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Five apps a Dynamics 365 implementation partner sets up, each with its own traps
Sales
Leads, opportunities, quotes and forecasts. The usual trap is copying every field from the old CRM; salespeople then stop updating records within weeks.
- ✓Lead to opportunity process
- ✓Product catalog and price lists
- ✓Forecast categories
- ✓Outlook and Teams integration
Customer Service
Cases, queues, entitlements and knowledge articles. Routing rules decide whether customers wait, so we design them with the people who answer the phone.
- ✓Case types and SLAs
- ✓Unified routing to queues
- ✓Knowledge base
- ✓Email and portal channels
Field Service
Work orders, scheduling and the mobile app. Technicians judge the whole project by how the mobile app behaves on a patchy signal.
- ✓Work order types and incidents
- ✓Resource scheduling board
- ✓Customer assets
- ✓Mobile app offline profile
Finance and Supply Chain Management
General ledger, procurement, inventory, warehousing and production for larger, often multi-country businesses. Chart of accounts and financial dimensions come first, because everything else posts to them.
- ✓Legal entities and dimensions
- ✓Procure to pay
- ✓Warehouse management
- ✓Dual-write to Dataverse
Why Dynamics 365 implementation projects overrun
The software is rarely the problem. Projects run long when decisions sit unanswered. They also run long when the design copies the old system screen by screen, or when data migration waits until the final weeks. Each of those is a management issue, not a technical one, and you can see each one coming.
As your Dynamics 365 implementation partner, we keep a decision log from the first workshop. Every open question has an owner on your side and a date, and it is visible to your sponsor. When a question has sat too long, we raise it rather than guessing an answer and building on the guess.
We also push back on customization. The customer engagement apps are highly configurable. Forms, views, business rules and flows can meet most requests. We write code only where configuration truly cannot do the job. After all, you have to maintain every plug-in through two Microsoft release waves each year.
The phases of a Dynamics 365 implementation
- 1
Initiate
Confirm scope, team, environments and the decision log. The scoping call sets the plan and the commercial terms, and we agree both in writing before work starts.
- 2
Design
Workshops by process area produce a solution design document. It shows what is standard, what we configure, what connects to other systems and what is custom. You sign it off.
- 3
Build and iterate
Configuration happens in short cycles with demos to your key users. So problems surface while they are still cheap to fix.
- 4
Test and rehearse
Then comes system testing, integration testing and user acceptance testing. We also run at least one full rehearsal of the data load and cutover on a copy of production.
- 5
Go live and stabilize
Cutover runs from a checklist with named owners. After launch we stay close to your users to fix issues and answer questions until the system settles.
What to ask any Dynamics 365 implementation partner before you sign
- ✓Who, by name, will do the configuration work, and will they stay for the whole project?
- ✓Where will you write down the solution design, and who signs it off on our side?
- ✓How many full rehearsals of data migration and cutover do you plan before go-live?
- ✓Which requirements do you expect to meet with custom code, and why can configuration not cover them?
- ✓How will you train our team, and who will own the system after the partner steps back?
- ✓What happens to the source code, solutions and documentation if we part ways?
Questions buyers ask a Dynamics 365 implementation partner
Do you implement Business Central on this page too?
No, Business Central has its own page because the product, the delivery approach and the typical customer are different. This page covers the Dataverse-based customer engagement apps and Finance and Supply Chain Management. Unsure which family fits? Our consulting work starts there.
Can you implement Sales now and Customer Service later?
Yes, and it is often the sensible path. Both apps share Dataverse. So the account and contact records you build for Sales are the same ones Customer Service uses later. We design the first phase with the second in mind, so you never have to rebuild anything.
How long will our implementation take?
It depends on the apps, the number of users and locations, the integrations and the state of your data. So we do not quote a duration on a web page. The scoping call sets the plan, and the proposal states the timeline and the assumptions behind it. If an assumption changes, we update the plan openly rather than let it quietly slip.
Who owns the configuration and code after go-live?
You do. We package configuration and any custom components as Dataverse solutions. For Finance and Supply Chain Management, they live as models in source control. You keep access to all of it. We also hand over documentation of the design and every customization. If you later move to another Dynamics 365 implementation partner, they start with the full picture.
Do you work with Microsoft FastTrack?
Where a customer qualifies for Microsoft FastTrack, we work alongside the FastTrack architect. We also take part in the Success by Design checkpoints. Those sessions force risks into the open early. Not every project qualifies, and a well-run project does not depend on it.
Talk to us about your project.
Tell us what you run today and what has to change. A senior consultant replies with a written next step.