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Migrating to Business Central: A Quick Start Guide

For your business to succeed, you’ll need to consider taking advantage of the best tools available. Microsoft has a host of these tools — and their offering for Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software is second to none.

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is one of the best tools you can use to plan your business, letting you track resources and plan efficiently and effectively — all with the power of the cloud. And, with innovations like automation added into the mix, Business Central truly is a tool of the next generation.

In this article, we’ll go over the ins and outs of Business Central. We’ll take you through the basics, and share the most important steps in migrating your own company to Business Central.

What is Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central?

Tracking your resources efficiently and accurately is essential when managing a business. Microsoft’s highly rated, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, is here to help you achieve that — and more.

Business Central is a suite of business management tools that are designed to support small and medium businesses. As an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, Business Central allows you to effectively and productively manage your company, with features to streamline business processes, quickly control your finances and project costs, improve sales and customer service, and operate supply, vendors & e-commerce, all from one handy application.

Why Migrate to Business Central?

Migrating to Business Central is a game-changer for any organisation. By utilising the wide range of features included within Business Central, your company will thrive like never before.

Some common use cases include businesses that:

  • Have many standardised business processes that can be automated
  • Require a single solution to manage multiple elements of the business
  • Are looking for a product that seamlessly integrates with other Microsoft products
  • Spend significant time running reports and analysing data
  • Require a flexible solution that will scale with their growth

Key Steps in the Migration Process

Assessing Your Current System

The first step in migrating your company to Business Central is to assess your business’s current system. For some businesses, your system may be another ERP provider, such as Oracle, SAP or Sage. However, for many small businesses, the system may be a series of Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.

In this audit phase, businesses should assess what functionality they require from an ERP solution. Typically the functionality will fall into one of the following categories:

  • Financial management
  • Business intelligence
  • Sales management
  • Supply chain management
  • Project management
  • Service management
  • Warehouse management
  • Manufacturing

Once the assessment is complete, it will be possible to select which Business Central modules are essential to derive the most value out of the product.

Planning the Migration

Creating an in-depth migration plan is essential for a smooth transition to Business Central. You should consider every step of the process — the beginning, middle, and end of the migration process, and future goals whilst working in Business Central. 

Here are some key considerations for a successful migration plan:

  • Plan Selection: Evaluate which 365 Business Central plan is best for your business.
  • Migration Type: Research which execution plan is best for you — Big Bang, Phased, or Hybrid.
  • Module Assessment: Consider what modules are required for your business.
  • Rollout: Consider issues during the rollout process — who your testing team will be, how the rollout may affect your company’s workflow, etc.

Data Migration

Having a data migration plan is crucial whilst moving to Business Central. Your data is valuable — if not handled properly, your business will be at a major risk of having a data breach, or even data loss.

This is where a migration partner is essential, as it will give you the confidence that all business-critical data and processes are migrated to Business Central, so you can make the most from day 1 after implementation.

If there is a period where both the new and legacy solutions are used in parallel, it may require employees to enter data twice, but ideally, this is only for the short term.

Testing and Validation

Before rolling out Business Central to your whole company, it’s highly recommended to build an early testing team. A testing team will be a small group of employees, ideally from a range of ages, tech knowledge, and sectors of your company, to gain access to the cloud earlier and generate feedback.  

By building an early testing team, you can gain valuable insight such as feedback and reviews, showcasing how Business Central works with every aspect of your company. The employees involved in the early testing scheme can also help facilitate employee training once the cloud is fully rolled out in your business.

Training and Support

The final, and arguably most important step in the migration process is to have accurate and reliable employee training and support. Moving to a new platform is a big change — and everyone in your company must be up to speed on how to use the new systems for the system to work as intended.

Regular training courses — as well as information sent out to employees through emails and leaflets — will help employees be able to get to grips with Dynamics 365 Business Central. Microsoft has a host of informational videos and articles on all of their products, so a great place to start is looking at their official materials.

The Importance of Working with a Migration Partner

Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central is simply a must-have for any modern company. However, migrating your entire business to Business Central alone can prove to be difficult and tedious — which is why partnering with a Service Provider is essential.

If you’re looking for a helping hand in getting your business started with Business Central, reach out to us today. Our experts are here to help you and will ensure that you have everything you need to get up and running — providing you with support and maintenance for your whole journey.  

Get in touch now and see how we can help.