Most companies engage a Dynamics 365 implementation partner in the same way as they would hire a contractor: they perform a few reference checks, put together a pretty slide deck, and demo the product in the conference room. After 6 months in the project, the data is all over the place, integrations are starting to fail, and the team doesn’t want to work with the system.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 is a truly powerful platform, so technology is not the problem here. The issue is that most businesses are unaware of what their partner is really capable of until they sign the contract.
This is not a guide to asking your partner the question: “How many years of experience do you have? It’s about the technical and strategic questions that will determine whether a Dynamics 365 consultant can do the job, especially in the four most common areas where Australian ERP implementations fail: data migration, integration, testing, and change management.
Why Do Dynamics 365 Implementation Partner Evaluations Fail to Get to the Root of the Issue?
The typical evaluation process is based on certifications, case studies, and price. These will be table stakes. What if they don’t disclose their methodology depth? What happens when things go wrong? And if they do understand the complexities of Australian business environments, how will they deal with GST compliance, Single Touch Payroll, and state-based payroll tax complexities?
You can find a Microsoft Dynamics partner in Australia who can have all the certifications, and then not be ready to perform the finance and operations rollout of a mid-market business. This is the only chance you’ll get to find out prior to the project beginning.
Data Migration: The Most Important Question
The greatest number of Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations implementations are unsuccessful in data migration. However, most companies spend less than 20 minutes talking about it in their partner assessments.
You need to ask: “Tell me about your data migration process? Your process of dealing with legacy data quality issues that arise during the migration process.”
An inexperienced partner will explain a typical extract, transform, load process, whereas a good Dynamics 365 consultant will give you an immediate focus on the data profiling that should have been done before the project’s scope, the cleansing rules, and cutover rehearsals.
If you have, ask this: “Have you migrated historical transaction data for an Australian business with a complex tax history? What went wrong, and how did you resolve the issue?
The question “what went wrong” is far more important than anything else. If nothing was broken, it means either they’re lying or they haven’t made enough migrations to have seen real complexity.
Data migration is not a technical issue; it’s a business process issue. The second critical piece of the data quality puzzle is the partner’s ability to get your finance team, accounts payable staff,f and operations managers to take ownership of the data quality process as well as the ETL tooling. If they are only intending to conduct migration without any formal client training sessions, then get out of there.
Integrations: Death Phase of Most Projects
The average mid-market Australian business has between five and fifteen systems that are connected, including Salesforce, payroll, third-party logistics, e-commerce, and legacy databases. Most of the chaos happens after a go-live due to integration failure, and it’s also the least preventable problem.
The question to ask is: “What is your preferred integration middleware/integration platform and why (and when would you pick something other than it?).”
A proficient ERP Consultant Australia will provide a comprehensive response: Azure for advanced enterprise situations, Power Automate for more modest workflows, and a positive answer on when direct APIs are better. If it’s an “evasive answer” or a size-fits-all response, it’s a red flag.
Ask this question: “What would you do if a third-party vendor isn’t willing to give you a sandbox to use for integration testing?”
This is a practical limitation, one that actually occurs all the time. If they haven’t encountered it, they haven’t done enough integrations.
Then you can ask something like: “How would you document the integration failure and recovery process for our internal IT team after the implementation?”
Most of the partners create integrations, and then they leave the scene. What you’re left with is a black box that you cannot troubleshoot. Documentation and knowledge transfer should be a part of the contractual deliverables, and not an afterthought.
Testing: The Phase No One Focuses On
It is commonly accepted that testing is essential and that there is a lack of investment in testing. User acceptance testing becomes three days, not three weeks, and budgets become tighter, and timelines are shortened.
So you need to ask this: What is your testing framework? Is it unit testing, integration testing, UAT, or performance testing? Who’s responsible for each phase, and what is the exit criteria?
The main word is “exit criteria. If the partner doesn’t have a clear and measurable criterion that testing meets, then you’re in for unresolved issues.
Next, you can ask: Have you faced peak periods (such as end-of-financial-year processing or month-end close) for a Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations implementation in Australia?
There are pressure points on the financial calendars in Australia. EOFY reconciliation running across multiple entities may not be something a partner expected to run in the markets if they had only been doing so in Northern Hemisphere markets.
Next query would be: “What is the defect management tool that you use and how do you prioritize the critical defects versus the non-critical defects before go-live?”
The answer demonstrates the maturity of a process. A knowledgeable D365 implementation partner will have a system of severity classifications, and not a shared spreadsheet.
Security & Compliance: Non-Negotiable in the Australian Context
Security configuration in Dynamics 365 is a compliance issue, not just an IT issue anymore, as the changes to the Australian Privacy Act continue to unfold and the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme is now well established.
Educate them on the way they design Role-Based Access Control (RBAC) and how they make sure it meets our audit and compliance needs. Security design should be performed at the architecture stage and not at the UAT stage. If a partner is setting up security roles in the last months before go-live, it’s a governance failure.
Ask them: How do you deal with data sovereignty needs, especially when it comes to Azure region configuration, for Australian clients?
All production data for Australian businesses should reside in Australian Azure datacentres (Australia East and Australia Southeast). It seems like a no-brainer, but it is important to make it clear and put it in writing. The Australian Privacy Act 1988 imposes legal obligations on organisations in relation to the location of personal information and its use to the extent that they fall within its scope.
Change Management: The Conversation Most Partners Avoid
Technology doesn’t fail; adoption does. Yet, change management is regarded as a “soft sell” and not as a discipline within implementation. User adoption is always found as one of the top reasons for ERP underperformance, as per Gartner ERP Research.
Ask the question: “Do you have a dedicated change management practitioner on your team, or is the project manager responsible for managing the change?”
These are varied subjects. If a project manager also has to manage change, that’s a red flag for the lack of seriousness about change.
When you start asking that question, you’re getting real questions: “How do you measure user adoption post go-live?” and “What’s your support model for the first 90 days?”
Implementations either get embedded or collapse during the first 90 days after go-live. A good Microsoft Dynamics partner in Australia will offer more than a helpdesk email address; they will have a well-defined hypercare model and a set of escalation procedures.
The Partner Interview Process
The partner interview process can be structured in many ways. Instead of a one-hour presentation, organize the evaluation over three sessions:
Discovery conversation
It includes culture fit, project governance model, and team structure. Who is doing the work on your project, and who is presenting in the sales meeting?
Technical deep-dive:
Apply the above questions. Round up your IT leader and CFO. Be specific, not general.
References:
Talk with the project manager and end-users, rather than the executive sponsor. Invite them to share their solutions for what they would change if they could.
Be sure to meet the actual delivery team before signing. The principal consultant that impresses you in the meeting is just there to sell and may not be involved in your project.
What You Won’t Hear About ERP Consultant Selection in Australia?
The ERP consulting market in Australia is segmented into two groups: the large global SIs with massive overhead, and the small boutique SIs without the depth of complex finance and operations situations. The sweet spot is found in the implementation partner, the right one to have the multi-disciplinary teams, but small enough to give your project your partner’s full attention.
What you will rarely hear: A fixed-price contract can be no friend. Adverse relationships frequently arise when there is a fixed-price contract that doesn’t allow for evolution of scope, while a clear time and materials engagement with a series of governance checkpoints and milestone gates can yield more favorable results.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission offers guidance to Australian businesses regarding technology procurement contracts that should be considered before signing a technology implementation engagement.
Final Verdict
A partner’s answer to tough questions is a piece of data. Confident and very clear answers and a recognition of previous errors will show maturity. If they do not answer the questions clearly, try to deflect the questions, or are eager to “get on with”, they should raise your concerns.
There’s so much on the line when it comes to implementing ERP in Australia that no one should choose a partner because of their presentation. Ask harder questions and demand specifics. Remember: the lowest cost proposal does not necessarily have the lowest risk.
Faq
In most cases, the implementation takes 6 to 18 months and is dependent on the scope of the implementation, the number of legal entities, and the complexity of integration. The aggressive timelines (especially the ones that guarantee ‘go-live’ in less than four months) should be taken with a grain of salt, as they are most likely to force a rushed testing process and end up in suboptimal user adoption.
A Microsoft Dynamics partner is an organisation that has a formal partner relationship with Microsoft (Microsoft Partner Network) and is qualified to sell, implement, and support Dynamics 365 solutions. Normally, a Microsoft Dynamics 365 consultant will be a single practitioner, possibly working within a partner organisation, or as a consultant of their own. Consider the organisation’s bench depth when making a selection, not the individual’s consultant qualifications.
Australian companies should verify that their Dynamics 365 system is running on Microsoft’s Australian Azure datacentres. This should be reflected in the implementation contract and checked during environment provisioning, and for organisations that may need to comply with the Australian Privacy Act or have sector-specific data residency requirements.
The top reasons for failure are poor quality data in the migration, under-investment in user training and change management, insufficient integration testing, and mismatched project governance between the client and the partner. Any implementation in which the go-live is seen as the end of the adoption process is almost always underperforming compared to the business case.
Cost of ownership should comprise license, implementation, data migration, third-party integration, training, post go-live support, and further customization. One of the frequent pitfalls is judging implementation offers based exclusively on professional services costs. Before you hire a partner, it’s useful to have some background information about the cost structure of Microsoft Dynamics 365 licensing.
