Category: D365 F&O

Building an Internal D365 ERP Team For Your Implementation

Posted on by Ryan Carolan

Building an internal D365 ERP team is the part of implementation planning that most IT leaders struggle with. Yes: they name the people, commit the headcount, and check the box. But there is a massive difference between assigning people to a project and building an internal D365 ERP team that can actually own a multi-million dollar transformation.

This blog is for the IT leader who has been told “you need internal resources on this project” and is now trying to figure out what that actually means. Not simply how many people. What capabilities. Because the difference between assigning people to a project and building an internal D365 ERP team that can actually own the outcome is where most implementations quietly start to drift.

The 5 capabilities your internal D365 ERP team actually needs

Building an internal D365 ERP team is more about quality than quantity. You can have 10 people internally on the project, but if none of them have the right capabilities, you are still not ready. Here are the five that matter most.

1. Business process ownership. Someone on your internal team needs to be the authority on how your business actually operates. Not how it is documented. How it actually runs. The person who knows that your receiving process has 4 unofficial steps that nobody wrote down. The person who can explain why finance closes the books the way they do and what breaks if that changes. Your implementation partner will configure D365 based on what your team tells them. If your team cannot articulate the real processes, the configuration will reflect the documented ones, which are almost never the same thing at a manufacturing company.

2. Decision-making authority. ERP implementations generate hundreds of decisions. Which costing method? How many legal entities? Standard or advanced warehousing? Should catch-weight apply to these product lines? Your internal D365 ERP team needs people who can make these decisions quickly, or who have a direct line to someone who can. If every decision has to go through three layers of approval, the project stalls. If decisions get made without the right people in the room, they get made wrong. I wrote about this exact dynamic in 5 early warning signs your D365 F&O implementation is drifting.

3. Data knowledge. Someone on your team needs to understand your data landscape. Not at a theoretical level. At the “I know where the vendor master lives, I know it has 4,000 duplicate records, and I know which system is the source of truth for customer addresses” level. Data readiness is the number one project killer, and it is entirely an internal responsibility. We covered this in depth in why D365 F&O data readiness is the #1 project killer.

4. Change management credibility. You need someone who can stand in front of the warehouse team and the finance team and be believed. Not someone from corporate with a slide deck. Someone the teams trust. Someone who has been in the building long enough to understand the culture, the informal power structures, and the real reasons people resist change. External change management consultants can provide frameworks. But the best change practitioners are the ones who have actually done the job.

Many of the change management experts in the d365contractors.com community spent years working in operations, on the plant floor, or in the warehouse before they moved into consulting. When they stand in front of your warehouse team and talk about what is changing, they are not reading from a playbook. They have lived it. And your team can tell the difference.

5. Time. This is the simplest capability and the one most often missing. Your best people are your best people because they are good at their current jobs. Pulling them onto a D365 project means someone else has to do their current job for 12 to 18 months. If you have not solved the backfill problem, you do not have this capability. You have a name on an org chart and a person who is going to burn out trying to do two full-time jobs.

The 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:

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How to assess whether your internal D365 team is ready

Here is a quick exercise that takes 15 minutes and will tell you more about whether your internal D365 ERP team is ready than any formal resource plan.

Step 1: Name the person. For each of the five capabilities above, write down the name of the person who owns it. Not “Finance team” or “IT department.” A name. One person. If you cannot name someone for all five, you have a gap. This kinda information is what you need before the project starts, not information you discover in month 4 when the partner is waiting on decisions that nobody has the authority or knowledge to make.

Step 2: Check their capacity. For each name you wrote down, answer this: can that person dedicate at least 60% of their time to this project for the next 12 to 18 months? If the answer is no, you still have a gap. Having the right person at 20% capacity is almost worse than not having them at all. They will be consulted on decisions but not present for the context behind them. They will review configurations they did not help build. They will sign off on testing they did not participate in. And when something goes wrong post go-live, it’s hard (or unfair!) to hold them accountable.

Step 3: Confirm they actually know. Does each of these people know they are on the project? Not “has been told” but “has accepted the role, understands what it means, and has had their day job reallocated.” You would be surprised how often IT leaders commit people to an ERP project without ever having a direct conversation about what that commitment actually involves. “I figured they knew” is not gonna fly!

What happens when your internal ERP team has gaps nobody addressed

You’ll probably start the project with a capable team that is stretched too thin. But in the first few weeks, it works. Everyone is energized. Workshops are productive. The partner is impressed with how much your team knows about the business. Then month 2 hits. Quarter-end close pulls your finance lead off the project for two weeks. A major customer audit takes your supply chain person out for 10 days. Your warehouse supervisor’s replacement calls in sick for a week and suddenly they are back on the floor full time.

Each absence is temporary. Each one is justified. And each one creates a gap in the project that gets filled by one of two things: the partner making assumptions, or the decision getting deferred. Neither of those is good. Assumptions lead to configuration that does not match how your business works. Deferred decisions pile up and create a wall of rework in the final months of the project when you can least afford it.

By month 6, your project is technically “on track” but the internal D365 ERP team feels like they are barely keeping up. The partner is doing more of the heavy lifting than planned. Knowledge transfer is not happening because your people are not in the room consistently enough to absorb it. And you are building a growing dependency on external consultants that will be very expensive to unwind after go-live. I wrote about what this dependency looks like long term in how to build your internal D365 F&O team whilst using external consultants.

How to close the gaps in your D365 ERP team without delaying the project

Gaps in your internal D365 ERP team do not mean you should delay the project. They mean you should fill the gaps strategically before or during the early stages of the implementation.

For business process ownership gaps: Run a structured process discovery exercise internally before the partner kicks off. This does not require D365 knowledge. It requires your operations, finance, and warehouse leaders to sit down and document how things actually work. Not the process maps from 2009. How things work today, including the workarounds. Three to four weeks of focused internal workshops can give your team the foundation they need to show up to partner sessions with confidence instead of confusion.

For decision-making authority gaps: Create a decision rights matrix before the project starts. It sounds corporate, but it saves weeks of delays. For every major decision category (chart of accounts structure, costing method, warehouse configuration, integration approach), name the person who decides and the person who approves. Two names per decision. If you cannot fill in the matrix, you have found your gap. Fix it before kickoff.

For data knowledge gaps: Hire a data owner. Internal if you have someone capable. But definitely an independent contractor if you do not. This person needs to live inside your data for 60-90 days before the implementation starts and own it through go-live. It is one of the highest-ROI hires you can make on the entire project.

For change management credibility gaps: Identify your super users early. Not the most technical people. The most respected people in each department. Give them visibility into the project from month 1 and empower them to be the bridge between the project team and the rest of the organization. An engaged super user with credibility on the shop floor is worth more than any external change management consultant.

For time gaps: Backfill. There is no shortcut here. If your best people are on the D365 project, someone else has to do their jobs. Budget for it. Plan for it. Protect it. Every dollar you spend on backfill saves you three dollars in project delays, rework, and post go-live firefighting.

Building your D365 team is a leadership process, not just staffing

The manufacturing companies that run the best D365 implementations are not the ones with the biggest internal teams. They are the ones who honestly assessed what their team could handle, filled the gaps before they became problems, and protected their people’s time throughout the project.

Building an internal D365 ERP team that works is a leadership responsibility. It means having the uncomfortable conversations early about capability and budgets. It means telling your CFO that the finance lead needs to be backfilled, not split between the project and month-end close. It means telling your COO that the warehouse supervisor cannot run the warehouse and own the WMS configuration at the same time. It means budgeting for the unglamorous work of process documentation, data cleanup, and backfill hires before you spend a dollar on partner fees.

If you are about to start a D365 F&O implementation and you have not done this assessment, do it now. If you are already mid-project and recognizing some of these gaps, it is not too late to address them. But every week you wait makes the gaps harder and more expensive to close. The questions in 5 questions to answer before you talk to any D365 F&O vendor are a good place to start if you want a broader readiness check beyond just team capability.

If you are trying to figure out whether your internal team is set up for what a D365 implementation actually demands, book a free discovery call. We will talk through your situation honestly and help you figure out what kind of support would actually make a difference.

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 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 Early Warning Signs Your D365 F&O Implementation Is Drifting

Posted on by Ryan Carolan

Every IT leader mid-flight on a D365 F&O implementation has the same moment. Something feels a bit wonky.

You can’t quite put your finger on it. The status reports still say green. The partner is still saying the right things. But there’s still a quiet voice internally asking: are we still on track here? That instinct is worth listening to, because D365 F&O implementation warning signs are usually stealthy before they get expensive.

Nobody walks into a steering committee and says “this project is off the rails.” Instead, it drifts. Slowly. Quietly. And by the time anyone officially acknowledges the drift, it is expensive to fix.

These are the five early D365 F&O implementation warning signs I see most often at manufacturing companies running Dynamics 365 F&O. They are not the obvious red flags. They are the subtle ones. The ones that, if you catch them now, you can still course-correct. If you miss them, they compound. And compounding project risk is just as painful as compounding interest, except nobody is getting richer.

1. Your team is making decisions without you: the first D365 F&O implementation warning sign

This one is subtle and it usually feels like efficiency. The project team is moving fast. Decisions are getting made in workshops. Configuration is progressing. Status reports look green. Everyone is happy.

Except you, the VP of IT or CIO, are finding out about decisions after they have been made. “Oh, we decided to use standard costing instead of actual costing for the new product line. The partner recommended it.” Or “We agreed to defer the intercompany invoicing automation to Phase 2. It was getting too complex.” These are not small decisions. These are architectural choices that affect your business for years. And they were made in a room you were not in.

This is one of the earliest D365 F&O implementation warning signs because it signals that the project is developing its own momentum independent of business leadership. That sounds productive. It might not be. It could mean the project team is optimizing for project delivery, not business outcomes. They are making the choices that keep the timeline on track, which is their job. But whether those choices align with what your CFO needs from month-end close, or what your plant manager needs from production scheduling, is a different question entirely.

The fix is not to slow the project down. It is to establish a clear decision framework from day one. Which decisions can the project team make autonomously? Which ones require business leadership sign-off? And how quickly can you provide that sign-off so you do not become the bottleneck? I wrote about this kind of internal ownership in detail in how to build your internal D365 F&O team.

If something feels off on your D365 F&O project and you want an honest, independent perspective: book a free 30-minute discovery call:

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2. Nobody can explain the D365 project status in plain English

Ask your ERP project manager how the project is going (hopefully you have one internally). If the answer needs explaining by a color-coded Azure DevOps dashboard & a 17-slide deck, you might have a problem.

Healthy D365 F&O projects can be explained simply. “Finance configuration is done. Supply chain is 80% complete but we are stuck on the intercompany transfer design. Warehouse is on track. Data migration is behind because the item master cleanup is taking longer than expected. We need a decision on historical data scope by Friday.” That is a real status update. It has specifics, it names problems, and it asks for what it needs.

When the status updates become increasingly abstract, when everything is “in progress” and risks are “being managed” and timelines are “under review,” that is one of the classic D365 F&O implementation warning signs. Complexity hides problems. The team may not even be doing it intentionally. Large D365 projects generate enormous volumes of information, and it is genuinely hard to distill that into a clear picture. But your job as a leader is to demand clarity. If you cannot explain the project status to your CFO in 60 seconds, something is wrong.

Ask your project team to give you the “five sentences or less” version every week. If they cannot do it, that tells you more than any ADO screen ever will.

3. Your best people keep getting pulled back to their day jobs: a D365 F&O implementation warning sign that compounds fast

You committed your strongest Finance lead, your best Supply Chain person, and your most experienced warehouse supervisor to the D365 project. Full time. Dedicated. Everyone agreed this was critical.

Then Q3 close happened and Finance needed their person back for two weeks. Then a major customer audit pulled the Supply Chain lead off the project for a month. Then the warehouse supervisor’s replacement quit, and suddenly they are splitting time between the D365 project and running the warehouse. Each time, the justification is reasonable. Each time, it is “just temporary.” And each time, the project loses momentum in ways that do not show up on the status report until weeks later.

This is one of the most damaging D365 F&O implementation warning signs because it erodes the project from the inside. Your internal team carries the business knowledge that makes the configuration work. When they are not in the room, decisions get deferred or made without the right context. Configuration gets built on assumptions instead of facts. And testing gets done by people who do not know the business well enough to catch the real problems.

The backfill problem is real, and I wrote about it in 5 questions to answer before you talk to any D365 F&O vendor. If you did not solve the backfill problem before the project started, it will absolutely bite you mid-project. And mid-project is the worst time to solve a staffing problem because now you are recruiting under pressure, training someone new on an active project, and explaining to the steering committee why things are slowing down. Fun times for any VP of IT out there.

4. Testing keeps getting pushed: the D365 F&O implementation warning sign you cannot afford to ignore

Here is how this one plays out. The project plan has a clean testing phase. Unit testing, integration testing, UAT, performance testing. All neatly scheduled. All with dedicated time blocks.

Then configuration runs a little long. A few workshops need to be repeated because the requirements changed. An integration that was supposed to be straightforward turns out to be complex. Each delay is small. Each one is explained and justified. And each one steals time from the testing phase because the go-live date does not move (yet).

This is one of the most predictable D365 F&O implementation warning signs, and yet it catches people off guard every single time. The testing phase is where your project proves it actually works: in practice, with real data volumes, real user workflows, and real edge cases. When testing gets compressed, you are transferring risk from the project phase to the go-live phase. And the go-live phase is the most expensive place to find problems.

If your testing timeline has been compressed by more than 20%, treat it as a serious D365 F&O implementation warning sign. Push back. Either the go-live date moves, or the scope reduces, or you add resources to the testing effort. The one thing you cannot do is pretend that less testing equals the same level of readiness. It does not. And your warehouse team will be the first to tell you, loudly, on day two of go-live.

5. The partner team has quietly changed: a D365 F&O implementation warning sign people feel but rarely address

You selected your implementation partner partly based on the team they proposed. The Solution Architect who impressed everyone in the sales process. The functional lead who had deep manufacturing experience. The technical lead who knew D365 integrations inside and out.

Now you are four months in and the Solution Architect has been “moved to another engagement” and replaced by someone more junior. The functional lead is splitting time between your project and another one. The technical lead is the same, thankfully, but they are stretched thin for reasons you can’t be sure of.

This is one of the D365 F&O implementation warning signs that IT leaders feel but often do not address because it feels awkward. You do not want to damage the partner relationship. You do not want to seem difficult. And the partner’s project manager assures you that the new team is “just as capable.” Maybe they are. But capability is only half the equation. The other half is context. The original team sat through your discovery workshops. They heard your CFO explain the intercompany challenges. They watched your warehouse supervisor demonstrate the batch tracking process. That context does not transfer in a handover document.

This is not about blaming your partner. Good partners sometimes need to rotate resources, and they will be upfront about it when it happens. The warning sign is when it happens quietly, when you find out through a calendar invite rather than a conversation. If your partner team has changed and nobody proactively told you why, what changed, and how continuity will be maintained, that is worth a direct conversation.

What to do when you spot these D365 F&O implementation warning signs

If you recognized one or two of these in your current project, you are not alone. The whole point of catching them early is that you still have room to act.

 1. Name the problem clearly

In one sentence:

  • “Our internal team is being pulled off the project and it is affecting configuration quality.”
  • “Testing has been compressed by 6 weeks and we have not adjusted scope.”
  • “Key decisions are being made without business leadership input.”

Clear problem statements create clear conversations.

2. Have the conversation with your partner.

As a partnership: “We are seeing some things that concern us. Here is what we are noticing. How do we address this together?” Good partners will welcome this conversation. They probably see the same warning signs you do.

3. Revisit your decision framework.

Most D365 F&O implementation warning signs trace back to one of three root causes: decisions being made at the wrong level, resources being pulled without replacement, or timelines being compressed without adjusting scope. Fix the root cause and the symptoms usually resolve themselves.

4. Protect the things that matter most.

If you can only protect one thing, protect testing. If you can protect two things, protect testing and your internal team’s time. Everything else can flex. Those two things cannot, because they are the difference between a go-live that works and a go-live that technically happens but nobody trusts. I wrote about why that trust gap is so dangerous in D365 F&O change management: why user adoption fails.

Catching D365 F&O implementation warning signs is a leadership discipline

The IT leaders who run the best D365 implementations are not the ones with the biggest budgets or the most experienced partners. They are the ones who pay attention to the early signals. Who ask the uncomfortable questions in month 3 instead of month 9. Who push for clarity when status reports get vague. Who protect their people’s time even when the rest of the business is pulling them away.

These five D365 F&O implementation warning signs are not exotic. They happen on almost every large ERP project. The difference between the projects that succeed and the ones that struggle is not whether these warning signs appear. It is whether someone catches them early enough to do something about it.

If you are in the planning stages and want to make sure you are set up to catch these problems before they start, the questions in 5 questions to answer before you talk to any D365 F&O vendor will help you build the right foundation. And if you are already mid-project and nodding along to this article, take it as a sign. Not to hit the alarm. Just to have the conversation. Today. Not next week.

Independent D365 consultants are fantastic at helping customers catch these warning signs. Get connected with an impartial ERP expert today for free:

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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 User Adoption: Why Your Plant Floor Doesn’t Trust the System

Posted on by Ryan Carolan

My 4-year-old taught me everything I need to know about D365 F&O user adoption the other day. If the toy does not work the way the box promised, it goes in the corner. No troubleshooting. No second attempt. Just “it’s broken, Daddy” and he moves on to something he trusts.

He is 4. He is also right. That is exactly what your warehouse team does when D365 ERP does not work the way they were told it would. They do not file a ticket. They open Excel and move on. Someone configured D365 based on how manufacturing should work. Not how yours actually works. The configuration missed the reality, and now the plant floor has decided the system cannot be trusted with the real work.

This is about more than insufficient training; it is a user adoption problem rooted in trust.

D365 F&O user adoption fails when the system does not match reality

Every trust breakdown starts with a gap between what was configured and what actually happens on the floor. That gap almost always originates in discovery: wrong people in the room, wrong questions asked, or not enough time allocated. We covered this in D365 F&O discovery: where your implementation is won or lost.

The exceptions are the real process. The third-shift dock crew handling returns differently. The scheduling workaround your lead planner invented six years ago. The biggest customer changing their order every Friday afternoon. When the system cannot handle these, the people who deal with them every day stop trusting it. And once trust is gone, no amount of training brings it back. Only fixing the actual gaps will.

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

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The Monday 6am test

This exercise will tell you more about D365 F&O user adoption at your plant than any survey ever could. Have your production supervisor walk through a full day using the D365 process. Monday, 6am to last shipment. Not the happy path. Every exception. Every “oh, we always do it this way.”

  • Shadow the morning. Does the D365 production schedule match what actually gets run first? At most manufacturers, the first run of the day is already an adjustment. A machine went down. A delivery was short. A rush order came in. If the system cannot accommodate this cleanly, your planner is already working outside of it before 7am.
  • Follow the exceptions. A material substitution. A partial receipt. A production order that needs splitting because half the batch failed quality. These are not rare events. They are daily life. Every one the system cannot handle is a moment where trust erodes.
  • Watch the last shipment. By end of day, how much was captured accurately in D365? If your warehouse lead spends 30 minutes reconciling adjustments, the system is reflecting the plan, not reality. And at a manufacturer, those two have usually parted ways by mid-afternoon.

If the system cannot handle the exceptions, the design is not done.

Where D365 F&O user adoption (usually) breaks down at manufacturers

Trust breaks in the same four places at nearly every manufacturer:

  • Receiving. Delivery does not match the PO. D365 cannot process it as it actually arrived. “I’ll fix it in the system later” is where trust starts dying.
  • Production scheduling. The D365 schedule rarely survives contact with the plant floor. If adjusting it in real time is difficult, your planner stops using it for scheduling and uses it only for reporting. You paid for an ERP. You are getting a very expensive filing cabinet.
  • Month-end close. Workarounds upstream mean inaccurate production transactions. Finance inherits the mess, builds reconciliation spreadsheets, and adds days to the close.
  • Reporting. Leadership pulls a report. Plant manager says “those numbers are not right.” Once executives stop trusting the data, the entire ROI case is at risk.

How to rebuild trust and fix the adoption problem

Most companies try to fix D365 F&O user adoption with more training. More lunch-and-learns. More posters in the break room. None of that works when the root cause is a configuration that does not match how the plant operates. You cannot train someone into trusting a system that does not support their job.

  • Fix the configuration, not the people. Most trust gaps are configuration adjustments, not architectural problems. A senior functional D365 ERP consultant who knows Quality OR Advanced Warehousing can identify the changes needed in 2-4 weeks. We covered how this works in how to build your internal D365 F&O team while using external experts.
  • Start with the most visible pain. Run the Monday 6am test. Document every workaround. Fix the one that costs the most time first. One fixed problem is worth more than ten training sessions.
  • Involve the floor in the fix. The people who built the workarounds understand the gaps best. When they are part of designing the fix, they own it. That is how adoption actually works. Bottom-up trust recovery, one process at a time.

If you are past go-live and seeing workarounds multiply, the roadmap in D365 F&O post go-live optimization will help you structure the effort.

D365 F&O user adoption is a trust problem, and trust is earned on the plant floor

Your steering committee can declare the implementation a success. Your dashboard can show green. None of that matters if the people who run your operation do not trust the system. Trust is built one fixed gap at a time. When the receiving team sees that D365 handles deliveries the way they actually arrive. When the planner adjusts the schedule without calling IT. When finance closes the month without a reconciliation spreadsheet. When the COO pulls a report and the plant manager nods instead of wincing.

No ERP earns trust by being powerful. It earns trust by being accurate. And accuracy starts with a configuration that reflects how your plant actually operates, exceptions and all.

If your plant floor is running workarounds and D365 F&O user adoption is not where it needs to be, book a free discovery call. We will connect you with a community member who can talk through where the trust gaps are and what kind of targeted support would actually fix them:

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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 Optimization: The Roadmap Nobody Builds

Posted on by Ryan Carolan

D365 F&O post go-live optimization is the phase of every ERP project that the business needs most yet nobody plans for. Not really.

The implementation is done. Go-live happened. Money was spent. Boy was it spent. Now, stabilization is mostly behind you. The fires are out, or at least manageable. Your team is exhausted. Hopefully some got a vacation. Your partner has rolled off. And somewhere in a boardroom, your CFO is looking at the business case you presented 18 months ago and wondering when the ROI starts showing up.

This is the moment most manufacturing companies stall. Not because the system failed. Because nobody planned for what comes after stabilization. The project team disbanded. The implementation budget is spent. The internal team that carried the project went back to their day jobs. And D365 Finance and Supply Chain Management sits there, running your business at maybe 60-70% of its potential, with a long list of deferred items that nobody has a plan (or budget to deliver).

This blog is an outline for that plan. A practical D365 F&O post go-live optimization roadmap for the months after stabilization, built for manufacturing companies who want to move from “the system works” to “the system is actually delivering the value we promised”.

Why D365 F&O post go-live optimization never gets off the ground

It is not laziness. It is exhaustion combined with a structural gap in how ERP projects are planned.

The implementation partner’s SOW typically covers everything through go-live and maybe 90 days of post go-live support. After that, the engagement ends or transitions to a managed services contract that is mostly reactive: you raise a ticket, they fix a thing. That is support (treading water). It is not optimization (swimming forward). There is a massive difference.

Internally, the project team was assembled for the implementation. They had a charter, a timeline, and a budget. All three of those things expired at go-live. Nobody chartered an optimization team. Nobody created an optimization budget. Nobody defined what optimization even means. So the deferred items list becomes a graveyard of good ideas that never get resourced. I covered the financial dynamics of this period in detail in why the first 6 months after D365 F&O go-live define your ROI.

D365 F&O post go-live optimization needs the same discipline the implementation had: defined phases, clear owners, measurable outcomes, and a budget.

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 about the vetted independent consultants who are ready to jump in and help:

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How to build a D365 F&O optimization backlog that actually gets funded

Before you optimize anything, you need to know what you are working with. Not what the status reports said. What the users actually experience every day.

Walk the floor with your end users. A structured walkthrough of the core processes in D365 with the people who actually use them. Month-end close with your finance team. A full receiving and putaway cycle with your warehouse team. A production run from sales order to finished goods with your planners. Ask one question at each step: does this work the way you need it to, or are you working around it? Document every workaround. Every manual step that could be automated. Every report that does not show what they need. Every process that takes longer than it should. This is your optimization backlog: and it could unlock millions of dollars for your business.

Assess your deferred items list honestly. Pull out the list of deferred items from the implementation. Some of them will still be relevant. Some will have been solved by workarounds that are now embedded in the business. Some were never important, they just felt important during implementation when everything felt urgent. Prioritize ruthlessly. What delivers measurable business value? What reduces manual effort? What improves data quality? Everything else can wait.

Frame everything in ROI language. “We need to optimize our warehouse configuration” does not get budget approved. “We can reduce pick time by 30% and eliminate 12 hours of manual rework per week by adjusting our WMS setup” does. Every item on your D365 F&O post go-live optimization backlog needs a business case, even if it is one sentence. That is the difference between a wish list and a funded roadmap.

The three types of optimization work in D365 F&O

Not all optimization work is the same. Understanding the three types helps you sequence the work, set expectations, and resource it correctly.

Quick wins (1-2 weeks each). These are the things that take minimal effort and immediately make someone’s life easier. Reports that need adjusting because the data is there but the layout does not match how the team uses it. Workflow approvals that have too many steps or not enough. Security roles that are too restrictive or too loose. Warehouse processes with one or two unnecessary steps that add minutes to every transaction, which adds up to hours every week across a team. Start here. Always.

Capability buildouts (4-8 weeks each). These are the features and configurations that were deferred at go-live because the team was not ready or the timeline did not allow it. Advanced warehouse management features. Planning optimization that connects demand forecasting to production scheduling. Catch-weight configurations for specific product lines. Each of these is a mini-project with a defined scope, timeline, and business case.

Strategic investments (8-16 weeks each). These are the larger pieces of work that transform how the business operates. Power BI dashboards that turn D365 data into operational intelligence. Integrations with external systems that eliminate manual data entry. Automation of processes that are still partially manual. These need proper resourcing and executive sponsorship, but they are where the biggest ROI lives.

Quick wins build trust and momentum. Capability buildouts close functional gaps. Strategic investments deliver the transformation your board was promised. You need all three, sequenced in that order.

What does not belong in your D365 F&O post go-live plan

Not everything deferred from Phase 1 deserves a second chance. This is the part most IT leaders skip because it feels easier to keep everything on the list than to have the conversation about what gets cut.

Remove items that have been solved by workarounds that are now embedded in the business. If your finance team built an Excel-based reconciliation process during stabilization and it works reliably, the cost of replacing it with an in-system solution may not be justified. That does not mean you accept every workaround permanently. It means you assess each one honestly: is the workaround costing us time and risk, or is it actually fine?

Remove items that were scope creep parked as “Phase 2.” Every implementation has these. Someone in a workshop said “wouldn’t it be nice if…” and it got written on the deferred list to avoid a difficult conversation. If it was not important enough to fight for during implementation, it is probably not important enough to fund now.

Remove items where the business need has changed. Your business is not the same company it was when the implementation started. Markets shift. Product lines change. Acquisitions happen. Some deferred items were designed for a version of the business that no longer exists. Let them go.

Pruning the list is just as important as building it. A focused D365 F&O post go-live optimization plan with 15 prioritized items will deliver more value than a sprawling list of 60 that overwhelms everyone and gets nothing done.

How to resource internally without rebuilding the project team

You do not need to reassemble the full implementation team. You do not need a massive partner engagement. What you need is targeted expertise for defined pieces of work.

Quick wins can usually be handled by your internal team if they have the capacity and the confidence. If they do not, a short-term contractor can knock out a backlog of quick wins in 2-4 weeks and transfer the knowledge to your team in the process. We covered how to think about this right here: how to build your internal D365 F&O team while using external experts.

Capability buildouts are where independent contractors shine. Examples of this could be:

  • A senior Advanced WMS expert for 4 weeks to implement advanced warehouse features
  • A finance functional expert for 3 weeks to optimize your costing configuration.
  • A Power BI contractor for 6 weeks to build the dashboards your CFO has been asking for.

Each engagement has a defined scope, a defined timeline, and a defined handover. No open-ended partner retainer. Work with independent consultants (like D365contractors.com) in this way, and you get the right person to help without any bloat.

Strategic investments may require a small team, but still not a full implementation partner. A solution architect to design the integration, a developer to build it, and your internal team to own it going forward. The key is that every engagement has a clear end state: your team can operate and maintain whatever gets built. And if you are wondering whether your internal team has the capability to own projects like this, the assessment in build an internal D365 ERP team for your implementation might be helpful.

Post go-live optimization is a leadership commitment

The IT leaders who get the most value from D365 are the ones who treat the post go-live period with the same rigor they treated the implementation. They charter a team. They allocate a budget. They define outcomes. They build a roadmap and they hold people accountable for delivering it.

If you are sitting at month 6 or month 9 after go-live and you do not have a D365 F&O post go-live optimization roadmap, start one this week:

  • Pull together your internal team, your key business stakeholders,
  • Collecting those mental list of “things that should be better.”
  • Turn that list into a prioritized backlog.
  • Identify the quick wins.
  • Define the capability buildouts.
  • Scope the strategic investments.
  • Put timelines and owners on each one.

It does not need to be a 50-page document. A one-page roadmap with three phases, clear priorities, and named owners is more valuable than a detailed plan that nobody executes. The goal is not perfection. The goal is momentum. Because the longer D365 sits at 60-70% of its potential, the harder it is to close the gap, and the more likely your users are to permanently settle into the workarounds they built during stabilization.

Incremental beats a big-bang “Phase 2” that never gets funded. Start small. Start now. Pick the three processes that waste the most time every week. Fix the one with the biggest time saving first. Then the next. That is D365 F&O post go-live optimization in practice. And it is how you deliver the ROI your board is still waiting for.

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 Discovery: Where Your Implementation Is Won or Lost

Posted on by Ryan Carolan

Your partner might call it the design phase, the requirements gathering phase, or the fit-gap analysis. Whatever the label, it is the same thing: the foundation everything else gets built on. D365 F&O discovery is where your implementation is won or lost.

This is the phase where you, as an IT leader, truly learn how the business really works. Where the warehouse manager explains the undocumented workaround they have used for 8 years. Where Finance admits the consolidation process runs on VLOOKUPs.

This blog is for the IT leader who is about to enter the discovery phase, or who is already in it and sensing something is not quite right. It is written from your side of the table, not the partner’s. Because while your partner runs the workshops, you own the outcome. And at a manufacturing company moving towards a sophisticated ERP platform, the outcome depends entirely on what happens in those early weeks.

Why D365 F&O discovery matters more than any other phase

Everything downstream is built on what comes out of discovery. Your partner builds configurations based on what they learn in these workshops. Test scripts get written against the processes documented here. And the training materials reflect the design decisions made in this phase. If it captures a sanitized, theoretical version of how your business is supposed to operate, every phase that follows inherits that gap.

At manufacturing companies, this gap is enormous. The distance between documented processes and reality is wider in manufacturing than in almost any other industry. Your warehouse team has been running a modified receiving process for years that nobody in IT knows about. Meanwhile, production planners have a sequencing logic that lives in someone’s head, not in any system. And the finance team has month-end close steps that were invented to work around the limitations of your legacy ERP and have been running on muscle memory ever since.

If your partner does not capture these realities during D365 F&O discovery, they will configure D365 based on the theoretical version. And you will spend UAT discovering that the system does not match how your business works. UAT is an expensive place to discover design flaws. Discovery is a cheap place to prevent them.

Our D365contractors.com community exists to serve D365 ERP customers who want to beef up their internal capability and drive projects forward independently. Chat with us today about the independent consultants who are ready to jump in and help you: BOOK A FREE DISCOVERY CALL

The one rule: the people who do the work must be in the room

If you take one thing from this blog, let it be this. Put the person running the warehouse in the workshop, not the VP who oversees it. The AP clerk, not the Controller. Your planner on the floor, not the Supply Chain Director. Leadership knows what the process should look like. The people on the floor know what it actually looks like. And it is the actual version that your D365 system needs to support.

Most manufacturing companies get this wrong. They send leadership because those are the people with availability. But leadership has not touched the day-to-day process in years. Nobody told them about the workaround in the receiving dock, or that the production schedule gets manually adjusted every Tuesday afternoon, or that AP bypasses the standard workflow for half their invoices.

Your partner will configure D365 based on what the people in the room tell them. Wrong people, wrong configuration. Not maliciously. Just incomplete.

What good D365 F&O discovery actually looks like

Good D365 F&O discovery at a manufacturing company has a few consistent characteristics regardless of which partner you are working with or which methodology they follow.

It starts with your processes, not the system. The partner should be asking “how does this work today” before they show you how D365 handles it. If the first workshop starts with a D365 demo, that is a red flag. Discovery is about understanding your business. The system comes later. A good partner listens first, then maps what they heard to D365 capabilities, then identifies the gaps.

It documents the exceptions, not just the happy path. Every process has a standard flow and a dozen exceptions. At a manufacturing company, the exceptions are where the real complexity lives. What happens when a supplier ships the wrong quantity? When a production order needs to be split mid-run? When a customer returns product that has already been partially consumed? The standard flow is easy. The exceptions are what break implementations.

It captures the workarounds. Every legacy system has them. Your team has been compensating for system limitations for years. Some of those workarounds are brilliant and should be preserved. Some are unnecessary and can be eliminated by D365’s native capabilities. But you cannot make that decision unless you know the workarounds exist. Good discovery surfaces them deliberately, not accidentally during UAT.

It takes the right amount of time. For a mid-size manufacturer implementing D365 Finance and Supply Chain Management, decent discovery could take 4 to 10 weeks, depending on complexity. If your partner has allocated 2 weeks, they are planning to cut corners. The right duration depends on how many modules you are implementing, how many sites you are rolling out, and how complex your operations are. But 2 weeks is almost never enough for a manufacturing company.

How to spot a discovery process that is being rushed

It does not always feel like rushing. Sometimes it feels like efficiency. Here are the signs:

  1. Your partner is running workshops with pre-built agendas that leave no room for tangents. In discovery, the tangents are the most valuable part. The tangent is where the warehouse manager says “actually, we do not do it that way” and the real process gets captured. A rigid agenda that moves through topics on a timer is optimized for the partner’s schedule, not your business’s complexity.
  2. The partner is leading with D365 demos instead of questions. If they are showing you how D365 handles accounts payable before they understand how you handle accounts payable, they are fitting your business to the system instead of the other way around. There is a time for demos. It is after they understand your processes, not before.
  3. Only leadership is in the workshops. If the partner has not asked to speak with the operational users, or if they accepted a room full of directors without pushing back, they are not going deep enough. A good partner will specifically request time with the people who do the work. If they did not ask, they are either too polite or too inexperienced. Either way, the result is the same: incomplete requirements.
  4. The fit-gap analysis is mostly “fit.” If your requirements gathering shows that D365 handles 95% of your needs out of the box, either you have a very standard business or the discovery was not thorough enough. At a manufacturing company with any real complexity, there should be meaningful gaps to address. A fit-gap that is almost entirely fit is usually a sign that the right questions were not asked.

I wrote about what this dynamic looks like when it compounds in 5 early warning signs your D365 F&O implementation is drifting.

How to prepare your internal team for D365 F&O discovery

The quality of discovery depends as much on your preparation as it does on your partner’s methodology. Here is how to set your team up to get the most out of this phase.

Document your real processes before the partner arrives. Not the process maps from 2019. How things actually work today, including the workarounds, the exceptions, and the unofficial steps. This does not need to be formal. A simple walkthrough written by the person who does the job is more valuable than a polished Visio diagram that nobody recognizes.

Identify the people who know the workarounds and protect their time. These are usually your most experienced operational people. They are also your busiest. If you do not carve out their time for discovery workshops, they will not be there, and the workarounds will not get captured until UAT when it is expensive to fix. Talk to their managers. Get coverage for their day jobs. This is a leadership responsibility. We covered how to assess whether your team is set up for this in build an internal D365 ERP team for your implementation.

Give your team permission to be honest. This sounds simple but it matters. In a room with their VP, the partner, and the project manager, your AP clerk is not going to volunteer that they bypass the standard process for half their invoices unless they feel safe doing so. Create the environment where honesty is expected, not punished. The best discovery workshops are the ones where someone says “I know this is not how we are supposed to do it, but here is what actually happens.” That is gold. Protect it.

Brief your team on what discovery is and why it matters. Most operational users have never been through an ERP implementation. They do not know what a fit-gap analysis is. They do not know why the partner is asking them to describe their daily workflow in granular detail. A 30-minute briefing that explains “this is how we make sure the new system works for you” goes a long way toward getting engaged, honest participation.

Discovery is YOUR responsibility

Your partner runs the workshops. But you own the outcome. Wrong people in the room? Your problem. Undocumented processes? Your gap. Team holding back because honesty feels risky? Your culture to fix.

The IT leaders who get the best results treat discovery as active leadership. They sit in the workshops. They check whether the partner captured what was actually said. They push back when complexity gets skipped over.

If something feels off, trust that instinct. Discovery is the cheapest place to get things right. Every other phase is a more expensive place to fix what was missed.

The questions in 5 questions to answer before you talk to any D365 F&O vendor can help you assess whether your organization is prepared.

If you are heading into D365 F&O discovery and want to make sure your internal team is prepared, or if you are mid-project and sensing gaps, let’s talk about independent consultants at D365contractors.com:

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 →

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 →

 

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 F&O User Adoption: Why Your Plant Floor Doesn’t Trust the System

Posted on by Ryan Carolan

My 4-year-old taught me everything I need to know about D365 F&O user adoption the other day. If the toy does not work the way the box promised, it goes in the corner. No troubleshooting. No second attempt. Just “it’s broken, Daddy” and he moves on to something he trusts.

He is 4. He is also right. That is exactly what your warehouse team does when D365 ERP does not work the way they were told it would. They do not file a ticket. They open Excel and move on. Someone configured D365 based on how manufacturing should work. Not how yours actually works. The configuration missed the reality, and now the plant floor has decided the system cannot be trusted with the real work.

This is about more than insufficient training; it is a user adoption problem rooted in trust.

D365 F&O user adoption fails when the system does not match reality

Every trust breakdown starts with a gap between what was configured and what actually happens on the floor. That gap almost always originates in discovery: wrong people in the room, wrong questions asked, or not enough time allocated. We covered this in D365 F&O discovery: where your implementation is won or lost.

The exceptions are the real process. The third-shift dock crew handling returns differently. The scheduling workaround your lead planner invented six years ago. The biggest customer changing their order every Friday afternoon. When the system cannot handle these, the people who deal with them every day stop trusting it. And once trust is gone, no amount of training brings it back. Only fixing the actual gaps will.

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

The Monday 6am test

This exercise will tell you more about D365 F&O user adoption at your plant than any survey ever could. Have your production supervisor walk through a full day using the D365 process. Monday, 6am to last shipment. Not the happy path. Every exception. Every “oh, we always do it this way.”

  • Shadow the morning. Does the D365 production schedule match what actually gets run first? At most manufacturers, the first run of the day is already an adjustment. A machine went down. A delivery was short. A rush order came in. If the system cannot accommodate this cleanly, your planner is already working outside of it before 7am.
  • Follow the exceptions. A material substitution. A partial receipt. A production order that needs splitting because half the batch failed quality. These are not rare events. They are daily life. Every one the system cannot handle is a moment where trust erodes.
  • Watch the last shipment. By end of day, how much was captured accurately in D365? If your warehouse lead spends 30 minutes reconciling adjustments, the system is reflecting the plan, not reality. And at a manufacturer, those two have usually parted ways by mid-afternoon.

If the system cannot handle the exceptions, the design is not done.

Where D365 F&O user adoption (usually) breaks down at manufacturers

Trust breaks in the same four places at nearly every manufacturer:

  • Receiving. Delivery does not match the PO. D365 cannot process it as it actually arrived. “I’ll fix it in the system later” is where trust starts dying.
  • Production scheduling. The D365 schedule rarely survives contact with the plant floor. If adjusting it in real time is difficult, your planner stops using it for scheduling and uses it only for reporting. You paid for an ERP. You are getting a very expensive filing cabinet.
  • Month-end close. Workarounds upstream mean inaccurate production transactions. Finance inherits the mess, builds reconciliation spreadsheets, and adds days to the close.
  • Reporting. Leadership pulls a report. Plant manager says “those numbers are not right.” Once executives stop trusting the data, the entire ROI case is at risk.

How to rebuild trust and fix the adoption problem

Most companies try to fix D365 F&O user adoption with more training. More lunch-and-learns. More posters in the break room. None of that works when the root cause is a configuration that does not match how the plant operates. You cannot train someone into trusting a system that does not support their job.

  • Fix the configuration, not the people. Most trust gaps are configuration adjustments, not architectural problems. A senior functional D365 ERP consultant who knows Quality OR Advanced Warehousing can identify the changes needed in 2-4 weeks. We covered how this works in how to build your internal D365 F&O team while using external experts.
  • Start with the most visible pain. Run the Monday 6am test. Document every workaround. Fix the one that costs the most time first. One fixed problem is worth more than ten training sessions.
  • Involve the floor in the fix. The people who built the workarounds understand the gaps best. When they are part of designing the fix, they own it. That is how adoption actually works. Bottom-up trust recovery, one process at a time.

If you are past go-live and seeing workarounds multiply, the roadmap in D365 F&O post go-live optimization will help you structure the effort.

D365 F&O user adoption is a trust problem, and trust is earned on the plant floor

Your steering committee can declare the implementation a success. Your dashboard can show green. None of that matters if the people who run your operation do not trust the system. Trust is built one fixed gap at a time. When the receiving team sees that D365 handles deliveries the way they actually arrive. When the planner adjusts the schedule without calling IT. When finance closes the month without a reconciliation spreadsheet. When the COO pulls a report and the plant manager nods instead of wincing.

No ERP earns trust by being powerful. It earns trust by being accurate. And accuracy starts with a configuration that reflects how your plant actually operates, exceptions and all.

If your plant floor is running workarounds and D365 F&O user adoption is not where it needs to be, book a free discovery call. We will connect you with a community member who can talk through where the trust gaps are and what kind of targeted support would actually fix them:

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.

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.

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