CRM Horror Stories: A Dynamics 365 CE Customization Cautionary Tale

A mid-sized company began their Microsoft Business Applications journey by hiring a partner to implement a Dynamics 365 Field Service system. But over a stagnant two-year project, the customer found themselves saddled with high costs and an overly-complex system.

The original implementation team had built customizations for capabilities that were available out of the box, placing two full-time developers on the project at great cost. The new features “reinvented the wheel” and were completely unnecessary.

This chilling tale of an over-customized, under-performing system is not typical, but it is also not uncommon, according to Western Computers VP of Strategy Greg Williams and Solution Architect Kayla Rohde. They spoke to an MSDW audience about this customer’s struggles and how Western came in to help them bring the project and system back under control.

By the time Western Computer was called in, the customer was still losing thousands of dollars of inventory each year because the customization effort was still unable to track inventory on trucks, automate scheduling functionality, and reduce manual data entry, Rohde recalled.

“The big impact for users is that when you customize away from out of box processes, you miss out on updates that come out. Things like AI that allow you to embed a summary of a work order on a form [don’t get implemented]…We worked with them at least six months to disentangle the implementation,” Rohde explained.

According to Williams, many partners are too quick to assign technical resources to a project. Very often, the functional skills of understanding objectives and working with personnel may matter more than the technical capabilities. Many customers want faster data entry and therefore seek out customizations, but very often their employees simply need training to use out of the box features properly.