Four Ways to Make Your Upgrade Project a Success When Moving from Dynamics AX to Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management
Companies using Dynamics AX are steadily moving to Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management to take advantage of the variety of new features and the power of the cloud. An upgrade from Dynamics AX to Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain doesn’t happen overnight, so even if you’re not prepared to move tomorrow, you should start planning and budgeting today. This blog is part of an ongoing series that will highlight how you can start preparing today for your upgrade to ensure your processes, data, and teams are ready for upgrade. Preparing now will save time and money down the road.
1. Identify Business Drivers
Microsoft is ending mainstream support for Dynamics AX in the coming years, which is an immediate reason why your business needs to plan your upgrade to D365. But what other business drivers are leading your decision to upgrade? Talk to your organization’s leaders to develop a list of reasons why an upgrade is necessary. This list could include reallocating IT responsibilities away from your team and onto Microsoft, reducing hardware costs, giving your team the ability to work remotely, realigning business processes, and more. This initial list of business drivers will help you focus on goals as you compile a project plan.
2. Establish Success Criteria
Embarking on an ERP upgrade is an undertaking that requires planning and preparation but also opens new opportunities for your business to connect with customers and embrace data and new technologies. Engage in conversations with your leadership team and users to determine what a new system will need in order to be considered a success. Additionally, refer to your 10-year business goals. If you plan on growing your customer or employee numbers, will you need different functionality from your software than you have currently? What modern technologies would help you become more efficient that you don’t use? (think IoT, virtual agents, customer, vendor, or employee portals, business intelligence, etc.) How could you use technology to better serve your customers? Defining what will make the project a success will guide strategy discussions with your software partner.
3. Build Your Project Team
All successful ERP implementations or upgrades rely on a solid project team to lead the initiative and be a catalyst for change and user adoption across the enterprise. While your software partner will provide a project manager and various resources for your upgrade, you’ll need involvement from a variety of people from your organization.
- Project Lead
- IT Managers
- Project Managers
- Business Process Owners
4. Document Your Processes
Take the time to assemble any pre-existing process documentation. Having this information available will help your software implementation team assess your current processes, identify any areas for improvement, and suggest changes.
The information that you gather during this initial phase and the team that you build will serve as the foundation for your project. By putting a plan into place and working with the right partner, upgrading to Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management can be as seamless as possible. Learn more about how to upgrade from Dynamics AX to Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management by reaching out to Stoneridge Software and make plans to join us for our upcoming webinar.
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