ERP Implementations Are Still Failing. AI Won’t Fix That by Going Faster.
The September 2025 lawsuit filed by Zimmer Biomet against their implementation partner seems like a case study in how ERP projects go wrong. A $172 million claim for a premature SAP S/4HANA go-live. Fifty-one change orders totaling $23 million beyond the original baseline. This is not a new story. National [...]
When AI Cuts Headcount, It Usually Cuts Quality Too
Several clients have asked whether AI justifies itself in an ROI conversation through headcount reduction. Honest answer: it can pencil out that way. But if that's your primary goal, you're optimizing for the next quarter, not the next decade. Here's why headcount reduction is the wrong North Star for AI [...]
AI vs. Experience – The Unmatched Value of Human Dedication in Manufacturing
Why Skilled Workers Will Always Be Essential in Manufacturing, Even with AI Impressive Talent Every week I meet people who have been at a company for 26 years, and held 80% of the job titles. You might think of them as a jack of all trades, but I see them [...]
AI and Automation Can Transform Your Manufacturing Processes
With manufacturers facing so many pressures, the need to optimize operations and enhance productivity is more intense than ever. As a mentor and advocate for innovation in manufacturing, AI, and Microsoft technologies, I often encounter organizations grappling with repetitive tasks and inefficient workflows. “Too much clicking.” “We have to check/verify/validate [...]
Top Five Things You Should Know About AI Agents
The top five things you should know about agents on the Microsoft platforms. AI Technology is Capable I think many of us are aware that large consulting and tech companies will make announcements of products and capabilities before they are truly viable for a business. Sort of like academics believing [...]
Reflections on Agents and Pricing
My opinion, subject to change, on how AI is being priced today. Value-based pricing involves setting prices primarily based on the perceived or estimated value of a product or service to the customer, rather than solely on the cost of production or historical prices. This is what we should expect, [...]
Which Product Configurator is best with Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management?
Determining which product configurator to use is a major decision point for any business with configurable products to make. There is no correct decision. In my experience, any choice is a hard choice, and no action is also a choice. Throughout this article I will cover different approaches I have [...]
Modernizing Your ERP Is Preparing for AI
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have long been the backbone of companies with the value being integrated finance, inventory, supply chain, and customer management. Conversations with C level leaders have revealed an understanding that legacy ERP systems are barriers rather than enablers. AI is generally cloud-first because of the scalability [...]
Hidden Costs with Dynamics 365
With One Platform and One Admin initiatives of Microsoft, we are getting many benefits which are simplifying the way we maintain environments. I'm very much looking forward to these changes! Yet several times now people have asked me about "hidden costs" of owning Dynamics 365. Typically I am the one [...]
How do I Determine the Azure Region for my Production Dynamics 365 Environment with AI
There are a lot of considerations when looking at where a production environment should be deployed. The first question that comes to mind is whether we can "get away with" one production instance or need to support multiple production instances by region or even country/division. Additional factors apply: Latency, weighted [...]
Opportunity in Analytics for Microsoft Dynamics 365
Recently, I have had the opportunity to expand my purview to all of Microsoft's services (i.e. Azure), not just in the Microsoft Dynamics 365 arena. That includes all Azure products, i.e. analytics, IaaS, PaaS, machine learning, Power Platform, et cetera in addition to Dynamics. Being a long time (13 year) [...]
Throttling on Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations (Supply Chain Management) Starting 10.0.19
Priority-Based Throttling is starting on version 10.0.19. This has caused some concern for users who are heavily dependent on OData or Custom Web Service calls from third party software, i.e. ISVs, EDI, Integrations, web portals, custom web apps. Everything here is up to date as of July of 2021. I [...]
Remove $id from Custom Web Service JSON – Dynamics 365 F&O
Priority-Based Throttling in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations (F&O, SCM) is almost mandatory! If your solution or integration architecture included the transaction orchestration being done outside of F&O (multiple OData calls within a transaction; rollback means making more OData calls), one of the things you can do to adjust [...]
Link to an Azure Logic App Run
Sometimes my Azure Logic Apps are sending emails internally, both for the happy path and for exceptions. Toon had a great post, Navigate directly to the Logic Apps run details | Your Azure Coach, explaining how to create a direct link to the Azure Logic App run. The idea is [...]
How do you manage your slides and decks?
The more I'm involved in sales, pre-sales, and training... the more I desire for a super robust presentation management / slide library. I have found some solutions, and I'm very interested in hearing what others are doing! PowerPoint capabilities SharePoint slide libraries are gone, but Teams is in, and [...]
Find Unused Labels – Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations
How many of your labels do you maintain, and yet are not being displayed in any way to a user? I set out to answer this question on one of my projects, and found 10%, over 100 labels, were created and abandoned as functionality was changed over time. These [...]