The following sections explain some areas that you need to think about as you begin the transition into system stabilization and optimization.
The first month-end closing is a key milestone for the system. This is a good litmus test for measuring the success of the implementation.
There will always be a need for reports that are critical for the executives and may have been missed during the previous phases. Watch out for such reports; some requests may be due to other system issues, such as a list of the invoices that had tax missing. Have a resource to respond to such requests. The guidelines given in Chapter 6, Reporting and BI will help in minimizing the need for these demands and will help you in responding to them.
As mentioned in Chapter 12, Go-live Planning, you will need resources to respond to the security-related issues, and then lock down access to the system.
It is common to see requests for adding more fields on the forms, or moving them from one from to another. Once the business has started using the system, and they have a better understanding of it, such requests will come up for improving efficiencies.
Once you are live, it is important to review usage patterns for the data. The need for additional indexes, optimizing long-running queries, expensive queries in terms of resource utilization, and so on should be checked regularly. It is like a new car; you need to service it soon after using it a little bit and keep servicing it at regular intervals rather than waiting for it to break down.
This is another item to pay attention to. You should undertake proactive maintenance rather than reacting to issues once they pop up. In high-volume environments, you can review the table-level data growth and pay more attention to the tables that are growing fast. You can also start reviewing the options for archiving or purging.
Pay attention to the areas that are in pain and arrange for training to address the training issues. It may not be training on just Dynamics AX; there may also be some generic tools that are different. For example, the AP team did not use CSV files before and formatting for the leading zeroes was not known to them. They would not be able to effectively utilize the AP invoice upload functionality.
Microsoft promotes the use of a partner network to engage with the customers. However, there are some plans that allow the customers to directly log incidents with Microsoft:
- The Business Ready Advantage Plus (BRAP) plan currently offers an unlimited number of incidents. I have seen this plan help customers in taking more ownership of their Dynamics AX environment and working directly with Microsoft on the issues. It also helps them save the consulting cost to work/coordinate on the product bugs.
- Engaging premier support is a good avenue to engage the experts from the premier support team to help with performance optimization, and retraining the internal resources for using the available tools.
Plan for annual support costs to be paid to Microsoft for staying up-to-date on the enhancement plan. Usually, it is 16 percent of your protected list price. The following are some of the points that you need to know about the enhancement plan:
- The customer is usually billed by the Microsoft Partner that is provided with the implementation services (unless you have an enterprise agreement with Microsoft). Ensure that you do not let it lapse.
- By paying the enhancement fees, you get access to the updates on the Customer Source, Lifecycle Services (LCS) portal, unlimited online trainings, access to product releases, service packs, hot fixes, and so on. It also protects your list price for future license upgrades.
- Prepare a process to periodically review and keep up with cumulative updates and hotfixes from Microsoft.
Now that you are live, you need to take a holistic look at the business processes and identify the factors causing pain and the way in which it can be simplified. Break them into smaller projects. During implementation, you should stay away from any major business process improvements to avoid fighting any political battles and to keep the amount of changes manageable. However, now you can start focusing on the business process improvements. The first part is to fix the processes broken due to the new system. The next part would be to look at strategic projects (which may come as part of PIR, mentioned in the next section).
Note
Once, I was given a $15 million challenge by a CFO. This was regarding their open AR. The open AR grew from ~$15 million to ~$35 million soon after going live. Of course, the CFO wanted to bring it back to ~$15 million, and he promised to stand reference for my organization if we helped in getting it back to $15 million within the next quarter. Many issues had contributed to the increased AR—invoice printing, delivery, user training in the collections team, low productivity of the collections team due to the manual processes, additional clicks, and the learning curve for the new system. Order entry, the returns process, and shipping issues made it even worse. Taking a holistic look at of all of these challenges, resolving the low-hanging fruit like training on the collection module, fixing a few invoicing bugs, statement printing, and form changes to reduce the number of clicks helped them get back to the $15 million mark.
The point is that reviewing specific issues/business processes in isolation can limit your ability to get to the root cause. You need to look at the big picture and take a holistic approach in defining the root cause of the factors contributing to the situation. For example, if the finance team has to make a lot of journal entries for corrections, they may want to automate the process. But the root cause of the issues really lies in the upstream business processes that can be handled by better training.
In addition to the processes that are reported as a challenge by business, efforts need to be put into finding the processes that are not working. Many times, several groups/resources in the organization will not proactively report the issues. They will simply accept them and put in more manual processes to work around those.
It is time to review the change requests that have been tracked during the implementation; most of the time, more than half are not needed any more, as the business learns more about the system or because things have changed.
- Work with the business to prioritize the tactical requests (low-effort changes) so that these can be taken up as the IT team gets a breather. Be careful in opening up the flood gates; you need to emphasize prioritizing the requests and planning the execution.
- Depending on the work load of the IT teams, it may be a good time to start looking at the low-hanging fruits (and these can be taken up while the team takes small breaks from the support issues) to help the business with their workload.
- Committing to deadlines on these change requests may be tough at this point, as you would have priorities changing day-to-day due to unknown production issues. Setting up a dedicated team for new efforts may be a good idea if these changes are needed to reduce the support issues or to improve business efficiency.