Tag: D365 ERP Implementation

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 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:

BOOK A FREE DISCOVERY CALL

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 →

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

Posted on by Ryan Carolan

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

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

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

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

1. Stop buying logos. Start buying names.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5. Negotiate talent insurance into your D365 implementation contract

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

You shouldn’t.

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

The Power Move: Negotiate these four staffing safeguards:

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

Choosing the right D365 ERP implementation partner: setting the standard

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

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

Want to know where you stand today?

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

TAKE IT HERE

 

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:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Use external experts strategically, not as a crutch

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

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

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

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

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

The “shadow team” approach that actually works

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Measure it. Report on it. Protect it.

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

Track simple metrics with simple questions:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About the Author

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

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

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn →

 

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

Posted on by Ryan Carolan

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

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

Stop. Not yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BOOK A FREE DISCOVERY CALLL 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GET FRACTIONAL D365 HELP

Walk into a D365 F&O vendor conversation ready

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

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

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

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

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

TAKE IT HERE

About the Author

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

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

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn →

 

D365 Project Rescue: What Actually Happens in Week One

Posted on by Ryan Carolan

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

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

How to know when your D365 project needs a rescue

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

GET FRACTIONAL D365 TALENT  

What a D365 project rescue actually looks like in week one

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

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

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

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

The real blockers are almost never technical

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

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

A D365 project rescue is emotional before it is technical

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

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

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

What happens after week one

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

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

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

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

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

What a rescue does not mean

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

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

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

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

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn →

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

Posted on by Ryan Carolan

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

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

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

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

It means ensuring every recommendation is:

  • Understood

  • Validated

  • Contextualised

  • Aligned to operational reality

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

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

  • The downstream impact of Inventory Valuation Method changes

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

  • The difference between functional vs technical scope creep

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

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

Not sure if you can?

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

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

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

GET FRACTIONAL D365 TALENT   

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

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

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

They can:

  • Explain D365 design decisions clearly to stakeholders

  • Anticipate how integrations will behave downstream

  • Spot when a configuration contradicts the intended process flow

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

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

  • Coherent, end-to-end solution design

  • Sensible, defensible customisation (not default + chaos)

  • Stable environments and disciplined release management

  • A realistic cutover plan

  • Governance structures that genuinely hold partners accountable

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

3. Empower Your Internal D365 Project Team

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

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

High-performing D365 teams behave differently.

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

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

  • Request clear justification for design decisions

  • Require visibility into downstream implications before approving changes

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

They:

  • Raise the standard immediately

  • Upskill internal teams through proximity

  • Strengthen delivery governance

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

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

Work With Experienced D365 Contractors

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

GET AN INTERIM D365 CONTRACTOR

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

 

About the Author

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

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

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn →

 

D365 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’.

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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.

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