You’re about to start talking to a D365 F&O vendor or implementation partner.
You’ve done the research. You’ve sat through the Microsoft pitch. You’ve probably watched a few Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management demos.
Stop. Not yet.
After 14 years in D365 staffing, placing contractors into manufacturing/SCM implementations across the US, I’ve watched this play out dozens of times. The IT leaders who walk into a D365 F&O vendor conversation without clear answers to 5 specific questions end up handing over control of their project before it starts. The vendor fills in the gaps for them. And once the vendor is defining your scope, your timeline, and your success criteria, you’re no longer buying. You’re being sold to.
These aren’t questions to ask the vendor. These are questions you need to answer internally, as a cross-functional leadership team, before you sit across the table from anyone.
This “pre-work” is often called Phase 0 of an ERP project, which we cover in detail in this article.
1. What does “done” look like before you meet a D365 F&O vendor?
This sounds obvious. It isn’t. Most IT leaders can describe what they want D365 ERP to do. Very few can describe what the business looks like when D365 is working.
There’s a difference. “We want to automate our procurement process” is a software requirement. “Our procurement team processes 400 POs a week with two less headcount and zero manual re-keying” is a business outcome. One of those gives the D365 F&O vendor room to define success on their terms. The other gives you something to hold them (or your own team) to.
Before you talk to any D365 F&O vendor: sit down with your CFO, your operations director, and your plant leadership. Get specific. What does month-end close look like when this system is working? How fast do production orders flow from sales to the shop floor? What does your warehouse pick accuracy need to be? How many manual workarounds disappear?
Write these down. Make them measurable. Because once you’re in a partner conversation, every SOW will be scoped against deliverables. If you haven’t defined your own outcomes first, you’ll be measuring success against the vendor’s milestones, not your business reality.
The IT leaders who get the best results from their D365 F&O vendor relationships are the ones who show up on day one and say: “Here is what success looks like. Tell me how you get us there.”
Need D365 expertise your internal team doesn’t have yet? Our vetted, independent consultants are ready to jump in. Let’s talk:
2. Who will we backfill during the D365 ERP implementation?
A smart D365 F&O vendor will ask you about your internal project team during the sales process. They need to know who they’re working with. But the real question isn’t who will be on the team. It’s whether those people actually have the time and authority to do the job.
I’ve seen this kill more D365 implementations than bad software configuration. The VP of IT assigns their best people to the project, but nobody backfills their day jobs. So your Finance lead is trying to define chart of accounts requirements in the morning and close the books in the afternoon. Your Supply Chain lead is in discovery workshops three days a week and managing the warehouse the other two. Within a month, both are burned out and the partner is waiting on decisions that never come. This is how you slowly hand the keys to the project, and your autonomy, over…
So before you talk to a D365 F&O vendor: answer this honestly: who is going to work on this full time? Not “attend meetings.” Not “be available for questions.” Full time. Dedicated. For the duration of the implementation. And who is going to do their current job while they’re gone?
If you can’t answer that cleanly, you’re not ready to start vendor conversations. Because every D365 F&O vendor’s timeline assumption is built on your team being available. When they’re not, the timeline slips. And the additional cost of that slip doesn’t show up in the original SOW.
3. What are the 3 processes that will break if D365 ERP is configured wrong?
Every manufacturing company has them. The processes that look simple on a whiteboard but have 15 years of tribal knowledge baked into how they actually run. The things your plant floor team does instinctively that no one has ever documented.
Maybe it’s your batch tracking process for raw materials with variable shelf life. Maybe it’s the way your warehouse team handles returns that don’t fit standard disposition codes. Maybe it’s the intercompany transfer logic between your plants that finance has been manually adjusting for years.
Your D365 F&O vendor doesn’t know these exist. Not because they’re bad at their job, but because these are the things that only surface during configuration, when someone on the shop floor says “that’s not how we do it” and the whole room goes quiet.
Before you start any vendor conversation: sit down with your operations and plant leadership and ask: “What are the 3 processes that, if the new system gets them wrong, will cause the most damage?” Not the biggest processes. The most fragile ones. The ones where a wrong configuration means your production schedule is wrong, your inventory counts don’t reconcile, or your warehouse team goes back to spreadsheets within a week of go-live.
Bring these to the D365 F&O vendor conversation as test cases. Not as requirements buried in a spreadsheet. As scenarios you expect them to address specifically during evaluation. The vendors who take these seriously are the ones worth talking to. We covered how to use these scenarios during partner evaluation in detail in The Power Buyer’s Guide to Choosing Your D365 ERP Implementation Partner.
4. How clean is your data? (your D365 F&O vendor might assume it’s fine)
Data readiness is the single most underestimated factor in D365 F&O implementations. Every IT leader knows data migration is part of the project. Almost none of them know the actual state of their data when they start talking to vendors.
Here’s what typically happens. The D365 F&O vendor asks about data during the sales process. You say “we have it in our current system.” They estimate migration based on standard assumptions. Then, 4 months into the project, someone actually opens the database and finds 12 years of duplicate vendor records, item masters with inconsistent units of measure, BOMs that haven’t been updated since 2013, and customer records spread across three different systems that don’t agree on basic details like addresses and payment terms.
Data cleanup becomes a parallel project that nobody budgeted for. It delays configuration because you can’t test with bad data. It delays UAT because the test results don’t make sense. It delays go-live because nobody trusts the numbers.
Before you talk to any D365 F&O vendor: assign a data owner. Not a data migration lead. A data owner. Someone with the authority to make decisions about what gets cleaned, what gets archived, and what gets left behind. Give them access to your current systems and 90 days to produce an honest assessment of what you’re working with. If you don’t have someone who can do that internally, hire one. Or find an independent D365 consultant who knows D365 ERP intimately.
When you bring that assessment to a vendor conversation, two things happen. First, the vendor can actually give you a realistic timeline and budget. Second, you immediately separate yourself from 90% of prospects they talk to, because almost nobody shows up with clean data or even an honest picture of their data state.
5. What is your real post go-live budget? Most D365 F&O vendor SOWs don’t cover it.
Every D365 F&O vendor will ask about budget. Most IT leaders give the number they’ve secured for the implementation. Licensing, configuration, data migration, training, go-live. That’s the number on the business case they presented to the board.
It’s not the real number. The real number includes what happens after go-live. Post go-live stabilisation. The dedicated support resources you need for at least 90 days. The configuration fixes that only surface when real users run real transactions at real volume. The additional training your warehouse team needs after they’ve actually used the system for a month, not the training they sat through during UAT when everything was theoretical. And a 30% buffer just in case.
For a manufacturing company running D365 Finance & Supply Chain Management across multiple plants, the post go-live investment is typically 10-15% of the total implementation cost. On a $5M implementation, that’s $500K-$750K. If that number isn’t in your budget, you haven’t budgeted for business success. You’ve budgeted for go-live. Those are different things.
Before you talk to a D365 F&O vendor: have the budget conversation with your CFO that includes the full picture. Implementation plus stabilisation plus optimisation. If you wait until after go-live to ask for that money, you’ll be asking from a position of weakness, when things are breaking and the board is already nervous. We covered how to frame this conversation in D365 F&O Post Go-Live: Why the First 6 Months Define Your ROI.
Bonus: Who can we turn to on OUR side when the big decisions hit?
There’s a moment in every D365 F&O implementation where a complex solution or technical decision lands on the table. Maybe it’s whether to use Advanced Warehouse Management or standard WMS. Maybe it’s how to handle intercompany accounting across 4 legal entities. Maybe it’s whether a customization is worth the long-term upgrade risk.
Your partner will have a recommendation. But their recommendation is shaped by their experience, their methodology, and their commercial model. That’s not a criticism: it’s just how consulting works. The question is: who on YOUR side of the table has the technical depth to evaluate that recommendation, push back when it doesn’t fit, or propose an alternative?
Most manufacturing companies don’t have that person internally. And that’s fine. But you need to know that gap exists before you start, not discover it mid-project when a $200K architecture decision needs to be made and nobody on your team can evaluate whether it’s the right call.
This is where a fractional Solution Architect can be invaluable. Someone independent — not tied to your implementation partner — who sits on your side of the table for the big decisions. They don’t need to be there full time. They need to be there when it matters: during discovery, during design reviews, during key technical decisions, and during go-live readiness.
Think of it like hiring an independent building inspector when you’re building a house. Your contractor is probably doing great work. But having someone who works for YOU reviewing the plans and the execution? That’s how you protect a multi-million dollar investment.
If you don’t have that person identified before you start vendor conversations, add it to your list. Or even better: book in a free discovery call with us to talk about it:
Walk into a D365 F&O vendor conversation ready
The IT leaders who get the best outcomes from their D365 implementations are the ones who did the internal work first. They defined their own success criteria. They freed up their best people. They identified the fragile processes. They confronted their data reality. They budgeted for the full lifecycle, not just go-live.
When you show up to a D365 F&O vendor conversation with those 5 answers, you change the dynamic completely. You’re not waiting for the vendor to tell you what you need. You’re telling them what success looks like and asking them to show you how they deliver it.
That’s the difference between buying and being sold to. And in a market where D365 implementations cost millions and take years at high failure rates (according to LinkedIn :D), that difference matters.
Want to assess how prepared your organisation is before you start D365 F&O vendor conversations?
We built a quick Partner Dependency Assessment that helps you see where the gaps are before someone else fills them in for you. Takes 2 minutes: