Case study · Manufacturing
A mid-sized manufacturer moving from a legacy system plus spreadsheets to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, phased by function rather than cut over in one weekend.
A manufacturer was running an aging ERP alongside spreadsheets that had become the real system of record for inventory and production. Reporting was rebuilt manually each month, and inventory variance was high enough that purchasing decisions were being made on intuition.
We mapped the actual flow from receiving through shipping with the people doing the work, and documented where data was re-entered and where it waited. Several problems turned out to be handoffs, not software.
That distinction changed the scope. Two of the issues originally described as ERP limitations were resolved by changing who entered a transaction and when, before any configuration happened.
Item records had accumulated years of inconsistency: duplicate items, units of measure that disagreed between purchasing and production, and BOMs that reflected how a product used to be built. Migrating that as-is would have produced an ERP that was wrong faster.
Cleanup was treated as its own phase with its own sign-off, because inventory cutover is the point where bad data becomes permanent.
Barcode scanning on the floor only works if wireless coverage holds in the aisles and between racking, so coverage was surveyed and corrected before scanning went live. Users needed Entra ID accounts, MFA and correct licensing, and the reporting layer needed a data model rather than exports.
This is the part most ERP projects treat as somebody else's problem. Running both sides removed the handoff.
Transactions were recorded where the work happened rather than transcribed later, monthly reporting became a refresh instead of a rebuild, and inventory data became trustworthy enough to plan against.
Outcomes are described qualitatively because we do not publish customer metrics without approval.
Common questions
Phased implementations for small and mid-sized manufacturers typically run several months rather than weeks, driven mostly by data cleanup and how many modules go live. Phasing extends the calendar but reduces the risk of a failed cutover.
A single cutover asks every department to change on the same day, which means every problem surfaces at once and nobody has capacity to fix any of it. Phasing by function keeps the failure surface small and lets each team stabilize before the next change.
For most small and mid-sized discrete manufacturers, yes — it covers BOMs, routings, production orders, warehousing and multi-location inventory. Heavily customized legacy systems may do specific things it does not, which is a scoping question to answer before committing.
Undocumented current processes, dirty item and BOM data migrated as-is, dimensions designed only for accounting, and asking the plant to absorb too many workflow changes at once. Very few failures are caused by the software itself.
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