Today's enterprise ERP opportunities suit Microsoft product strengths, says Avanade ERP practice lead

In the enterprise ERP market, Microsoft partners have historically had to fight an uphill battle against entrenched vendors, most notably SAP and Oracle. But software investment decisions in large organizations are different today, says Barr Snyderwine, North America ERP business lead at Avanade, and he believes Microsoft has gained a new edge in areas that executives really care about like flexible deployment options, cost controls for ERP deployment at the subsidiary tier, rapid mobile application development, and flexible options for analytics.

Snyderwine joined Avanade's center of excellence for Dynamics 365 for Finance and Operations (D365FO) about 18 months ago after many years in the Microsoft channel and, most recently, working for a project-based firm that ran their business with Dynamics AX. In an interview at last week's User Group Summit 2019, Snyderwine discussed customer trends and new partner opportunities that Avanade is seeing in ERP deployments and upgrades today. 

"We're getting invited to more opportunities that we wouldn't have before," said Snyderwine. "[D365FO] is definitely moving upscale. The companies that would have only looked at Oracle and SAP are pulling in D365. And it's a real competition. Sometimes it is cloud-driven, but we can also do the entire implementation in a year's worth of SAP support dollars."

He also noted that Avanade is seeing a mix of different types of D365FO projects today. Some are companies that outgrew SMB ERP solutions like Dynamics GP. Another segment is looking for rapid deployment in subsidiaries and new corporate entities. Interestingly, Snyderwine observes that core financials is less of a focus in new engagements than it has been historically.

We're seeing companies with global growth. Companies that are making acquisitions are all of a sudden open in France, Germany, Russia, and so on. And we're almost not seeing just core financials anymore, even when we're brought in for it. We're talking to a large accounting firm and they are also looking at time and billing. So people are taking that Microsoft vision, the end to end that includes field service and delivery and they're looking at that vision that includes talent, field service, aligning the Project Service Automation [with D365FO], and aligning around Power BI. The Power Platform is really gaining a lot of traction.

And he continued:

This year we went into a very large organization running SAP for core financials. Their subsidiary was $1.5 billion. But to do [Oracle or SAP] would have been $100 million. D365FO was a fraction of that and it fit better, and the implementation would be a lot shorter. In the enterprise space there is still some resistance. But in almost any opportunity, integration to all sorts of things is such a foundation [in areas like] CRM, HR and payroll, e-commerce, and homegrown systems.

For companies running Dynamics AX in many subsidiaries and planning an upgrade, Snyderwine says one approach is to select certain subsidiaries as test cases to help guide the rest of the organization toward more predictable AX upgrade projects.

What we're seeing more of is a company that is on AX with 20 entities and three primary operational entities. We are looking to take one entity to D365FO, working out the implementation process, because it is not always an upgrade, it can be more of a re-implementation many times. And that's really touchy for clients. You really have to walk that line carefully because the expectation is to click the button and off you go. So what we try and do is smooth that out, take one entity, one proof of concept, especially core financials and maybe supply chain, and work it out there with the new process, whether it is pure upgrade or implementation. We're really beginning to phase it in.

Another organization [that Avanade is talking to] is in acquisition mode. We're going to take a more complex legal entity, do the financial core first. Then, in their supply chain, integrate to [their CRM] and smooth all that out. That's like the proof of concept or user acceptance testing mode. Then we'll take all the entities and do the core financials. [Operations comes last], because the last thing you want to do is interrupt operations - buy, sell, ship, implement.

Avanade has a long history of supporting retail industry clients with Dynamics-focused solutions. Snyderwine said his team views the advances in Dynamics 365 Commerce, an evolution of Dynamics 365 Retail, as an important step in the solution's maturity.

Now retail is really starting to get some traction. With the vision end to end, now with Dynamics 365 Commerce, that is gigantic. Even if [some clients] won't use it today, they want to see the vision. So the CEO can now see that Microsoft is developing it. Right now it's very simple. It's a check-in, check-out cart without complexity. I haven't seen the configurator in it, but that will have to be added to really hit the market.

With so many Dynamics AX customers thinking about their next generation ERP investment, Snyderwine says Avanade is encouraging clients to make smart investments today that will improve the conditions for a real upgrade or migration in the future. In many cases, the smaller wins come in the form of improvements that are fairly obvious.

It's not a new idea, but it's all these manual processes and the manual integrations between systems. What's surprising is that they haven't automated them yet. We're finding those companies that have always done it this way. A recommendation we made to one company recently was to just integrate those systems right now. Even if you proceed with an upgrade or migration, automate that now and you'll get that out of the way, you'll understand what that automation is, what the integration is.

On our advisory side we are getting in earlier working with the CIO and IT departments to start to plan out the future, including these upgrades. They're hearing a lot about automation [in many areas].

Like other Microsoft partners, Avanade is engaging with clients in a range of ways on delivering solutions based on the Power Platform. Delivering new mobile solutions is of high value, says Snyderwine, but needs and interests vary. He explained:

We're working to come up with a host of ideas in various industries. We're developing apps in these industries. We're seeing two flavors of clients. Some clients want us to do all of it. We have deep managed services for some of those larger clients and it's about [ticketing and support]. But we're also getting requests to have resources dedicated to a client for [a certain number of] hours per month to create some [apps]. Another flavor of client comes to us and says 'Great, you can come and do the implementation and teach us.' And we'll engage on those and work hand in hand. We call it 'two in a box' with an implementation person from our side and a [subject matter expert] from the client. We're doing this with Power BI and PowerApps.

It's definitely a mix. I wouldn't say there's a trend.

There's a perception [created by Microsoft] that it's really easy. And in many cases it is. So what we end up doing is teaching [a client] about the data model. We actually spend a lot of time teaching them how to find the data, where it is, how to extract it and flatten it out to make it useful for BI and PowerApps.

And Snyderwine expanded on how perception related to BI and reporting investments for D365FO is maturing.

In the past, people would buy AX/D365 and not realize there was a lot of reporting they needed for the organization. Now people are accepting of that and know they want to create the report for themselves. The basics are there but they want to tweak them for themselves.

Four or five years ago, BI was the hot topic. Now, [the sentiment is that] the tool is great but how do I get the data? The maturity there is that a lot of clients already have [some BI tools in place] and just need help with the data model.