Few businesses reach a connected operation in a single move. These are the stages we take them through — where we start depends on where you are today, and you do not have to walk them all at once.
Spreadsheets, email approvals and re-keyed data. Every department has numbers, and no two sets agree.
Dynamics 365 Finance, procurement and Supply Chain establish one ledger, one agreed set of supplier terms and one stock figure for the whole business.
Sales, Commerce, Marketing, HR & Payroll and the delivery arm join that core instead of standing beside it, so a customer is one customer everywhere.
Power Platform takes over the approvals, reconciliations and hand-offs that used to move by hand.
Fabric and OneLake put every workload on one copy of the data; Power BI and Copilot Studio turn it into forecasts, recommendations and answers.
Stages 02 and 03 run on Microsoft Dynamics 365; stages 04 and 05 add Power Platform and the Fabric data platform on top. Here is how all eleven modules played out for one business.
One company, followed the whole way through. A regional distributor and retailer: six branches, three warehouses, selling through its own shops, online and to trade — and installing and servicing what it sells. Every figure on this page belongs to this one business.
These three are what the closing section is measured against — not the software.
Eleven modules, in the order this business took them. Jump to any of them from the rail on the left, and watch the platform beside it assemble itself as each one goes live.
An illustrative composite drawn from typical implementations, not a specific client.
The ledger
Close drops from weeks to days — and the numbers stop being negotiable between departments.
Receives posted entries from Purchasing, Commerce and HR & Payroll; publishes the closed period to Fabric & OneLake.
The risk. Everything downstream inherits the chart of accounts, so a rushed design is expensive to unpick later.
How we handled it. We froze the chart with finance and audit before a single transaction was migrated, and ran two parallel closes against the old ledgers before switching.
What the business buys
You buy on the terms you negotiated, and you can prove it when the invoice arrives.
Raises demand from Supply Chain, posts commitments and invoices to Finance, and routes approvals through Power Platform.
The risk. Tight matching rules stop invoices dead when the receipt is late, and Accounts Payable feels it first.
How we handled it. We set tolerance bands per category and gave AP a queue with a reason code on every held invoice, rather than a silent block.
Stock across three warehouses
Less capital sitting on shelves, and fewer stockouts on the lines that actually sell.
Signals demand to Purchasing, commits stock for Commerce and Project Ops, and values inventory into Finance.
The risk. Reorder points calculated on bad history simply automate the old mistakes.
How we handled it. We ran the calculated points in advisory mode for two cycles and let planners overrule them, then promoted only the ones that held up.
The pipeline
You can see what is really going to close, early enough to do something about the gap.
Prices from Commerce, checks availability in Supply Chain, hands won deals to Project Ops, and feeds the forecast to Power BI.
The risk. A pipeline nobody updates is worse than a spreadsheet, because it looks authoritative.
How we handled it. Stage exit criteria are enforced in the form, and the weekly review is run from the live board rather than an exported copy.
The retail arm
One customer and one price list, whichever channel they buy through.
Draws stock from Supply Chain, prices Sales quotes, posts takings to Finance, and sends behaviour to Marketing.
The risk. One catalogue means one mistake reaches every channel at once.
How we handled it. Price and product changes go through a staged publish with a preview against each channel, rather than straight to live.
Demand and the customer record
Marketing spend is aimed at people likely to buy, and the revenue it produced can be traced back.
Reads behaviour from Commerce, hands qualified leads to Sales, and measures itself against won revenue in Power BI.
The risk. Unifying customer records across channels surfaces every duplicate and consent gap at once.
How we handled it. Matching ran in review mode first, and consent was re-captured per channel before any journey was switched on.
The people system
Payroll reconciles itself against the ledger, and compliance survives the next regulatory change.
Posts labour cost to Finance, supplies technician availability to Project Ops, and its journal is reconciled in Power BI.
The risk. Payroll is the one system where a rounding error becomes a trust problem the same afternoon.
How we handled it. Three parallel runs against the old spreadsheets, reconciled to the fils, before anyone was paid from the new system.
Delivering the work
You can see margin per job while there is still time to do something about it.
Takes won work from Sales, consumes parts from Supply Chain, draws technicians from HR, and accrues to Finance.
The risk. Field capture only works if it works with one hand, on site, on bad signal.
How we handled it. The mobile flow was cut to four taps and made offline-first, with technicians in the design from the first week.
The work between the modules
The repetitive work between systems stops consuming your team's week.
Sits between every module — carrying approvals for Purchasing, hand-offs from Sales to Project Ops, and exceptions into Power BI.
The risk. Flows built by whoever needed them become an estate nobody owns.
How we handled it. Everything runs in managed solutions with named owners and a monthly review of failures and orphans.
One copy of the data
Arguments about whose number is right stop, because there is only one number.
Reads from every operational module and serves Power BI and Copilot Studio — it is the floor the answers stand on.
The risk. Centralising the data makes every existing quality problem everyone's problem at once.
How we handled it. Quality rules run at ingestion with an owner per domain, so a bad feed is quarantined and named rather than quietly averaged in.
Answers, not reports
Decisions get made on today's numbers, by the people who own them.
Stands entirely on Fabric & OneLake, and closes the loop by feeding decisions back into Sales, Supply Chain and Marketing.
The risk. An agent that sounds confident and is wrong destroys trust faster than no agent at all.
How we handled it. It answers only from the governed model, shows the measure behind every figure, and says it does not know rather than guessing.
Each module is worth something on its own. What matters is what they are worth together — and whether the business got the three things it asked for at the start.
The work itself got better, because the people doing it can see what is happening while they can still change it.
The same output for far less effort — and the effort that came back went into work that pays.
Capital came off the shelves, spend came under contract, and the company became straightforward to audit and to finance.
The operating rhythm changed. Questions get answered by the person who has them, on the day they have them.
The seventh branch inherits a chart of accounts, payroll rules, a stock model and a price list that already run. Opening one is now a configuration task, not another finance hire and another spreadsheet.
Five copies of the data became one in OneLake, and twelve conflicting definitions of the same measure became none. The number in the board pack is the number in the dashboard, because there is only one of them.
One catalogue and one price list behind retail, online and wholesale. A customer gets the same price and the same stock answer whichever door they come through, and the business can see them as one customer.
A business that used to review itself monthly, in arrears, now reviews itself continuously — which is the difference between reporting the past and running the company.