Dynamics AX to Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain transition – a smooth sail or a bumpy ride!
You must have heard by now that Microsoft is ending Dynamics AX support from October 2021 onwards. The next obvious thing in your mind must be to consider an upgrade to Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain. A lot of businesses ponder how it is going to be. Is it going to be a smooth sail or a bumpy ride? Given the support from Microsoft, and competency of your partner, it is not as difficult as you might imagine. With fast-track implementation option, flexible licensing, unparalleled scalability, and lower cost of ownership, migrating to D365 Finance and Supply chain is worth considering.
To be convinced that it is right to move to D365 Finance & Supply Chain, it is important to understand the economic impact of your current AX solution and how this compares to Dynamics 365 in the cloud.
Economic Impact is typically seen in 3 areas:
1. Total Cost of Ownership
2. Business Process Improvement
3. Accelerated time-to-value.
Let us look at these one by one.
Total Cost of Ownership: Microsoft Offers significant discount on D365 Licensing for existing Dynamics Customers. If you are already a Dynamics AX customer, your cost of using Dynamics Finance & Supply Chain will be lesser. This can lead to a huge cost saving over time.
Not just discount (for AX customers), you also get flexible subscription-based licensing for D365 Finance & Supply Chain Management. This, coupled with lower costs, delivers great benefit over time.
Dynamics 365 is built on foundation of purpose-built apps, such as Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management. These apps are seamlessly connected with each other as a single solution, but they also allow organizations to pay for licenses on a user-by-user basis. If a user need access to functionality within D365 finance and not within D365 supply chain then you only need to pay for that app (D365 Finance, in this case).
There are multiple pricing tiers as well within each app. For example, you can choose between Full Users & Team Member Users. Full users work actively and perform in-depth tasks in the system. Team member users on the other hand do light tasks such as accessing reports, updating simple records, etc. Team member costs much lesser than full User.
Monthly subscription also makes it easy to add or remove users as required. Let us say you have a seasonal change in number of users, you can subscribe for those users on a month-by-month basis.
Business Process Improvement: Migrating to cloud offers significant improvement in business performance with improved productivity, capability, and business insights. Increased automation, a better user experience, reduced rework, and enhanced forecasting increase company-wide productivity. Furthermore, real-time data analysis and streamlined processes enhance forecasting accuracy, improve quality, reduce waste, and prevent delays.
Dynamics 365 cloud solutions typically perform better than on-premises and D365 Finance & Supply Chain is no exception if you compare it with AX. Overall, it leads to improvements in the cycle time of key business processes, together with improved operational efficiency materializing in increased profit margins.
Accelerated time-to-value: Transition to cloud brings with it huge opportunities to become more agile and respond ever-faster to changing demand. With faster deployment, timely updates, faster capability enhancement, organizations can continuously improve. Businesses have also become more adaptable. They can scale to new site or geographies faster. Time to on-board newly acquired business has also improved. Finally, organizations are becoming more data data-driven with new insights based on more robust data gathering and real-time availability to drive innovation. These insights support improved strategic planning and new operating models.
There is one more factor which is very important and largely determines the success of your migration
Choosing the right ERP Partner: Last but not the least. Look at the cost, experience, track record of the partner you choose. But here are some equally (if not more) critical things to consider. Some of them may at time go unnoticed but are highly important for a successful upgrade or a roll-out.
Make sure that your partner is allocating proper time and resource in advance for quality review of existing objects, functional testing, key user training, user acceptance testing, post UAT support. Because most times a successful rollout depends on these critical factors.
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