Dynamics 365 is a top quadrant, market leading business system which can manage all elements of your operation from lead generation to bank reconciliation. For most people, the business case associated with the initial implementation would have been based on a series of benefits that could be achieved and value that could be released within the organisation.

Sometimes after the implementation project is complete and the system is operational, companies find that they are not quite achieving the value that they initially expected. Whilst this is not uncommon, it is disappointing and can be caused by several things:

• Unrealistic initial expectations
• Shortcuts taken during implementation to achieve a date
• Poor architecture or delivery
• Inefficient working practices sustained in to D365

When your board are constantly questioning why you haven’t achieved your goals from the project, it is easy to start to wonder if the product selection was a mistake.

The good news is that many thousands of companies worldwide are using D365 to give them fast and efficient operations. Inciper offer a series of interventions that will help you to remove any blockers that may be stopping you from achieving your business goals.

What we can do

Our Strategy & Advisory service run a continuous improvement engagement which lets us get to the heart of any problems that you may be facing with your D365 system. The actual steps that we will go through are tailored to you but will probably include the following:

Business benefit appraisal: it is worth taking the time to go back to the business case and looking at the value that was expected from the project. Usually, a business benefit will be stated along with expected improvement measures and timeframes. We will help you to look at whether the original goals were realistic and if any new or secondary goals have arisen within the organisation that are now the measures of success.

Operational discussions: deeper dive sessions with the departments impacted by the Dynamics implementation enable our functional experts to understand what interventions might be required to improve the efficiency of running the business. Some of these could be quick changes to process or system configuration for immediate impact, and some could be longer term projects to change an operational area or introduce an ISV partner.

Solution architecture review: our solution and technical architects will look at how the system has been put together at both a technical and a functional level to analyse whether there is any inefficiency inherent in the system design such as the coding of any customisations or the functional design of the end-to-end process architecture.

Deliverables: as you would expect, we will work with you to co-create a pack to facilitate the discussion with the rest of the board about any proposed changes. What’s important is that all the elements of our investigation knit together into a cohesive whole. For example, there is little point in making changes requested by your accounts payable team if they work counter to your business benefit aspirations.

What tools are there to help?

Our custom Finance diagnostics dashboard in Power BI can plug into any standard D365 implementation and give you a view of over 80 key metrics to understand where your operations may be falling short on your efficiency goals. We will then work with you as a part of the continuous improvement engagement to understand the results and fold this into your proposed initiatives.

You can then continue to use the dashboard to monitor week by week as we collaborate on interventions across the finance department to help you to achieve your goals.

How much will it cost?

The cost of a continuous improvement project depends on the scope and your needs, as well as the size and complexity of your organisation. From our experience, the price will fall between £10k for the shortest engagements up to £30k for the longest. Once we start talking to you face to face, we will be able to give a far better indication of this.

Microsoft are committed to ensuring that you achieve excellence with your Dynamics implementation and so have made a series of funds available through their End Customer Investment Funds (ECIF) programme. We can apply for this on your behalf and if granted, it will offset some of the cost of our engagement.