properly. Month-end close processes that take a week instead of three days. Cost accounting that can’t accurately track ingredient costs through complex production processes. Poor visibility into actual production costs versus standard costs.

One CFO described their month-end process as “archaeology.” The finance team knew the numbers existed somewhere in AX, but finding them required digging through multiple screens, running custom reports that sometimes worked, and manually validating everything because nobody trusted the automated calculations anymore.

It’s not even about bad training. These are system limitations that create real financial risk.

Every hour your finance team spends fighting AX is an hour they’re not spending analyzing the business or identifying cost savings opportunities.

Can AX 2012 Handle Current Food Safety and Traceability Requirements?

Food and beverage manufacturers face more regulatory scrutiny than almost any other industry. GS1 standards for product identification. Full lot traceability from supplier through production to customer. FDA requirements that get stricter every year. SQF certifications. Retailer-specific requirements that change constantly. Recall readiness that’s measured in minutes, not hours.

AX 2012 was built before many of these requirements became standard. Adding them required customizations that create their own compliance risks.

Do you know anybody that doesn’t have an intolerance these days?

The most serious exposure is traceability. In a recall scenario, you need to identify every affected lot, every customer who received it, and every ingredient that went into it. You need this information immediately, not after a day of running reports and cross-referencing spreadsheets.

If your plant manager has to tell the FDA “give me until tomorrow to trace that lot,” you have a serious problem. One that could result in expanded recalls, regulatory action, and brand damage that takes years to repair.

D365 handles modern compliance requirements natively. Real-time traceability, automated audit trails, integrated quality management, and supplier collaboration tools are built into the platform. You’re not fighting the system to maintain compliance anymore, the tool is literally designed for it.

The gap between what regulators expect and what your system can easily deliver grows wider each month.

Why Do Our Integrations Keep Breaking?

The typical food and beverage technology stack connected to AX looks something like this: EDI connections to major retailers, a separate WMS, production planning systems that may or may not sync properly, homegrown MRP logic that someone built in 2014, manual import processes for supplier data, and partner-written connectors that nobody currently at the company fully understands.

Every one of those integrations is a potential failure point. EDI mapping changes break overnight shipments. The WMS loses sync with AX and inventory counts become fiction. Production systems feed bad data that finance has to manually correct. Someone changes a field in AX without realizing it breaks an integration, and suddenly orders aren’t flowing to the warehouse. Dammit.

When these integrations break, the cost shows up as consultant time, operational downtime, delayed shipments, and the general chaos of trying to manually work around a system that’s supposed to automate these processes.

It’s not uncommon for IT directors to tell us they budget $150,000 annually just for “integration maintenance”.

D365 reduces this integration tax significantly. Modern API-based connections, built-in data entities, Power Automate flows, and standardized connector patterns mean fewer brittle point-to-point integrations and less dependency on specialized consultants who are the only ones who understand how everything connects.

What Happens If We Wait Another Year?

Every year you delay the D365 upgrade, several things happen that make the eventual migration harder:

The people who understand your AX customizations leave the company or move to D365 F&O roles. Institutional knowledge walks out the door. Someone new has to reverse-engineer what was built and why.

Your internal team loses the opportunity to gain D365 experience gradually. The skill gap widens between what you have and what you’ll need.

The pressure from the board increases because competitors have already moved and are seeing benefits. The upgrade becomes urgent instead of planned.

Your dependency on your implementation Partner grows because you have nobody internal who can push back on recommendations or validate estimates.

The cost per hour for AX support continues rising because the talent pool continues shrinking.

When you look at it like this: delaying the ERP upgrade doesn’t make it easier or cheaper, don’t you think?

How Are Other F&B Companies Handling This?

The companies handling this transition best aren’t the ones with the biggest budgets or the largest internal IT teams. They’re the ones being strategic about how they build capability.

Here’s what we’re seeing:

  1. They start with assessment, not ERP implementation. Before committing to a full D365 rollout, successful F&B companies bring in experienced people (independent of the implementation partner) to evaluate their current state. What customizations actually need to be rebuilt? Which processes can be simplified? Where are the biggest risks? This assessment phase typically takes 6-12 weeks and saves months of rework later.
  2. They build internal capability gradually. Instead of outsourcing everything to a partner, these companies invest in training their own team on D365 fundamentals. They send key people to Microsoft training. They run proof-of-concept projects on non-critical areas. By the time they’re ready for the full implementation, they have internal champions who can push back on partner recommendations and validate the approach.
  3. They use a hybrid staffing model. Rather than going all-in with a single place for resources, many F&B manufacturers are mixing it up. A core partner for the overall program management and integration work, combined with independent specialists for specific capabilities where they need deep expertise without the overhead. Get the most out of your independent contractor interview with our D365 Contractor Checklist. This hybrid approach has some real advantages. You get senior-level talent for focused engagements instead of committing to multi-year retainer relationships. Someone needs to assess your warehouse customizations and recommend a modernization approach? That’s a six-week engagement, not a six-month one. You avoid the “junior army” problem where partners staff projects with less experienced resources who need supervision from the senior people you thought you were getting.
  4. They treat it as a business transformation, not an IT project. The implementations that go well have executive sponsorship from operations, finance, and supply chain leadership, not just IT. They’re redesigning processes, not just replacing technology.

The common thread across successful transitions is flexibility in how you source talent and expertise. Whether that’s independent D365 contractors with F&B experience, a boutique implementation partner, or a mix of both, the key is having people who understand your industry and transfer knowledge rather than creating dependency.

The Real AX 2012 Hidden Costs Add Up Fast

For food and beverage manufacturers, keeping AX 2012 running isn’t the conservative, low-risk option anymore. It’s probably the expensive one.

The costs show up in multiple places: declining warehouse productivity as systems struggle with volume, finance teams spending extra days closing the month, compliance exposure that grows every year, rising contractor rates for legacy support, integration failures that create operational chaos, and the increasing difficulty of eventually making the move.

The question isn’t whether to upgrade. It’s when, and how to do it in a way that minimizes risk and maximizes the return on your investment.

If you’re ready to assess your situation and understand what a practical upgrade approach looks like for your operation, we can help connect you with boutique partners & contractors who’ve successfully guided F&B companies through this exact transition.

Email me here and I’ll send you the “Upgrade Readiness Talent Plan” that PE-backed food manufacturers are currently using to prepare for their D365 move.

About the Author

Ryan Carolan is the founder of d365contractors.com, connecting US manufacturing companies with pre-vetted, independent D365 Finance & Supply Chain Management experts. 14 years exclusively in D365 staffing. Hundreds of contractor placements into manufacturing implementations across the US.

Most weeks, he waffles on about stuff like this online.

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn →

 

The Power Buyer’s Guide to Choosing Your D365 ERP Implementation Partner for Manufacturing

Posted on by Ryan Carolan

You’re about to commit MILLIONS on a shiny new Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management system. Besides a life partner, choosing a D365 ERP implementation partner is probably one of the biggest decisions you’ll ever make.

Most VPs of IT think of this as a software purchase, but it’s actually a high-stakes talent play. The partner logo gets them the meeting. But never forget it’s the individual consultants, the ones actually sitting in your conference room, the ones that see this thing through to the end with you: they determine whether you hit your go-live. Nobody cares about the logo at that point.

The best partners in the D365 ecosystem don’t want “easy” clients; they want Power Buyers. They want leaders who understand how the talent market works, ask the hard questions early, and know that a project’s success lives or dies by the people assigned to it.

Here are 5 ways to move past the sales pitch and show up as a Power Buyer before the SOW is signed.

1. Stop buying logos. Start buying names.

In the D365 staffing world, we see it every day: a partner has a “strong bench” of 200 people, but only six of them truly understand your specific manufacturing flow. Whether that’s metal extrusion, fresh fruit OR canned areosol products; chances are you will meet someone in the sales cycle who knows your specific industry.

When a partner shows you a polished org chart with titles like “Senior Solution Architect,” they are giving you placeholders. As a Power Buyer, you push past the titles. Ask for the actual names of the people who will be on-site on Day 1.

The Power Move: Ask for the LinkedIn profiles of the specific team members assigned to your D365 F&SCM project. You aren’t buying “expertise” in the abstract. You’re vetting the track record of the humans configuring your production orders, your warehouse management, and your financial posting logic. If a partner won’t name the team before the ink is dry, they are likely still scrambling to staff your project. And sometimes that’s okay- but you just want to know up front. If you skip this, don’t be surprised if you never again see the awesome consultant who “just got it” during the pitch.

Need trusted D365 expertise your internal team doesn’t have yet? Our vetted independent contractors are ready to jump in. Let’s talk:

BOOK A FREE DISCOVERY CALLL

2. Audit your D365 ERP implementation partner’s project history

Every partner has three “gold star” references they’ve used for years. Those are marketing assets, and fair enough.

But to see how your D365 ERP implementation partner actually handles a complex manufacturing environment, ask for a list of every D365 F&O go-live they’ve done in your vertical in the last 24 months. Then, you pick three. When you get the VP of IT on the phone, ask the uncomfortable questions:

“What would you do differently if you were starting this project again?” Nobody says “nothing.” Their answer will tell you exactly where the blind spots were, whether it’s warehouse configuration, complex BOMs, or post go-live support.

“Were the people who started the project the same ones who finished it?” Consultant continuity is one of the biggest factors in D365 implementation success. Understanding how the partner manages team stability tells you what to expect on your project.

“How deep was their ‘X’ manufacturing knowledge?” There’s a massive difference between a partner who has implemented D365 for a professional services firm and one who has configured production orders, BOM structures, and advanced warehouse management for a company that actually makes things. Apples, packaging, golf balls, paperclips: you want to have consultants who have as close to whatever your ‘X’ is.

3. Stress-test with ugly scenarios from your plant floor

Most partner evaluations stay at the demo level. But manufacturing is messy. Light assembly is a world away from process manufacturing with catch-weights and shelf-life constraints.

Don’t let the D365 ERP implementation partner show you a clean demo. Give them a scenario that actually keeps your plant manager up at night.

The Power Move: Hand them a real-world problem: “We have a production line with 4 co-products where yield fluctuates 15% based on raw material quality. Our warehouse team needs to receive these into different storage zones based on shelf life and temperature requirements. Show me exactly how your team would configure this in D365 Supply Chain Management.”

If they get specific fast, they’ve been in the trenches. If they pivot back to “platform capabilities,” they’re learning on your dime.

This exercise helps both sides figure out fit early, before anyone commits serious time and budget. The best D365 partners actually appreciate this kind of detail in the sales process because it tells them you know your business and you’re ready to engage at a serious level.

4. Separate “delivery” from “outcomes” on your D365 project

Here is a staffing reality: the partner’s Project Manager and your Project Manager have different KPIs.

The partner’s PM is there to manage their team and hit SOW milestones. Your PM is there to protect your business outcomes. The person who pushes back when a configuration decision will break your shop floor reporting six months from now. The person who escalates when timelines are drifting but the status report still says green.

The Power Move: If you don’t have a D365 F&O-experienced PM internally, hire an independent ERP Project Manager with direct manufacturing experience. A Power Buyer knows that having an advocate who speaks “Partner” and “Manufacturing” fluently reduces friction and ensures the partner delivers value, not just code.

The best implementations I’ve seen have this structure in place. The partner appreciates having a client-side counterpart who understands D365, speaks the same language, and can make decisions quickly. It makes the whole project run better for everyone.

5. Negotiate talent insurance into your D365 implementation contract

The D365 talent market is competitive (no thanks to people like me :D)… Consultants get headhunted or moved to bigger projects constantly. Most VPs accept this as “just part of the game.”

You shouldn’t.

Before you sign, build resource continuity into your commercial agreement. This isn’t adversarial. It’s practical risk management that protects your manufacturing implementation timeline and your budget.

The Power Move: Negotiate these four staffing safeguards:

  • 14 days written notice before any key resource is rolled off your project. Not a phone call the day before. Written notice with enough time for you to assess the impact on your warehouse configuration, your finance setup, or whatever module that person owns.
  • Approval rights on replacements. You interview the new consultant just like a job candidate. If you’re running a D365 Finance & Supply Chain Management implementation in manufacturing, the replacement should have equivalent manufacturing experience. Full stop.
  • Two-week mandatory overlap for knowledge transfer. The outgoing consultant and the incoming one work side by side for at least two weeks ideally. This protects the project timeline and ensures nothing falls through the cracks.
  • A ramp-up rate adjustment while the new consultant learns your business. If a replacement needs 3-4 weeks to get up to speed on your plant floor processes, discuss how that ramp-up period is handled commercially. Good partners are open to this conversation because they understand the value of long-term client trust.

Choosing the right D365 ERP implementation partner: setting the standard

The difference between a live system and a successful business outcome is the quality of the people in the room. Yes, the people that come onto your project with your partner are crucial; but do not underestimate the importance of having excellent people internally too.

It shows you’re a serious client who is ready to engage. And in this market, serious clients get the best teams. And the best outcomes.

Want to know where you stand today?

We built a quick Partner Dependency Assessment that tells you whether you’re in control of your D365 implementation, or whether your D365 ERP implementation partner is running the show.

TAKE IT HERE

If your next decision is who to hire rather than which partner to sign, our guide to D365 manufacturing contractors covers the roles, modules, and vetting that matter on a plant implementation.

About the Author

Ryan Carolan is the founder of d365contractors.com, connecting US manufacturing companies with pre-vetted, independent D365 Finance & Supply Chain Management experts. 14 years exclusively in D365 staffing. Hundreds of contractor placements into manufacturing implementations across the US.

Most weeks, he waffles on about stuff like this online.

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn →

How to Build Your Internal D365 F&O Team While Using External Experts

Posted on by Ryan Carolan

When helping customers build their internal D365 F&O team, the story usually starts like this:

  • Company spends $ 3M to $10M+ on an ERP implementation.
  • The partner runs 95% of the project.
  • External consultants configure the system, build the integrations, and lead the testing.
  • The project goes live. Wahoo.
  • The partner rolls off. Uh oh.

IT leadership looks around the room and realizes nobody internal actually knows how D365 works. The system is live, but most of the ERP knowledge walked out the door with the consultants.

Building an internal D365 F&O team while using external experts isn’t something that happens naturally. It has to be designed. And it has to be driven by the VP of IT or CIO, because nobody else in the organisation has both the authority and the incentive to make it happen.

Why your internal D365 F&O team doesn’t develop by default

Let’s be honest about the incentive structure.

Your implementation partner is paid to deliver a working system. They are not paid to build your internal team’s capability. Knowledge transfer appears in every SOW, usually as a line item somewhere near the bottom. In practice, it means a few training sessions in the final weeks of the project, when everyone is exhausted and focused on go-live cutover, not learning.

The external consultants on the project are focused on configuration, testing, and hitting milestones. They’re good people doing their job. But their job is to deliver the system, not to teach your team how to run it. And your internal team members are often split between their day jobs and the project, which means they’re in the room for the workshops but not doing the hands-on work that creates real capability.

The result is predictable. Your team watches the consultants configure D365. They attend the training. They pass the knowledge transfer checkbox. And six months after go-live, when something needs to change, they don’t know how to do it. Not because they’re not smart. Because watching someone configure a system and actually configuring it yourself are two completely different things.

If you want to build a real internal D365 F&O team, you have to change the structure of the project itself. Not bolt on training at the end.

Need D365 expertise your internal team doesn’t have yet? Our vetted independent contractors are ready to jump in. Let’s talk:

BOOK A FREE DISCOVERY CALLL 

Decide what your internal D365 F&O team actually needs to own

You don’t need to replicate your partner’s entire team internally. That’s unrealistic and unnecessary. What you need is enough internal D365 F&O team that can handle 80% of your post go-live needs without picking up the phone.

For a manufacturing company running D365 Finance & Supply Chain Management, that typically means owning three things internally.

Functional configuration knowledge. Someone who understands how your D365 Finance module is configured and can make changes to posting profiles, number sequences, workflows, and reporting dimensions without calling the partner. Someone who understands your Supply Chain configuration well enough to adjust warehouse parameters, modify production order defaults, and troubleshoot planning runs. These don’t need to be the same person. But they need to exist.

Data and reporting capability. Someone who can build and modify Power BI reports, manage data entities, and handle routine data imports and exports. In manufacturing, this is critical. Your operations team will need new reports constantly as the business evolves. If every report requires an external engagement, you’ll never keep up.

Integration and technical troubleshooting. At least one person who understands how D365 connects to your other systems, can read integration logs, and knows when something breaks whether it’s a D365 issue, a middleware issue, or an upstream data issue. This person doesn’t need to be an X++ developer. But they need to understand the architecture well enough to triage problems quickly.

Everything else, deep X++ development, major configuration changes, version upgrades, complex new module deployments, those are the things you bring external experts in for. The goal is to stop paying consulting rates for things your team should be able to handle.

How to structure the project so your internal D365 F&O team actually learns

This is where most companies might struggle. They assign internal people to the project team but don’t change what those people actually do during the project.

If you want to build an internal D365 F&O team, your people can’t just attend workshops and review documents. They need to do the work. Alongside the external consultants, not watching from the side.

Pair your internal people with external consultants on every module. Not as observers. As co-configurators. Your Finance lead should be in the system configuring the chart of accounts alongside the partner’s consultant, not reviewing a document that describes the chart of accounts. Your Supply Chain lead should be setting up warehouse parameters, not approving a design document that lists them.

This slows the project down slightly at the beginning. Every partner will tell you that. And they’re right. But it accelerates everything after go-live, because your team actually knows what they built and why. The IT leaders I’ve worked with who insist on this approach consistently spend less on external support in the 12 months after go-live. Significantly less.

Make your internal team lead UAT, not just participate. User Acceptance Testing is the best learning opportunity in the entire project. When your team designs the test scripts, executes them, troubleshoots the failures, and documents the results, they build capability that no training session can replicate. If the partner is running UAT and your team is just clicking through scripts someone else wrote, you’ve missed the single best chance to build your internal D365 F&O team.

Require your team to deliver the end-user training. Nothing exposes knowledge gaps faster than having to teach someone else. If your internal Finance lead can’t train the AP team on the new invoice process in D365, that’s a gap you need to fill before go-live, not after. This also builds credibility. When your end users see that an internal person can answer their questions, they trust the system more. Trust is an underrated currency in ERP implementations.

Use external experts strategically, not as a crutch

None of this means you shouldn’t use external D365 F&O experts. You absolutely should. The question is how.

The best approach I’ve seen is what I’d call a “teach and transfer” model. You bring in an external expert for a specific capability gap, with a defined scope and a clear handover plan. Not an open-ended engagement where the consultant does the work and your team watches.

For example. Your internal team doesn’t know how to configure Advanced Warehouse Management in D365. Why would they!? You bring in an independent WMS specialist for 8-12 weeks. During those weeks, they configure the system alongside your internal warehouse lead. Your person is in the system every day, making changes, making mistakes, learning the logic. At the end of the engagement, your warehouse lead can handle 60-70% of WMS configuration changes independently. Much better than 0%, right? The specialist leaves behind documentation, but more importantly, they leave behind a person who actually understands the system.

Compare that to the alternative. You engage the partner for WMS configuration. Their consultant does it. Your team reviews the design document and signs off. After go-live, any WMS change requires a partner ticket, a scoping call, and a billing cycle. For years.

Independent contractors are particularly effective for this kind of targeted capability building. They don’t have a practice to feed or a bench to fill. Their success is measured by whether your team can operate independently after they leave. That’s a fundamentally different incentive than a partner whose revenue depends on your ongoing dependency (sorry partners :D). We covered this dynamic in detail in The Power Buyer’s Guide to Choosing Your D365 ERP Implementation Partner.

The “shadow team” approach that actually works

Another effective model I’ve seen for building an internal D365 F&O team is what some organisations call a “shadow team.” It’s simple in concept, but requires commitment from IT leadership to protect. And buy-in from the business.

For every external consultant on the project, you assign an internal person as their shadow. Not a full-time project resource necessarily, but someone who is present for every key decision, every Functional Design Document, every configuration session, every testing cycle for their module. They have access to the same environments. They’re making changes in the system alongside the consultant. They’re asking “why did you configure it that way?” constantly.

The shadow team approach works because learning happens through doing, not watching. After 6-12 months of working alongside a D365 Finance specialist, your internal Finance lead has seen every configuration decision, understood the trade-offs, and built the muscle memory to operate the system independently.

The challenge is protecting these people’s time. Their managers will want them back on their regular work. Other priorities will compete for their attention. This is where you, as the VP of IT, have to be firm. If you pull your shadow team members back to their day jobs during the implementation, you lose the capability building and you’ll pay for it in external consulting fees for years afterward.

Budget for backfill. Hire temps or redistribute work. Whatever it takes. The cost of protecting your shadow team during the implementation is a fraction of what you’ll spend on external support if you don’t.

Developing your internal D365 F&O team after go-live

Internal D365 F&O team building doesn’t stop at go-live. In fact, the first 6 months after go-live is when the most valuable learning happens, because your team is dealing with real transactions, real exceptions, and real users.

During this period, keep at least one experienced external D365 F&O resource embedded with your team. Not to do the work. To coach. When your internal Finance lead encounters something they haven’t seen before, they have someone to ask. When your Supply Chain owner needs to adjust a planning parameter, someone is there to guide them through it the first time so they can do it independently the next time. A fractional Solution Architect might be a good idea here.

This is a fundamentally different engagement model than traditional post go-live support, where the partner runs a ticket queue and your team submits requests. That model builds dependency. The coaching model builds capability. It costs the same or less, and the ROI compounds over time because every issue your team resolves independently is one you never pay an external rate for again.

We covered the broader post go-live strategy in D365 F&O Post Go-Live: Why the First 6 Months Define Your ROI.

Measure it. Report on it. Protect it.

If you don’t invest in your internal D365 F&O team, capability will erode. People leave. Priorities shift. The team that was confident at the 6 month mark starts losing ground by month 18 if nobody is paying attention.

Track simple metrics with simple questions:

  • How many configuration changes were handled internally versus externally this quarter?
  • What’s the average time to resolve a D365 support ticket internally?
  • How many reports were built by your team versus requested from a partner?
  • Are your module owners still getting development time, or have they been fully absorbed back into their operational roles?

Report these to your leadership team. Not as vanity metrics. As cost avoidance. Every configuration change your team handles internally is a partner engagement you didn’t pay for. Every report your team builds is $5K-$15K you didn’t spend. Over 3-5 years, the compound savings of a capable internal team versus permanent partner dependency is enormous.

And when your CFO asks why you’re requesting budget for training, D365 conferences, certifications, or a dedicated D365 support role, you have the data to justify it. Not as an expense. As an investment that’s already paying for itself.

The decision only a VP of IT can make (or a CIO!)

Building your internal D365 F&O team while using external experts is a leadership decision. It requires you to structure the project differently, protect your team’s time, budget for backfill, choose engagement models that prioritise knowledge transfer over speed, and measure the results over years, not weeks.

Nobody else in the organisation will drive this. Your partner won’t, because their business model benefits from your dependency. Your project manager won’t, because their focus is go-live. Your team won’t, because they’re overwhelmed and don’t have the authority to demand co-configuration time.

This one is on you. And the IT leaders who get it right build teams that can run, maintain, and improve D365 for years without calling for help every time something changes.

If you haven’t started these conversations internally yet, and you’re already in an implementation or about to start one, the questions in 5 Questions to Answer Before You Talk to Any D365 F&O Vendor will help you get your house in order first.

About the Author

Ryan Carolan is the founder of d365contractors.com, connecting US manufacturing companies with pre-vetted, independent D365 Finance & Supply Chain Management experts. 14 years exclusively in D365 staffing. Hundreds of contractor placements into manufacturing implementations across the US.

Most weeks, he waffles on about stuff like this online.

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn →

 

5 Questions to Answer Before You Talk to Any D365 F&O Vendor

Posted on by Ryan Carolan

You’re about to start talking to a D365 F&O vendor or implementation partner.

You’ve done the research. You’ve sat through the Microsoft pitch. You’ve probably watched a few Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management demos.

Stop. Not yet.

After 14 years in D365 staffing, placing contractors into manufacturing/SCM implementations across the US, I’ve watched this play out dozens of times. The IT leaders who walk into a D365 F&O vendor conversation without clear answers to 5 specific questions end up handing over control of their project before it starts. The vendor fills in the gaps for them. And once the vendor is defining your scope, your timeline, and your success criteria, you’re no longer buying. You’re being sold to.

These aren’t questions to ask the vendor. These are questions you need to answer internally, as a cross-functional leadership team, before you sit across the table from anyone.

This “pre-work” is often called Phase 0 of an ERP project, which we cover in detail in this article.

1. What does “done” look like before you meet a D365 F&O vendor?

This sounds obvious. It isn’t. Most IT leaders can describe what they want D365 ERP to do. Very few can describe what the business looks like when D365 is working.

There’s a difference. “We want to automate our procurement process” is a software requirement. “Our procurement team processes 400 POs a week with two less headcount and zero manual re-keying” is a business outcome. One of those gives the D365 F&O vendor room to define success on their terms. The other gives you something to hold them (or your own team) to.

Before you talk to any D365 F&O vendor: sit down with your CFO, your operations director, and your plant leadership. Get specific. What does month-end close look like when this system is working? How fast do production orders flow from sales to the shop floor? What does your warehouse pick accuracy need to be? How many manual workarounds disappear?

Write these down. Make them measurable. Because once you’re in a partner conversation, every SOW will be scoped against deliverables. If you haven’t defined your own outcomes first, you’ll be measuring success against the vendor’s milestones, not your business reality.

The IT leaders who get the best results from their D365 F&O vendor relationships are the ones who show up on day one and say: “Here is what success looks like. Tell me how you get us there.”

Need D365 expertise your internal team doesn’t have yet? Our vetted, independent consultants are ready to jump in. Let’s talk:

BOOK A FREE DISCOVERY CALLL 

2. Who will we backfill during the D365 ERP implementation?

A smart D365 F&O vendor will ask you about your internal project team during the sales process. They need to know who they’re working with. But the real question isn’t who will be on the team. It’s whether those people actually have the time and authority to do the job.

I’ve seen this kill more D365 implementations than bad software configuration. The VP of IT assigns their best people to the project, but nobody backfills their day jobs. So your Finance lead is trying to define chart of accounts requirements in the morning and close the books in the afternoon. Your Supply Chain lead is in discovery workshops three days a week and managing the warehouse the other two. Within a month, both are burned out and the partner is waiting on decisions that never come. This is how you slowly hand the keys to the project, and your autonomy, over…

So before you talk to a D365 F&O vendor: answer this honestly: who is going to work on this full time? Not “attend meetings.” Not “be available for questions.” Full time. Dedicated. For the duration of the implementation. And who is going to do their current job while they’re gone?

If you can’t answer that cleanly, you’re not ready to start vendor conversations. Because every D365 F&O vendor’s timeline assumption is built on your team being available. When they’re not, the timeline slips. And the additional cost of that slip doesn’t show up in the original SOW.

3. What are the 3 processes that will break if D365 ERP is configured wrong?

Every manufacturing company has them. The processes that look simple on a whiteboard but have 15 years of tribal knowledge baked into how they actually run. The things your plant floor team does instinctively that no one has ever documented.

Maybe it’s your batch tracking process for raw materials with variable shelf life. Maybe it’s the way your warehouse team handles returns that don’t fit standard disposition codes. Maybe it’s the intercompany transfer logic between your plants that finance has been manually adjusting for years.

Your D365 F&O vendor doesn’t know these exist. Not because they’re bad at their job, but because these are the things that only surface during configuration, when someone on the shop floor says “that’s not how we do it” and the whole room goes quiet.

Before you start any vendor conversation: sit down with your operations and plant leadership and ask: “What are the 3 processes that, if the new system gets them wrong, will cause the most damage?” Not the biggest processes. The most fragile ones. The ones where a wrong configuration means your production schedule is wrong, your inventory counts don’t reconcile, or your warehouse team goes back to spreadsheets within a week of go-live.

Bring these to the D365 F&O vendor conversation as test cases. Not as requirements buried in a spreadsheet. As scenarios you expect them to address specifically during evaluation. The vendors who take these seriously are the ones worth talking to. We covered how to use these scenarios during partner evaluation in detail in The Power Buyer’s Guide to Choosing Your D365 ERP Implementation Partner.

4. How clean is your data? (your D365 F&O vendor might assume it’s fine)

Data readiness is the single most underestimated factor in D365 F&O implementations. Every IT leader knows data migration is part of the project. Almost none of them know the actual state of their data when they start talking to vendors.

Here’s what typically happens. The D365 F&O vendor asks about data during the sales process. You say “we have it in our current system.” They estimate migration based on standard assumptions. Then, 4 months into the project, someone actually opens the database and finds 12 years of duplicate vendor records, item masters with inconsistent units of measure, BOMs that haven’t been updated since 2013, and customer records spread across three different systems that don’t agree on basic details like addresses and payment terms.

Data cleanup becomes a parallel project that nobody budgeted for. It delays configuration because you can’t test with bad data. It delays UAT because the test results don’t make sense. It delays go-live because nobody trusts the numbers.

Before you talk to any D365 F&O vendor: assign a data owner. Not a data migration lead. A data owner. Someone with the authority to make decisions about what gets cleaned, what gets archived, and what gets left behind. Give them access to your current systems and 90 days to produce an honest assessment of what you’re working with. If you don’t have someone who can do that internally, hire one. Or find an independent D365 consultant who knows D365 ERP intimately.

When you bring that assessment to a vendor conversation, two things happen. First, the vendor can actually give you a realistic timeline and budget. Second, you immediately separate yourself from 90% of prospects they talk to, because almost nobody shows up with clean data or even an honest picture of their data state.

5. What is your real post go-live budget? Most D365 F&O vendor SOWs don’t cover it.

Every D365 F&O vendor will ask about budget. Most IT leaders give the number they’ve secured for the implementation. Licensing, configuration, data migration, training, go-live. That’s the number on the business case they presented to the board.

It’s not the real number. The real number includes what happens after go-live. Post go-live stabilisation. The dedicated support resources you need for at least 90 days. The configuration fixes that only surface when real users run real transactions at real volume. The additional training your warehouse team needs after they’ve actually used the system for a month, not the training they sat through during UAT when everything was theoretical. And a 30% buffer just in case.

For a manufacturing company running D365 Finance & Supply Chain Management across multiple plants, the post go-live investment is typically 10-15% of the total implementation cost. On a $5M implementation, that’s $500K-$750K. If that number isn’t in your budget, you haven’t budgeted for business success. You’ve budgeted for go-live. Those are different things.

Before you talk to a D365 F&O vendor: have the budget conversation with your CFO that includes the full picture. Implementation plus stabilisation plus optimisation. If you wait until after go-live to ask for that money, you’ll be asking from a position of weakness, when things are breaking and the board is already nervous. We covered how to frame this conversation in D365 F&O Post Go-Live: Why the First 6 Months Define Your ROI.

Bonus: Who can we turn to on OUR side when the big decisions hit?

There’s a moment in every D365 F&O implementation where a complex solution or technical decision lands on the table. Maybe it’s whether to use Advanced Warehouse Management or standard WMS. Maybe it’s how to handle intercompany accounting across 4 legal entities. Maybe it’s whether a customization is worth the long-term upgrade risk.

Your partner will have a recommendation. But their recommendation is shaped by their experience, their methodology, and their commercial model. That’s not a criticism: it’s just how consulting works. The question is: who on YOUR side of the table has the technical depth to evaluate that recommendation, push back when it doesn’t fit, or propose an alternative?

Most manufacturing companies don’t have that person internally. And that’s fine. But you need to know that gap exists before you start, not discover it mid-project when a $200K architecture decision needs to be made and nobody on your team can evaluate whether it’s the right call.

This is where a fractional Solution Architect can be invaluable. Someone independent — not tied to your implementation partner — who sits on your side of the table for the big decisions. They don’t need to be there full time. They need to be there when it matters: during discovery, during design reviews, during key technical decisions, and during go-live readiness.

Think of it like hiring an independent building inspector when you’re building a house. Your contractor is probably doing great work. But having someone who works for YOU reviewing the plans and the execution? That’s how you protect a multi-million dollar investment.

If you don’t have that person identified before you start vendor conversations, add it to your list. Or even better: book in a free discovery call with us to talk about it:

GET FRACTIONAL D365 HELP

Walk into a D365 F&O vendor conversation ready

The IT leaders who get the best outcomes from their D365 implementations are the ones who did the internal work first. They defined their own success criteria. They freed up their best people. They identified the fragile processes. They confronted their data reality. They budgeted for the full lifecycle, not just go-live.

When you show up to a D365 F&O vendor conversation with those 5 answers, you change the dynamic completely. You’re not waiting for the vendor to tell you what you need. You’re telling them what success looks like and asking them to show you how they deliver it.

That’s the difference between buying and being sold to. And in a market where D365 implementations cost millions and take years at high failure rates (according to LinkedIn :D), that difference matters.

Want to assess how prepared your organisation is before you start D365 F&O vendor conversations?

We built a quick Partner Dependency Assessment that helps you see where the gaps are before someone else fills them in for you. Takes 2 minutes:

TAKE IT HERE

About the Author

Ryan Carolan is the founder of D365contractors.com, connecting US manufacturing companies with pre-vetted, independent D365 Finance & Supply Chain Management experts. 14 years exclusively in D365 staffing. Hundreds of contractor placements into manufacturing implementations across the US.

Most weeks, he waffles on about stuff like this online.

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn →

 

Why D365 F&O Data Readiness Is the #1 Project Killer for Manufacturers

Posted on by Ryan Carolan

D365 F&O data readiness is the single most underestimated factor in ERP implementations.

Despite what you see on LinkedIn: nobody ever killed an entire implementation with a bad configuration decision. Configurations can be fixed. Workflows can be adjusted. Security roles can be rebuilt. But when your data is wrong? That breaks everything, and it breaks it in ways that are almost impossible to fix quickly.

After 14 years in D365 staffing, I’ve placed hundreds of contractors into manufacturing implementations across the US. And the pattern is always the same. The project plan has a line item for “data migration.” It sits somewhere between “testing” and “cutover.” It gets a few weeks of attention near the end. And then it can blow up the entire timeline.

D365 F&O data readiness isn’t a task you check off. It’s the foundation everything else sits on. Get it wrong and your configuration doesn’t work, your testing is meaningless, your users don’t trust the system, and your go-live becomes a disaster recovery exercise.

And if you plan to board the Microsoft ERP AI train, this stuff has never been more important.

Why D365 F&O data readiness is YOUR responsibility, not your partner’s

Here’s something worth understanding early. Your implementation partner’s SOW almost certainly includes a line that says something like: “Client is responsible for providing clean, validated data in the agreed format by the agreed date.”

Read that again. That’s your partner being clear about where their scope ends. D365 F&O data readiness sits with you.

Partners scope their projects assuming your data will arrive clean, on time, and in the right format. Their timelines, their resource plans, their testing schedules — all of it assumes the data is ready when they need it. When it isn’t, and it almost never is, the project slips. But the partner isn’t absorbing that cost. You are.

This isn’t a criticism of partners. It’s just how the commercial model works. The partner can’t price the risk of your data being a disaster, because they don’t know the state of your data until they’re already deep into the project. So the SOW places responsibility with you, and most IT leaders sign it without realizing what they’ve just agreed to.

Data readiness starts 6 months before you think it does

Most manufacturing companies don’t start thinking about their data until the implementation partner asks for it. By then, you’re already behind.

For a mid-market manufacturer running a legacy ERP, or worse, running critical processes on spreadsheets alongside the ERP, the data landscape is usually a mess. You’ve got customer records in three different formats across two systems. Vendor master data that hasn’t been cleaned since the last ERP migration. Item masters with duplicate records, inconsistent units of measure, and descriptions that mean different things to different departments.

And that’s just master data. When you get into transactional data — open purchase orders, open sales orders, inventory balances, work-in-progress, open AR and AP — the complexity multiplies. Every one of those transactions has to be accurate on day one of go-live, because your finance team can’t close the month if the opening balances are wrong.

D365 F&O data readiness means starting the assessment and cleanup months before your implementation kicks off. Not weeks. Months. If you’re planning a January go-live, the data conversation should be happening in the spring of the prior year. That sounds aggressive. It isn’t. It’s realistic.

The 5 data problems that kill D365 F&O projects at manufacturing companies

In 14 years of placing D365 contractors into these exact projects, I see the same five D365 F&O data readiness failures over and over again. Every single one of them is preventable. None of them are surprising. And yet they keep happening.

1. Nobody owns the data. The project has a project manager. It has functional consultants. It has a steering committee. But who owns the data? Usually the answer is “everyone,” which really means nobody. D365 F&O data readiness requires a named person, ideally someone internal, who owns the entire data workstream end to end. Extraction, cleanup, validation, mapping, testing, cutover. One person. Full accountability.

2. The item master is a disaster. For manufacturers, the item master is the most critical and most neglected data set. You’ve got thousands of SKUs, many of them duplicated, many with incomplete Bills of Materials, many with incorrect units of measure. Some items are active. Some haven’t been ordered in 5 years but nobody marked them inactive. Your D365 configuration for Supply Chain Management depends entirely on the item master being accurate. Production planning, inventory valuation, procurement — all of it breaks if the item data is wrong.

3. Chart of Accounts doesn’t map cleanly. Your legacy chart of accounts was designed for a different system and a different era of the business. D365 F&O uses financial dimensions differently than most legacy ERPs. Mapping the old chart of accounts to the new structure is a design decision, not a copy-paste exercise. When this gets treated as a last-minute data task instead of a strategic finance decision, you end up with a chart of accounts that technically works but makes reporting a nightmare for years.

4. Historical data scope is undefined. How much history are you bringing over? All of it? 2 years? 5 years? Just open transactions? This decision affects timeline, testing complexity, and storage. And it’s usually not made until someone asks, which is usually too late. Every manufacturing company wants “all the history” until they realise what that actually means in terms of data cleanup, validation, and cutover time.

5. Nobody tested the data until UAT. This is the killer. The team extracts the data, transforms it, loads it into D365, and then doesn’t validate it properly until User Acceptance Testing. By that point, you’re weeks from go-live. The users start testing and immediately find that half the item records are wrong, opening balances don’t match, vendor payment terms are missing, and warehouse locations don’t exist. Suddenly the entire go-live timeline is at risk because of data issues that could have been caught 3 months earlier with a simple mock migration.

What good D365 F&O data readiness actually looks like

The companies that get this right do something very simple. They treat data as its own workstream with its own timeline, its own resources, and its own checkpoints. Not bolted onto the end of configuration. Not somebody’s side project. A proper workstream.

Good D365 F&O data readiness follows a pattern. First, you assess what you have. That means pulling every data source into the light — the ERP, the spreadsheets (YES finance team: that means EVERY spreadsheet you use!!), the Access databases somebody built 10 years ago, the warehouse system that doesn’t talk to anything else. You document what’s there, what’s missing, what’s duplicated, and what’s flat-out wrong.

Then you make decisions. What data migrates to D365? What gets archived? What gets cleaned up versus rebuilt from scratch? These are business decisions, not technical ones. Your finance team decides the chart of accounts mapping. Your supply chain team decides which items are active. Your operations team decides how much production history matters. The IT team coordinates, but the business owns the decisions.

Then you test early and test often. Run a mock migration in month 2 or 3 of the project, not month 8. Load the data into a sandbox environment and let users actually look at it. They’ll find problems immediately. Good. That’s the point. Find the problems early when you have time to fix them. Not during UAT when you don’t.

And you run the full mock cutover at least twice before the real thing. The first time will be ugly. The second time will be smoother. By the time you do it for real, the team has done it before and knows exactly what to expect.

Why your internal team has to own D365 F&O data readiness

Your partner can build the data migration templates. They can help you map fields from legacy to D365. They can run the technical import process. But they cannot clean your data for you. They don’t know your business well enough to decide whether item #4592 is the same as item #4592-A, or whether customer “ABC Industries” and “ABC Industries Inc” are the same entity, or whether that open PO from 2021 should be migrated or written off.

These are decisions that require deep business knowledge. The kind of knowledge that only exists inside your organisation, usually in the heads of people who have been there for years. Or a highly-skilled contractor who can come in, ask the right questions and get smart decisions made. Those people are the ones who need to be driving D365 F&O data readiness. Not the partner. Not the project manager. Your people.

This connects directly to something I wrote about in how to build your internal D365 F&O team. Data ownership is one of the earliest and most important capabilities your internal team should develop. If your team can’t own the data during implementation, they definitely can’t own it after go-live. And if nobody owns the data after go-live, the system degrades steadily from day one.

The real cost of poor D365 F&O data readiness

I’ve seen implementations delayed by 3-6 months because of data issues alone. That’s not 3-6 months of waiting. That’s 3-6 months of paying for partner resources who can’t move forward until the data is ready. That’s 3-6 months of your internal team being stretched across both the legacy system and the new one. That’s 3-6 months of change fatigue eroding user confidence before the system even goes live.

And the financial impact goes beyond the obvious. A delayed go-live means the ROI clock doesn’t start ticking. If you budgeted for 12 months to payback and the project is 6 months late, your finance team is now explaining to the board why the ERP investment isn’t delivering returns on the original schedule. That’s a career conversation nobody wants to have. I covered the mechanics of this in detail in why the first 6 months after go-live define your ROI.

Then there’s the hidden cost: user trust. When users log into D365 on day one and their data is wrong — the item descriptions don’t match, the inventory quantities are off, the customer addresses are outdated — they stop trusting the system immediately. And once users lose trust in an ERP, it is incredibly difficult to get it back. They revert to spreadsheets. They build workarounds. They stop entering data properly because “the system is wrong anyway.” That’s the death spiral that turns a recoverable data issue into a permanent adoption problem.

ERP data readiness is a leadership decision

If you’re a VP of IT or an ERP Program Manager reading this, the message is simple. Data readiness isn’t a task for someone on the project team to figure out. It’s a decision you need to make early, resource properly, and protect throughout the implementation.

That means assigning a dedicated data owner before the project starts. It means getting your finance, supply chain, and operations leaders to commit time — real time, not “squeeze it in between your day job” time — to data cleanup and validation. It means budgeting for data resources, whether that’s internal headcount, a contractor who specialises in D365 data migration, or both. And it means running mock migrations early enough that problems surface when there’s still time to fix them.

If you haven’t had the internal data conversation yet, the questions in 5 questions to answer before you talk to any D365 F&O vendor will help you figure out where you stand. Particularly question 4, which asks directly: how clean is your data? Your vendor might assume it’s fine. It probably isn’t.

The companies that nail D365 F&O data readiness don’t do anything magical. They just start early, assign ownership, test relentlessly, and treat data as a first-class workstream instead of an afterthought. It’s not glamorous. It doesn’t show up in any demo. But it’s the single biggest factor in whether your D365 implementation delivers real value or becomes an expensive lesson in what happens when nobody owns the data.

I’ll make a bet now: that starting in 2026 those companies that get data right will also flourish in the agentic ERP world we are without doubt transitioning to.

 

About the Author

Ryan Carolan is the founder of D365contractors.com, an elite community of independent D365 consultants. Spends most of his time connecting US manufacturing companies with pre-vetted, independent D365 Finance & Supply Chain Management experts (or permanent staff via Bond Patrick). 14 years exclusively in D365 staffing. Hundreds of contractor placements into manufacturing implementations across the US.

Most weeks, he waffles on about stuff like this online.

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn →

 

D365 Project Rescue: What Actually Happens in Week One

Posted on by Ryan Carolan

Most organizations do not plan or budget for a D365 project rescue. Nobody puts “rescue contingency” as a line item in their implementation budget. However, rescues happen more often than the industry likes to admit, and they almost always happen later than they should. By the time leadership realizes the project is genuinely in trouble, timelines have slipped, budgets have expanded, and the partner’s status reports no longer match what people feel on the ground.

From the outside, bringing in a senior D365 contractor to rescue a failing Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management implementation looks simple: an expert joins the team to fix the project. But what actually happens during the first week of a D365 project rescue is far more complex, and far more important to the future of the implementation, than most people realize. Because the first week is not about fixing anything. It is about understanding the truth.

How to know when your D365 project needs a rescue

Not every struggling project needs a rescue. Implementations are messy by nature. Timelines slip. Issues surface. Workarounds get built. That is normal. However, the question is whether you are dealing with normal implementation friction or something more fundamental. Here are the signals that suggest you have crossed from “challenging project” into “project that needs outside intervention.”

The partner’s status reports do not match reality. This is the earliest and most reliable signal. The steering committee slides say green or amber. But when you talk to your finance lead, your warehouse manager, or your production planner, they tell a different story. If there is a persistent gap between the official narrative and what your operational people are experiencing, something is being managed instead of being solved.

Your best people have gone quiet. At the start of the project, your SMEs were engaged, opinionated, and pushing back on design decisions. Now they attend workshops but say very little. In many cases, they have stopped raising concerns because they feel like nobody is listening, or because raising concerns has been treated as resistance rather than valuable input. As a result, quiet SMEs are one of the most dangerous signals in a D365 implementation.

Decisions are being deferred, not made. The project has a growing list of “to be confirmed” items. Design decisions that should have been finalized months ago are still open. Testing is happening against configurations that everyone knows will change. As a result, the project is moving forward on paper but standing still in practice. We covered these early signals in 5 early warning signs your D365 F&O implementation is drifting.

The scope keeps growing but the timeline does not. New requirements keep appearing. Change requests are being logged. But the go-live date has not moved. Either the partner is absorbing the additional scope silently (which means quality is being compromised) or the scope is being parked as “Phase 2” without anyone honestly assessing whether Phase 1 is still viable without it.

You have lost confidence in the partner’s team. The senior consultants who were in the sales process and the kickoff are no longer on the project. The people doing the daily work are less experienced than what was promised. Deliverables are late or incomplete. You are spending more time managing the partner than managing the project. This is not necessarily the partner’s fault. It is a structural reality of how many large partners staff projects. But it is your problem to solve.

If three or more of these signals are present, you are likely past the point where internal course-correction will work. That is when a D365 project rescue becomes the fastest path back to control.

Our D365contractors.com community exists to serve D365 ERP customers who want to beef up their internal capability and drive projects forward internally. Chat with us today about our vetted consultants who are ready to jump in and help

GET FRACTIONAL D365 TALENT

What a D365 project rescue actually looks like in week one

A seasoned D365 specialist does not arrive and start rewriting configurations or overhauling environments. Their first job is not technical at all. It is diagnostic. And it happens fast.

Mapping the real state of the project. This means ignoring the official plan, the partner timeline, and the steering committee slides. Instead, they focus on the operational reality. They look at where the project actually stands in relation to design completeness, development progress, data readiness, test execution, defect patterns, integration stability, and business adoption. They review documentation, if it exists. Often, it does not. They also examine configuration decisions and trace the logic, or lack of logic, behind them.

Talking to the people who have been silenced. They speak to SMEs who have not had a voice in months. They talk to the warehouse supervisor, the finance lead, the production planner. Crucially, they bypass the project manager and the partner to get to the people closest to the work. Because the truth about a D365 implementation lives at the operational level, not in the status reports. We covered why this matters in D365 F&O discovery: where your implementation is won or lost.

Identifying what is salvageable and what is not. This is the hardest part. Certain areas of the project will be solid. Others will need rework. And a few may need to be rethought from the ground up. A good rescue specialist can distinguish between these quickly because they have seen the same patterns across dozens of implementations. Within a few days, a picture forms. It is rarely flattering, but it is accurate. And accuracy is what a D365 project rescue depends on.

The real blockers are almost never technical

Contrary to what most people think, D365 project rescue work is almost never about bad code. Instead, the issues are almost always upstream. Misaligned scope. Unclear ownership. Business processes not captured correctly during discovery. UAT treated as a discovery phase because discovery was rushed. Data migration left too late. Dependencies between workstreams that were never reconciled. In addition, risks are often hidden to avoid difficult conversations.

A senior contractor understands these patterns long before they see the specifics. They have lived them across industries, across implementations, across teams who all believed their challenges were unique. Consequently, week one is not about solving everything. It is about identifying what must be solved immediately, what can wait, and what must be accepted as a constraint for go-live and addressed in a post go-live optimization phase. We covered how to structure that ongoing work in D365 F&O post go-live optimization: the roadmap nobody builds.

A D365 project rescue is emotional before it is technical

This is the part nobody talks about. A rescue is not just a technical intervention. It is an emotional one.

By the time outside help arrives, teams are often burnt out, frustrated, or quietly disengaged. Similarly, leaders feel exposed because they championed the project and now it is struggling. Meanwhile, SMEs feel unheard because their concerns were dismissed during discovery. The partner may be defensive because they know the project is not going well but do not want to acknowledge it publicly.

The senior contractor becomes a stabilizing force. Someone who can explain where things stand, why they have gone wrong, and what must happen next. No politics, no bias, and no protecting anyone’s narrative. This clarity alone shifts the energy of the project. For the first time in months, people can see a way forward. That shift in confidence is worth as much as any technical fix, because a demoralized team cannot deliver a successful go-live regardless of how good the configuration is.

What happens after week one

Once the real state of the project is uncovered, decisions can finally be made based on facts rather than hope. Here is what the IT leader should expect in weeks two through four of a D365 project rescue.

Scope gets corrected. Certain things that were planned for go-live need to move to Phase 2. Conversely, items that were deferred to Phase 2 may need to move forward because they are actually critical. The rescue specialist helps you make these calls based on operational impact, not on what was in the original SOW. In addition, they help you communicate these changes to leadership in a way that frames them as smart prioritization rather than project failure.

The partner relationship gets reframed. This is the awkward conversation nobody wants to have. However, it is essential. A D365 project rescue does not necessarily mean replacing your partner. In many cases, the partner has good people and solid D365 knowledge. The problem is often structural: wrong resources on the project, unrealistic timelines that everyone agreed to, scope that was never properly defined. The rescue specialist helps you have a direct, professional conversation with the partner about what needs to change. Specific asks. Clear priorities. Updated accountability structures.

A new plan gets built. This means a revised timeline, a realistic resource plan, a reworked testing strategy, and a fresh budget conversation with the CFO. The original plan is gone. Trying to rescue a project by holding onto the original plan is like trying to navigate with a map of the wrong city. Instead, the rescue specialist builds a plan based on where the project actually is, not where it was supposed to be.

Ownership gets restored. In most struggling projects, ownership has quietly shifted to the partner. The internal team is along for the ride rather than driving the bus. A D365 project rescue puts ownership back where it belongs: with you. Module owners get named. Decision rights get clarified. Your internal team gets re-empowered to challenge design decisions and hold the partner accountable. We covered how to build this internal capability in build an internal D365 ERP team for your implementation.

What a rescue does not mean

A D365 project rescue almost never means starting over. Re-implementation is the nuclear option. It is expensive, time-consuming, and demoralizing. In most cases, however, targeted recovery works without scrapping what has already been built. The configuration may need adjusting. Scope may need trimming. Timelines may need extending. But the foundation is usually there.

In terms of timeline and cost, a lighter intervention typically takes 4 to 6 weeks. Conversely, a deeper recovery effort, where significant rework is needed across multiple modules, can take 3 to 6 months. Either way, it is a fraction of the cost and time of starting over. Furthermore, it preserves the knowledge, the configuration, and the momentum that already exist in the project.

The IT leaders who get the best outcomes from a D365 project rescue are the ones who act early. Not when the project has completely failed, but when they feel the drift. Perhaps the status reports have stopped matching what their teams are saying. Or their gut tells them something is wrong even though nobody can point to a single dramatic failure. Trust that instinct. It is almost always right.

About the Author
Ryan Carolan is the founder of d365contractors.com, connecting US manufacturing companies with pre-vetted, independent D365 Finance & Supply Chain Management experts. 14 years exclusively in D365 staffing. Hundreds of contractor placements into manufacturing implementations across the US.Most weeks, he waffles on about stuff like this online.

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn →

Build an Internal D365 Team: 3 Ways to Stay in Control of Your Implementation

Posted on by Ryan Carolan

Most successful Dynamics 365 ERP implementations involve a capable delivery Partner. But no matter how good they are, no Microsoft Partner should own your ERP transformation. The organizations that consistently succeed understand this early. They build internal D365 team capability to work alongside and intelligently challenge their partner.

Below are three non-negotiable capabilities that separate controlled, high-performing D365 F&SCM implementations from the ones that quietly drift off the rails.

1. Build Internal D365 Team Leaders Who Can Challenge Design Decisions

Challenging a partner does not mean pushing back for the sake of it.

It means ensuring every recommendation is:

  • Understood

  • Validated

  • Contextualised

  • Aligned to operational reality

Most internal teams struggle here because generic IT experience isn’t enough.

To challenge effectively in D365, someone must be able to interrogate things like:

  • The downstream impact of Inventory Valuation Method changes

  • Architectural implications of Dual-write if you’re integrating with CRM

  • The difference between functional vs technical scope creep

  • Process ownership gaps that derail Master Planning, WMS, PMA, or production scheduling

Solution Architects with Subject Matter Expertise in your specific industry AND D365 F&SCM are worth their weight in gold. But you need them on your side, in for the long-run. Hire them as employees if you can keep them busy.

Not sure if you can?

This is where internal senior D365 contractors are a great option.
They bring instant depth and functional maturity that internal teams simply cannot build overnight.

With D365contractors.com, you can bring vetted members from our community on a 10-20 hour per week engagement to attend all crucial meetings. Giving you the confidence your ERP transformation deserves.

Want to get access to the best independent D365 consultants for your ERP projects? Let’s talk.

GET FRACTIONAL D365 TALENT

2. Ensure Domain Leads Understand the “Why”: Not Just the “What”

High-performing D365 programmes always include strong internal domain leads. Across Finance, Supply Chain, Warehousing, Production. Whatever the key functions for your business require.

These people don’t just know what was configured — they know why.

They can:

  • Explain D365 design decisions clearly to stakeholders

  • Anticipate how integrations will behave downstream

  • Spot when a configuration contradicts the intended process flow

  • Recognise when a “small change request” signals a deeper design flaw

Most importantly, they know what “good” actually looks like in a D365 F&O implementation:

  • Coherent, end-to-end solution design

  • Sensible, defensible customisation (not default + chaos)

  • Stable environments and disciplined release management

  • A realistic cutover plan

  • Governance structures that genuinely hold partners accountable

Without this internal clarity, partners naturally become the decision-makers, and control slowly slips away.

3. Empower Your Internal D365 Project Team

The final element- and often the hardest to achieve- is empowerment.

Even experienced SMEs and managers can slip into deferring to a partner’s authority, particularly when timelines tighten and delivery pressure increases. This is where many ERP programmes can lose control.

High-performing D365 teams behave differently.

They don’t challenge emotionally or defensively- they challenge politely, precisely, and with intent. They:

  • If something doesn’t add up, ask for alternatives rather than accepting the first recommendation

  • Request clear justification for design decisions

  • Require visibility into downstream implications before approving changes

  • Refuse to accept “we’ve done this before” as a complete answer. What worked for another business, by default, doesn’t work for you.

Be sure that decisions are deliberate, defensible, and aligned to the business.

Empowered teams create a different dynamic. Partners remain accountable, assumptions are surfaced early, and design choices stand up to scrutiny — even when the clock is ticking.

If your internal team isn’t yet comfortable operating at this level, interim senior D365 contractors can help. They model this behaviour in real time, reinforce good governance, and give internal leaders the confidence to engage as equals rather than deferring by default.

How to Build Internal D365 Team Capability When It Isn’t There Yet

Building an internal D365 team takes time. It takes a considerable budget too, even mid-level D365 ERP resources will command a six-figure salary.

If your team cannot yet operate at this level, interim senior D365 contractors can be the fastest and lowest-risk way to get there. If they’re good!

They:

  • Raise the standard immediately

  • Upskill internal teams through proximity

  • Strengthen delivery governance

  • Prevent the partner from becoming the de facto owner of your ERP

Most importantly, they help you stay in control of your Dynamics 365 implementation both now and after go-live.

Work With Experienced D365 Contractors

We have curated a vetted community of senior Dynamics 365 contractors who support organisations that want to stay in control of their ERP programmes. And show them how to do it. Everyone has been vetted for our core values: D365 ERP expertise, honest & collaborative. Many are available for interim or fractional

GET AN INTERIM D365 CONTRACTOR

Email Ryan about bringing in a Fractional D365 F&O Solution Architect.

About the Author

Ryan Carolan is the founder of d365contractors.com, connecting US manufacturing companies with pre-vetted, independent D365 Finance & Supply Chain Management experts. 14 years exclusively in D365 staffing. Hundreds of contractor placements into manufacturing implementations across the US.

Most weeks, he waffles on about stuff like this online.

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn →

D365 for Food and Beverage: How Independent Contractors De-Risk Your ERP Project

Posted on by Ryan Carolan

If you are a VP or Director of IT implementing D365 for Food and Beverage operations, chances are this thought has crossed your mind:

“This ERP project will either completely modernize this business… OR follow me around like a bad smell for the rest of my career.”

OK- maybe you’re not being so dramatic, a couple of years at most 😀

But seriously- in the F&B industry, Dynamics 365 (D365) implementations carry higher stakes than almost any other sector. Between FDA Modernization audits, lot traceability, catch-weight inventory, and shelf-life management, the margin for error is razor-thin. One wrong move and the system meant to create control becomes a source of chaos.

However, success is not just about choosing the right Microsoft partner. It is about how you manage risk throughout the lifecycle of the project. This guide explores how independent D365 contractors quietly remove that risk for D365 for food and beverage implementations. Not by replacing your partner, but by making you a stronger, more informed owner of the program.

Need D365 expertise your internal team doesn’t have yet? Or some independent advice? Our vetted contractors are ready to jump in. Let’s talk:

BOOK A FREE DISCOVERY CALL

Why D365 for food and beverage projects carry more risk

Food and beverage manufacturers operate under a specific set of pressures that generic ERP templates simply cannot handle. For example, regulatory scrutiny means that mistakes in food safety compliance or SQF/BRC audits are public and costly. Similarly, thin margins mean that high production costs magnify the impact of ERP budget overruns. In addition, operational complexity around recipe management, allergen handling, and co-manufacturing requires deep industry knowledge that most consultants do not have. Finally, zero downtime tolerance means production lines cannot stop for software glitches during peak seasonal demand.

As a result, independent D365 contractors are particularly effective in this environment because they address these industry-specific challenges, not just software functionality. The best ones will insist on touring your plant floor before they touch a single configuration, because in food manufacturing the gap between the conference room and the production line is where projects go wrong. We covered this dynamic in detail in D365 F&O discovery: where your implementation is won or lost.

How independent contractors help during D365 for food and beverage partner selection

During the exploration phase, IT leaders are not just worried about features. They are also considering long-term consequences like operational disruption and unclear ROI. This is where independent expertise pays for itself before a single dollar is spent on implementation.

Objective partner evaluation. An independent advisor evaluates your requirements without the potential bias of selling software. They help you determine if D365 F&O is the right fit compared to competitors and, critically, which partners have genuine F&B implementation experience. If a partner’s food and beverage track record feels thin, your independent consultant will be the first to flag it.

F&B tribal knowledge. Experienced independents understand lot genealogy and shelf-life tracking because they have actually implemented them before. As a result, this prevents critical requirements from being missed during discovery. They know what questions to ask because they have seen what happens when those questions get skipped.

Fractional access to senior talent. You gain access to solution architects who can pressure-test proposals and timelines before you sign a multi-million dollar contract. In addition, they help you ask the hard questions and protect your interests from day one. The questions in 5 questions to answer before you talk to any D365 F&O vendor are a good starting point for structuring these conversations.

Want to get access to the best independent D365 consultants for your food & beverage project? Let’s talk.

GET FRACTIONAL D365 TALENT

Preparing for a D365 for food and beverage implementation without losing control

Once the partner is selected, the fear becomes tactical: Is our data ready? Is the timeline realistic? How prepared is the business for this level of change? Independent contractors stabilize this phase by bringing objectivity to the planning process.

Plan validation. Independent architects review the partner’s project plan with a critical eye, specifically flagging over-optimism before it leads to delays. Because they have seen enough F&B implementations, they know which timelines are realistic and which are wishful thinking.

F&B-specific design. In particular, they lead workshops on the uncomfortable topics that generic templates often gloss over: quality inspections, FDA audit readiness, allergen segregation, catch-weight configuration. These are the areas where D365 for food and beverage implementations succeed or fail, and they require consultants who have done this work before. We covered why generic configuration breaks down in why generic D365 F&O configuration fails food manufacturers.

Data migration strategy. Dirty data is the number one cause of go-live delays. Bringing in a specialist to clean your legacy records before migration ensures your new system starts clean rather than inheriting years of accumulated mess. We wrote about this in detail in why D365 F&O data readiness is the #1 project killer.

Change management. Independent change management experts help design training programs that resonate with plant-floor users, not just corporate stakeholders. Because user adoption at a food manufacturer depends entirely on whether the people on the floor trust the system. We covered why trust matters so much in D365 F&O user adoption: why your plant floor doesn’t trust the system.

Keeping your implementation on track during build and test

During the build and test phases, stress peaks. This is where UAT anxiety and scope creep begin to threaten the go-live date. Independent contractors serve as both surge capacity and quality assurance during this critical window.

Surge capacity. For instance, contract specialists can be added to testing or training efforts to hit deadlines without burning out your internal core team. This is especially important in food manufacturing where your best operational people are also your busiest.

Independent quality assurance. Fresh eyes find bugs and data gaps that internal teams might miss after months of staring at the same configuration. Consequently, contractors provide an objective go/no-go assessment that is based on what they see, not what they hope.

Scope reality checks. Additionally, they assess change requests objectively, helping you decide what is a must-have for go-live versus a nice-to-have for Phase 2. Although a generic consultant might treat FEFO picking logic, batch traceability, and catch-weight processing as optional, an F&B specialist knows they are non-negotiable. We have some of the world’s best Advanced Warehousing consultants in our community at d365contractors.com.

What D365 for food and beverage companies need most after go-live

The system is live, but the risk has not gone away. Will users revert to spreadsheets? Is the data trustworthy? The first 90 days are critical for the long-term health of the platform. We covered this period in depth in why the first 6 months after D365 F&O go-live define your ROI.

Hypercare reinforcement. On-call experts accelerate issue resolution during the fragile weeks following go-live. In food manufacturing, where production cannot stop and shelf-life constraints do not wait for IT to fix a configuration issue, this responsiveness is especially critical.

Flexible support models. Instead of expensive managed services contracts, independent contractors provide targeted support for specific optimization projects as needed. For example, a 3-week engagement to optimize your WMS configuration is very different from a 12-month retainer, and it is usually far more effective.

Continuity of knowledge. The same experts who helped build the system can support it after go-live, eliminating the steep re-learning curve that comes with bringing in new consultants who have never seen your operation. That continuity is one of the biggest advantages of working with independent specialists rather than rotating partner resources.

Post-implementation audits. Furthermore, independent checks uncover underused features and process gaps, ensuring you are getting the full value of your D365 investment. For food manufacturers, this often means discovering that native capabilities like planning optimization, advanced batch tracking, or quality management modules were configured at a basic level when the platform can do significantly more. The practical roadmap in D365 F&O post go-live optimization will help you structure this effort.

The strategic advantage of independence

Independent D365 contractors are not competitors to your Microsoft partner. They are force multipliers. As a result, your internal team is protected from fatigue and your external partners stay aligned. This model allows you to maintain ownership, reduce costs, and address risks before they become visible to the board.

For food and beverage manufacturers, this approach turns an ERP project from a career risk into a strategic win. The IT leaders who get the best outcomes are the ones who recognize that their implementation partner cannot be expected to have deep expertise in every aspect of food manufacturing, and who proactively fill the gaps with independent specialists who do.

Think of the partner as the chef and the independent contractor as the health inspector. The chef wants to get the plate out fast. The inspector makes sure nothing in the kitchen will cause problems later. Both are essential. Both are good at what they do. The difference is who they are accountable to. The independent contractors that D365 for food and beverage companies trust most are the ones who are accountable to you, not to a partner’s bench utilization target.

FAQs:

Why hire an independent D365 contractor if we already have a Microsoft partner? A partner is focused on delivery. An independent contractor is focused on your risk. They provide objective oversight, validate the partner’s work, and fill specific F&B functional gaps the partner may lack.

When is the right time to bring in an independent contractor? Ideally during Phase 0, before the contract is signed. Bringing them in early allows them to audit the Statement of Work and ensure the scope is realistic. However, they are also frequently brought in mid-implementation when a project hits a plateau or during the high-stakes UAT phase. OR even aftet go-live, when things are quite working as expected- they can be brilliant at getting you back on track.

How do D365 contractors help with food safety compliance? They work between your team and the system ensure that lot traceability, allergen tracking, and audit logs are designed into the system from the start rather than treated as an afterthought. This keeps you compliant with FDA, FSMA, GFSI, and customer-specific audit requirements.

Can an independent consultant help with D365 data migration? Yes. Data migration is a leading cause of go-live delays. Independent specialists manage the cleansing, mapping, and validation of legacy data specifically for F&B requirements like catch-weight and expiration dates.

How do we find vetted, independent D365 talent for food and beverage? Generic job boards are noisy and lack F&B context. The most effective way is through specialized networks like d365contractors.com or via peer referrals from other IT leaders in the manufacturing space.

If something feels off on your D365 F&O project and you want an honest outside perspective, book a free 30-minute discovery call to find out how the D365contractors.com community can help:

BOOK A FREE DISCOVERY CALL

About the Author

Ryan Carolan is the founder of d365contractors.com, connecting US manufacturing companies with pre-vetted, independent D365 Finance & Supply Chain Management experts. 14 years exclusively in D365 staffing. Hundreds of contractor placements into manufacturing implementations across the US.

Most weeks, he waffles on about stuff like this online.

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn →

D365 F&O Post Go-Live: Why the First 6 Months Define Your ROI

Posted on by Ryan Carolan

You championed this project. You signed off on the partner. You presented the business case to your board. And now your Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management implementation is live. The D365 F&O post go-live period is about to become the most important phase of the entire project.

Congratulations. But now the real work starts.

Because go-live is the moment the entire company turns to IT and asks: so what now? And as the VP of IT or CIO, that question lands on your desk. Not the project manager’s. Not the partner’s. Yours. After all, “ERP is IT”, right?!

After 14 years placing D365 contractors into manufacturing companies across the US, I can tell you this: the D365 F&O post go-live period, specifically the first 6 months, is where ROI is either captured or lost. And most IT leaders aren’t ready for it because nobody told them to plan for it.

Go-live is when the spotlight shifts to you

During the implementation, the partner ran the show. They managed the milestones, led the steering committees, and presented the status reports. Your job was to keep the project funded, remove blockers, and shield your team from the noise.

After go-live, that dynamic flips completely.

The partner starts rolling off. Your project team goes back to their day jobs. Budget gets redirected. And the system, which is technically live but not yet mature, becomes your responsibility.

This is the moment that defines your reputation as an IT leader. If D365 is seen as a success at the 6 month mark, you’re the person who modernised the business. If it’s seen as a struggle, that sticks to you. Not to the partner who left. Not to the project manager who moved on. To you.

The good news: you can control this outcome. But only if you plan for D365 F&O post go-live stabilisation the same way you planned the implementation itself.

Need D365 expertise your internal team doesn’t have yet? Or some independent advice? Our vetted contractors are ready to jump in. Let’s talk:

BOOK A FREE DISCOVERY CALL

What actually happens in the D365 F&O post go-live period

Here’s what Monday morning looks like after go-live in a manufacturing company. I’ve seen this pattern dozens of times.

The warehouse team is back on spreadsheets by noon because the pick logic doesn’t match their actual process. Finance is manually adjusting transactions that were supposed to be automated. Production orders are stuck and nobody is sure why. The reporting that looked great in UAT doesn’t reconcile against real data.

Hopefully, you nodded to no more than ONE of those.

Your CFO calls. Month-end close is going to take an extra week. Your operations director is in your office asking why the production schedule in D365 doesn’t match what’s happening on the plant floor. Your warehouse manager has already built a workaround in Excel.

This is normal. Every D365 F&O go-live has a stabilisation period. The system at go-live is maybe 70% of what it needs to be. The core processes work, but the edge cases, the exceptions, the things that only surface when real users run real transactions at real volume, those haven’t been found yet.

In manufacturing, those edge cases matter enormously. Your warehouse team knows within the first week. Your finance team knows at the first month-end close. Your production planners know at the first demand spike.

If nobody is there to catch and fix these issues quickly, users lose confidence. And once they lose confidence in D365, they build shadow systems. Spreadsheets come back. Manual processes appear. Within 3 months, you’re running two systems: D365 and whatever your people trust more.

That’s where your ROI goes to die. And that’s the story your board hears.

And if you’re still running AX 2012 and thinking go-live can wait, the hidden costs are already stacking up. We broke that down in detail here: The Hidden Costs of Staying on AX 2012 for Food & Beverage Manufacturers

The D365 F&O post go-live plan that nobody writes

Here’s what I see consistently: IT leaders spend months planning the implementation and almost no time planning what happens after go-live.

The implementation plan is detailed. Phases, milestones, resource plans, testing schedules, cutover checklists. Hundreds of pages.

The post go-live plan? A slide that says “hypercare: 4 weeks” with a vague description of ticket triage and a reduced partner team.

Four weeks isn’t enough. Not for a manufacturing company running D365 Finance and Supply Chain Management across multiple plants, warehouses, and legal entities. The first month-end close alone will surface issues nobody anticipated. The first quarter-end will surface more. The first physical inventory count, the first peak season, the first year-end. Each of these is a test of your D365 configuration, and each one will reveal gaps.

As the IT leader, you need to own this plan. Not delegate it. Own it.

What a VP of IT or CIO should put in place before go-live

The IT leaders who get the best D365 F&O post go-live outcomes tend to do the same things. None of this is complicated. It just requires you to make decisions that only someone in your seat can make.

Appoint permanent module owners. Today. Not the project team. Permanent owners. Someone in Finance who owns the D365 Finance configuration. Someone in Supply Chain who owns warehouse and/or production. Someone in IT who owns integrations and data. These are your people now. They need time carved out of their regular responsibilities.

Secure a dedicated stabilisation resource for 90 days. Minimum. This is the single highest-ROI decision you’ll make in the entire D365 F&O post go-live period. One experienced person (or a small team), fully dedicated, embedded in the business. Not splitting time with other projects. Not ramping down after week 4. Their only job is stabilisation. This can be an internal resource, an independent contractor, or a partner resource. But you need to budget for it and protect it. When your CFO pushes back on the cost, show them what a 3-month project delay costs in partner fees and lost productivity.

Run daily triage for the first 30 days. A 15-minute standup every morning. Finance, Supply Chain, Warehouse, Production. What broke yesterday? What’s the workaround? What’s the fix? Who owns it? You don’t need to attend every one of these. But you need to create them, resource them, and read the output. This cadence keeps issues from festering and gives users confidence that IT is on top of it.

Shift to weekly reviews from day 31 to day 90. The daily standup is intense and you can’t sustain it forever. After the first month, move to weekly reviews. Track issues by module, severity, and resolution time. Look for patterns. If the same process keeps breaking, the design probably needs revisiting. Escalate that to the partner if needed, or your independent D365 contractor, but you make the call.

Define your 30/60/90 day scorecard. This is for your board, your CFO, and yourself. Be specific. “Month-end close completed in 5 business days.” “Warehouse pick accuracy above 98%.” “Zero manual journal entries for intercompany transactions.” If you don’t define what success looks like, leadership will assume everything is fine until it very clearly isn’t. And by then, the narrative is already set.

The budget conversation with your CFO

This is the part nobody wants to deal with. You’ve already spent $3M to $10M. Maybe more. Now you need to go back to your CFO and ask for more money for D365 F&O post go-live stabilisation.

Here’s how to frame it.

Don’t ask for “more implementation budget.” That sounds like the project failed. Instead, frame it as “ROI protection.” You’ve made a $5M investment. Allocating 10-15% of that for stabilisation and optimisation is what ensures the business actually gets the value it was promised. It’s the difference between a $5M system that transforms operations and a $5M system that everyone works around.

If your CFO needs a number: budget $500K-$750K for post go-live stabilisation on a $5M implementation. Dedicated resources, extended support, configuration fixes, additional training. That’s the highest-ROI line item in the entire project, and it’s the one that gets cut first.

You are the only person in the organisation who can make this case. The partner won’t make it for you. The project manager can’t. This is a leadership conversation between you and your CFO. Have it before go-live, not after.

Driving the partner relationship after go-live

You (probably) chose this partner. Your name is on that decision. After go-live, make sure you’re driving the relationship, not the other way around.

Good implementation partners understand that go-live isn’t the end. Many offer structured hypercare and D365 F&O post go-live support packages. Take them seriously.

But understand the dynamic. After go-live, your partner is balancing your support needs against new project commitments. Their best people are being pulled toward the next implementation. The resources you get in month 3 may not be the same ones who built your system.

This is where having your own stabilisation plan, your own module owners, and your own dedicated resource makes the difference. You’re not dependent on the partner to tell you what’s working and what isn’t. You already know, because your people are living in the system every day and reporting back through the structure you built.

The best D365 F&O post go-live relationships I’ve seen are ones where the IT leader is driving the agenda. Specific asks. Clear priorities. Fast decisions. Partners do their best work when the client knows what they want. Be that client.

The 6-month window that defines your reputation

Six months. That’s roughly how long you have before the organisation’s opinion of D365 becomes fixed.

If users are productive and confident by month 6, the system becomes “the way we work.” Adoption sticks. Improvements build on a solid foundation. Your board sees the ROI starting to materialise. And you’re the IT leader who delivered.

If users are frustrated and working around the system by month 6, that perception is very hard to reverse. People will say “D365 doesn’t work” long after it actually does. And the person they associate with that outcome is you.

The difference between these two outcomes is rarely about the software or even the implementation quality. It’s about what happened in the D365 F&O post go-live period. Did someone own it? Did issues get fixed quickly? Did users feel heard? Did IT show up?

That’s where the ROI lives. And that’s your window.

Three D365 F&O post go-live decisions to make this week

If you’re approaching go-live, or if you went live recently and don’t have a stabilisation plan in place, here are three decisions that only you can make:

1. Name your module owners. Who internally owns D365 Finance? Who owns Supply Chain? Who owns the warehouse configuration? If the answer is “the project team” or “we’ll figure it out after go-live,” you have a gap that needs filling now. Today.

2. Secure and protect the stabilisation budget. 10-15% of total implementation cost. Have the conversation with your CFO before go-live. Frame it as ROI protection, not cost overrun.

3. Write your own 30/60/90 day scorecard. Don’t let the partner define what success looks like. You define it. Based on what your business needs. Based on what your board expects. Measure against it publicly.

The implementation gets the system live. The D365 F&O post go-live period determines whether it was worth it. And that part is entirely on you. Go get em’.

Want to understand how dependent your organisation is on external support after go-live?

We built a quick Partner Dependency Assessment that shows you where you stand.

TAKE IT HERE

About the Author

Ryan Carolan is the founder of d365contractors.com, connecting US manufacturing companies with pre-vetted, independent D365 Finance & Supply Chain Management experts. 14 years exclusively in D365 staffing. Hundreds of contractor placements into manufacturing implementations across the US.

Most weeks, he waffles on about stuff like this online.

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn →

Hiring D365 F&O Food and Beverage Consultants

Posted on by Ryan Carolan

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.

Why are food & beverage D365 experts more expensive than discrete manufacturing consultants?

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.”

Need D365 expertise your internal team doesn’t have yet? Our vetted independent contractors are ready to jump in. Let’s talk: BOOK A FREE DISCOVERY CALL

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.

Dynamics 365 F&O food manufacturing peanut butter processing with batch and recipe control
Viscous, recipe-driven production like peanut butter exposes why Dynamics 365 F&O food manufacturing consultants must understand formulation, rework, and shelf life.

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.

Dynamics 365 F&O food and beverage ERP brewery fermentation tanks and production planning environment
Dynamics 365 F&O food and beverage ERP brewery fermentation tanks and production planning environment

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.

FIND AN F&O PLANNING EXPERT

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.

Food and beverage is one corner of a wider picture. Our guide to D365 manufacturing contractors sets out the operations and finance roles manufacturers hire across discrete, process, and mixed-mode plants.

About the Author Ryan Carolan is the founder of d365contractors.com, connecting US manufacturing companies with pre-vetted, independent D365 Finance & Supply Chain Management experts. 14 years exclusively in D365 staffing. Hundreds of contractor placements into manufacturing implementations across the US. Most weeks, he waffles on about stuff like this online. Follow Ryan on LinkedIn →