Tag: Hiring D365 F&O

Building an Internal D365 ERP Team For Your Implementation

Posted on by Ryan Carolan

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

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

The 5 capabilities your internal D365 ERP team actually needs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LETS TALK

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 →

 

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

Posted on by Ryan Carolan

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Data readiness starts 6 months before you think it does

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What good D365 F&O data readiness actually looks like

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The real cost of poor D365 F&O data readiness

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

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

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

ERP data readiness is a leadership decision

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

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

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

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

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

 

About the Author

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

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

Follow Ryan on LinkedIn →

 

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 →