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"One of the reasons I was able to kind of progress into some of the roles I progressed into was I had that exposure to literally every single part of a business. That for me was my college, it was my university." - Kerry Hughes Wright
The Catch Up Podcast brings you candid conversations with industry leaders, consultants, and change-makers from the Microsoft Dynamics and tech ecosystem. Hosted by Phillip Blackmore, Sales Director at Catch Resource Management, each episode dives into the real stories behind business transformation, career pivots, and scaling success. Expect thoughtful interviews, practical insights, and honest reflections. Brought to you by Catch Resource Management, a leading UK recruitment specialist for Microsoft Dynamics and ERP talent, this podcast is your inside track to the people shaping the future of enterprise technology.
[00:00:00] Phillip Blackmore: Today I'm joined on the Catch Up Podcast by Kerry Hughes-Wright.
[00:00:03] Kerry Hughes-Wright: You've got to deal with people, you've got to deal with process.
[00:00:07] Phillip Blackmore: Well the product doesn't change. I mean, products evolve, but fundamentally, the product is what the product is.
[00:00:12] Kerry Hughes-Wright: That's the thing that doesn't change. Anybody coming in new to D 365, I would say give yourself time to learn your craft.
[00:00:22] Phillip Blackmore: Yes, don't oversell yourself.
[00:00:24] Kerry Hughes-Wright: And out of the blue I had this recruitment agency, contact me, went on this telephone call with a couple of guys, and we realized within a few minutes into that call that there were crossed wires.
[00:00:37] Phillip Blackmore: It is truly one of those really true success stories.
[00:00:40] Kerry Hughes-Wright: You should not have asked me that question, Phil, because you're gonna have to stop me talking.
[00:00:47] Phillip Blackmore: Morning, Kerry. How are you?
[00:00:48] Kerry Hughes-Wright: Morning. I'm good, Phil. Thank you. How are you?
[00:00:51] Phillip Blackmore: Yeah, very good. How's the jet lag back from the US?
[00:00:54] Kerry Hughes-Wright: You know what it's like? You just get back to normal. As soon as you sort of hit Monday, you're back to normal.
[00:01:00] Phillip Blackmore: Kerry, what I wanted to have a little chat about today and what I think is a great thing to, I guess, sort of share some insights with our audience is if we start with a little bit about your, I guess your journey from, you know, where we land today, you as leading a large scale global D365 program.
But I guess for many people they probably, some people starting off their journey, they kind of think, well, how do you land there, what does a career path look like to get to there? So it'd be really interesting just to hear kind of, I guess, how you got into the IT Technology space and was it the first role?
Was it project program management orientated, or did you come in a different capacity when you started in that market?
[00:01:38] Kerry Hughes-Wright: You should not have asked me that question, you're going to have to stop me talking.
[00:01:42] Phillip Blackmore: That's fine. I'll interject if I need to.
[00:01:45] Kerry Hughes-Wright: One thing that is really relevant, actually, I was helping with some interviews recently. So we were bringing in an additional trainer into the US team, and there were three of us who were involved in that interview process and one of the candidates, she wasn't successful. But she was really impressive and she's relatively young. She's relatively early in her career,and when she was talking me through her experience, I couldn't help but comment to her that I thought she was making some really good decisions about the roles that she was wanting to move into.
So she'd started off in a BA role actually in legal. Then somebody had introduced her to D365, and so she'd got into that role as a BA and then got to know the application and wanted to learn more. So she'd invested in some training and then managed to get herself into a position as an application consultant, and so she's building her experiences. That I thought was really impressive, and she and I are staying in touch cause I said I would sort of be happy to help mentor her.
Flipping back to me. I've grown my experience each step of the way. So I think Phil, you know, I left school at 16, so back in the day I've been working for now 42 years of my life. So anybody listening, they can do the maths.
My very first job and it was, you know, I was smart. I was in the top form all the way through school. Should have gone to college. Should have gone to uni. But the circumstances were such for me that couldn't happen and so I was really fortunate though in the fact that my first position was with a very small business.
It was a paper merchant. I had the best boss ever. I am still in touch with him today. He's now 82. I see him every three months. We go for lunch.
[00:03:55] Phillip Blackmore: Fabulous.
[00:03:55] Kerry Hughes-Wright: I credit him with where I've got to. He credits me for the fact that he always says, you were always a hard worker. I was 16, 17 and he encouraged me to go to night school. So it was just a paper merchant. I joined as an invoice clerk
[00:04:11] Phillip Blackmore: Yep.
[00:04:12] Kerry Hughes-Wright: And I went to night school two nights a week, did a B-Tech. Finance, business management, marketing, all of the kind of modules that go with that, and I was hungry. I was a hard worker. I was encouraged to learn. I was given more responsibility.
So within a couple of years I was in a position within this small paper merchant as an office manager. So I was then, 20 years old. I then was recruiting my invoice clerk. I learned finance through that organisation again. Through my night school that taught me the basics of finance, you know, but I worked sort of a manual cashbook in the day. That's how long ago this was. We had a sales department. We had a large warehouse. We had distribution. We had all of the parts of a business that go into an ERP system
[00:05:12] Phillip Blackmore: Yeah. Absolutely.
[00:05:13] Kerry Hughes-Wright: A finance and operation system, and then when I was, I think 21, 22, we were then implementing our first management information system as it was called day.
My boss, Alan, he gave me the opportunity to basically work with him and work with the implementation partner, a company in Stockport, Manchester. And so I used to trundle over with Alan to Manchester for meetings with this implementation partner. So we then engaged with them. And so at 22/23, I was leading from my business' side. What is it that we do? How do we sell? How do we run our warehouse? How are we going to code our customers? How are we going to code our stock? How are we going to identify our bin locations?
And when I think about that now, it's bonkers in a way because you see so many people who specialise in certain areas and I think for me, one of the reasons I was able to kind of progress into some of the roles I progressed into was I had that exposure to literally every single part of a business that for me was my college, it was my university.
When I was, then in my early thirties, early to mid thirties, I always had a bit of a hangup that I hadn't done College and Uni, even though I'd done night school and so I then put myself through a part-time MBA.
This is quite funny actually. My final year I had to write a dissertation. My dissertation was the impact of change management on technology projects.
[00:07:00] Phillip Blackmore: Wow.
[00:07:01] Kerry Hughes-Wright: What I wrote is still relevant today. So I was writing about the importance of change management business transformation. The fact that the technology is the easiest part, but it's the journey that the business goes on.
[00:07:14] Phillip Blackmore: Yeah, absolutely. The people are part of it.
[00:07:16] Kerry Hughes-Wright: I then after about a year, with the support of my boss and the relationship had built with the implementation partner, they had given me an open invitation if I wanted to move into technology, then they would happily talk to me.
So I think when I was 25, 26, I then joined that company in Stockport and I joined them going back to where I was saying about, the lady that I interviewed recently in her journey, I had that extensive business knowledge, but I didn't have consulting knowledge. I didn't have the skills or expertise that allow you to move into that delivery world. I then joined there as a trainer. Then from a trainer, learnt the system better than I knew. Cause I already knew the system, as you can imagine, as an end user, and then moved into consulting.
So then got hands-on, application consultant knowledge, experience. As part of that, you naturally do BA work, you'd get into processes. Then I left that company, so I was working for one of our clients. One of our clients then offered me a position, so I was 27, 28, at this time. A client offered me a position to lead a UK wide rollout of that business application. So this was in the hospitality sector. It was drinks industry. They were a drinks wholesale and manufacturer. We had probably 20 depots across England, Scotland, Wales, and so I led that for a couple of years. Worked as part of a small team.
But actually if I roll forward now 30 years, I'm now leading a global rollout. Much more extensive, much more complex. But it's almost bringing all of those aspects of consulting, business process knowledge, application knowledge, and at that point I was then layering on the project management and then started moving into the program management and from there I moved back into the delivery side. But I was then moving into, I think I went back into the delivery side in project program management roles, and then round about the time I got to know you, which was scarily enough, Phil. I think it was roundabout 2008, 2009, maybe?
[00:09:47] Phillip Blackmore: I think, yep. That'd be about right. I think, was it 2e2?
[00:09:50] Kerry Hughes-Wright: It was 2e2. Yeah, yeah. So before 2e2, I had then progressed through, I would say my experience within business. Then starting off in training, then application consultant, then project management, and that doesn't necessarily suit everybody, but that was my natural progression and that then led me into delivery leadership roles.
So I first worked with NAV.
[00:10:20] Phillip Blackmore: Which version? Do you remember?
[00:10:23] Kerry Hughes-Wright: Oh my goodness, me. It was before what was at the time, known as Project Green, and they were then starting to work on bringing all of those together, but it never quite came off. So yeah, that was early days, NVision. So I was then back in on the delivery side and then got heavily involved in redeveloping a legacy sort of industry specialist application into NVision and that was really interesting because we basically looked at all of the processes. We looked at how those processes were managed in legacy, in a legacy application, and redeveloped those, redesigned those on a NVision platform. So, you know, a lot of partners will specialise in, specific sectors that got me heavily into the hospitality sector.
[00:11:15] Phillip Blackmore: And then was it 2e2 to K3?
[00:11:17] Kerry Hughes-Wright: Yeah, so 2e2 was the transition from NAV to AX, and 2e2 was a large acquisitive organisation and the AX practice as it was in the day was kind of a small piece of that. If you remember, 2e2 also did Oracle. They also did SAP. Yeah. Did a lot of infrastructure stuff as well.
2e2 was an acquisitive organisation, and, you know, they had SAP as we said, Oracle, AX. They did a lot of infrastructure projects as well. So I basically took over that practice. Whilst it was still relatively young and spent a couple of years there, my main reason for moving on was I think I could see the writing on the wall with 2e2, unfortunately, and I think about six, nine months after, after I'd left, 2e2 had folded, unfortunately.
[00:12:12] Phillip Blackmore: I remember we had a couple of contractors there still, unfortunately, at the time. We were impacted a little bit financially by that. The role, you then moved to K3, what was the role that you moved into when you sort of moved across? What was the first role that you took on?
Did you go in there as a practice director or did you go in, you did, yeah.
[00:12:30] Kerry Hughes-Wright: I did, and I'd actually interviewed with K3 at the time I was joining 2e2, but there wasn't really a clear role.
[00:12:37] Phillip Blackmore: Yeah.
[00:12:37] Kerry Hughes-Wright: By the time I was joining K3, AX was gaining more maturity. I mean, it certainly wasn't where it is as D365, but it was tail end of AX 09. It was going into AX 2012. K3's expertise was NAV and their industry expertise was retail and they were building out their retail functionality on the AX platform.
[00:13:08] Phillip Blackmore: Did they build an ISV in the end?
[00:13:10] Kerry Hughes-Wright: Yeah, we had an ISV yeah. AX'S Fashion, I think it was called.
[00:13:14] Phillip Blackmore: LS Retail or...
[00:13:15] Kerry Hughes-Wright: Yeah. In the Netherlands. A very good partner, part of K3. So yeah, I basically joined K3 to build up the AX practice. It was still relatively small when I joined. Again, heavy recruitment, if you remember.
[00:13:33] Phillip Blackmore: Yeah, it was, yeah. Busy. Yeah.
[00:13:35] Kerry Hughes-Wright: And an awful lot around the methodology. And that's where I think for me, in that sort of delivery, practice leader role. The fact I had done consulting training, I'd worked really closely with developers building out the platform.
I knew enough technically to be dangerous when it came to sort of architecture. What was the right way to go about things. And I've always had a strength in organising, controlling, project management. So all of those pieces just naturally come together. One of the most important things is people. You know, you want to bring in the right people. You want to make sure you've got the right experience. Having a methodology that everybody follows as well is critical. And we had, you know, Microsoft got everybody off to such a good start with SureStep. Everybody built on that, and even today, is a well extended version of that.
So as I've grown in my career. I've learned, and I've worked with different partners and I've worked with different clients. You tweak your methodology, you bring it up to date, you know the areas where you get that repeatability and you've got to make it easy for people coming in to work with that methodology.
[00:14:58] Phillip Blackmore: Yeah, and then onto Lloyd's. Slightly different role.
Yeah, I remember you ringing me about that saying I've just been for an interview for what I thought was going to be a D365, or sorry a Dynamics AX practice leadership role, but it turns out it's CRM, but they've still offered me the job.
[00:15:16] Kerry Hughes-Wright: Yeah. Yeah. The timing of that was wonderful. It really was because anybody who's been around AX, D365 for a number of years, this was 2015 time, and AX 2012 was sort of at the end of its usefulness, so to speak. Microsoft were then building out into the cloud, so that's when they were really starting to look at what does next generation look like. But on the partner side, it was a really difficult time because.
[00:15:54] Phillip Blackmore: Oh, absolutely. It was mayhem.
[00:15:55] Kerry Hughes-Wright: You couldn't sell. You couldn't sell AX 2012 anymore because it was, you know.
[00:16:01] Phillip Blackmore: Did they try to release
AX 7?,
[00:16:04] Kerry Hughes-Wright: Yeah.
[00:16:04] Phillip Blackmore: It came out as like AX 2015. But I remember vividly talking to partners and people within the partner channel at that time that were saying, we are having customers coming to us saying, look, we're on 2012. Where do we go?
[00:16:16] Kerry Hughes-Wright: What do we do next?
[00:16:17] Phillip Blackmore: To partner channel for about 12 or 18 months we sat in limbo Land where they're saying...
[00:16:22] Kerry Hughes-Wright: We were, we were.
[00:16:23] Phillip Blackmore: We don't actually have clarity in terms of what we can tell customers about what's coming next, and also then you mentioned the piece about the cloud because then the whole licensing model changed.
So then you're getting customers saying, well, this is how we used to buy our licenses. We'd buy them, we'd own them. Now, it was almost like you were then moving on to, what I sort of familiarise with in sort of like layman's terms is like a mobile phone contract. You sign up for 24 months and you pay your 30 pounds a month, as opposed to buying your phone outright for £1500 pounds. But you know, it really was a strange sort of period in the world ofthat partner channel world.
[00:16:57] Kerry Hughes-Wright: I
t was, and that Lloyd's opportunity for me came out of the blue. It was just perfect timing because we were all in a no man's land, as you say. You couldn't sell, you couldn't tell your clients what the next thing was going to look like. Licensing model changing, everything was a bit disrupted, and out of the blue I had this recruitment agency contact me. Just spoke about Microsoft. even in the blurb that they sent me, it said nothing about CRM at all and so I went on this telephone call with a couple of guys from Lloyds of London, not Lloyd's bank.
[00:17:35] Phillip Blackmore: Yeah. Lloyd's of London. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:17:36] Kerry Hughes-Wright: And we realised within a few minutes into that call that there were crossed wires. I must have said something because they said, hang, hang on. You know, let's just carry on talking, and it's not as if, I didn't know CRM at all Phil, because CRM if you remember, was part of AX.
So I had some exposure and I knew the principles, the processes, which I always think are the most important things.
So they explained what they were looking for, they were looking to build out a CRM Center of Excellence within Lloyd's. The insurance market was maturing. They knew that they needed to do things differently and they wanted somebody to come in andand build that capability, and they'd been talking to techies, they'd been talking to technical architects, and I came at it from a process perspective.
I was asking more about. What's the business case? What you want to achieve? Why are you doing this, as opposed to asking about the technology, and so I went in, I met them and they offered me the position and I spent two absolutely wonderful years there. I loved Lloyd's.
[00:18:41] Phillip Blackmore: A great change of environment though cause you go from working at like sort of K3, essentially like large industrial estate, sort of Abingdon way, and then you then flip that to then you are getting the train in and out of London. I don't think it was every day, or was it sort of three or four days a week?
[00:18:56] Kerry Hughes-Wright: I was cycling to the train station. With my rucksack with my laptop in the back, and then I got on the train. So did an hour's work on the train into London and then ran from Waterloo to Bank. Lloyds had really good facilities. They had massive cloak room, they had showers, so I was still at my desk by eight o'clock and then everybody finished at half four, five o'clock.
[00:19:22] Phillip Blackmore: Yeah, I remember you saying. It was the change for you. It was that change where you're used to sort of being still going at eight, nine o'clock at night, working weekends, and at Lloyds it's what are you doing? It's half past five. You got to get out, we're shutting the doors.
[00:19:34] Kerry Hughes-Wright: Honestly, honestly, so I would then leg it back to Waterloo train station. I'd be on the 20 past five train home. They were some of my shortest working days ever. I also got, which I loved at Lloyds, so the way that we built that practice, the way I built that practice, and again, I think you helped me on this. We decided to not go with a partner.
I brought in a BA, I brought in a Consultant and I brought in an Architect, and then I worked with MVPs. We didn't actually engage with a partner. There was one occasion where we did engage with a partner. There was some work that we were doing, and my team didn't have the expertise, and so at that point it was a specific piece of work and we brought in the expertise that we needed. One of the members of that team is still there and has made a fantastic career at Lloyds.
[00:20:31] Phillip Blackmore: Absolutely.
[00:20:31] Kerry Hughes-Wright: It's a pleasure to see and it's a pleasure to see that from small acorns grow great things. 10 years ago, I joined to build that practice and it's thriving and crazily enough, this is just the way that things are. so what that did for me, that gave me exposure to CE functionality, in the background D365 was evolving, but I had two years fully immersed in CE processes. How the solution is configured. Technically how it works differently to FO and I think that is key. It's still key even in today's world of the supposed connected D365 platform, these two applications do behave differently.
The other exposure it gave me was to a different approach, so different methodology I had to rethink. So we worked very agile. We needed to deliver regularly and demonstrate to Lloyds that we were adding value. I brought somebody in to kind of, guide us as a team. I wasn't an expert in agile at the time. We were working in four week sprints, which suited us.
Lloyds was very much wanting to promote agile as well, so there was a lot of training that was available to us. But that was really good for me having that change in approach, change in methodology, change in application and then roll on two years and I'd succeeded and I was kind of loved all of the aspects. Got involved in loads of voluntary stuff whilst I was at Lloyd's because I had the time, but I was kind of, not bored...
[00:22:22] Phillip Blackmore: Itchy feet. Challenge yourself a bit more.
So you really did do that though, in your next role.
[00:22:28] Kerry Hughes-Wright: By that time, D365 had then gained, not maturity, but it wasthere.
[00:22:35] Phillip Blackmore: There was clarity of the product and how to deliver it and sell it and then if we bring you up to that point in which, so you leave Lloyds to London and you go in as practice lead at HCL.
Did you go into a specific sort of, I guess, work stream within the HCL practice piece, or were you kind of across industry in there? Or did they bring you into focus specifically like, okay, we want you to look after the housing, or we want you to look after private?
[00:22:58] Kerry Hughes-Wright: It transitioned. So there was a leadership team for HCL Power Objects. That leadership team crossed FO, CE, Housing. By then I'd done hospitality and retail. But I've worked across many different sectors.
Again, HCLs massive grown through acquisition. So I joined to again, grow, shape, the FO practice methodology people that ended up transitioning into the CE world as well, because one of my colleagues took some time out. They had a sabbatical for around six months. I ended up sort of overseeing not just the FO from a growth perspective, but also the CE side. Which, was more mature, but then you have the housing side as well.
My role there was very much in that practice leadership role, but in that practice leadership role, you typically are engaging with the Execs of your clients. You're making sure that the team are delivering in the right way. You're there to support the team. You're there to sort of, help develop the team, help them through any difficulties, manage the sort of client relationship. Technology programs, I think at their heart, whilst we think that they're about technology and they are about delivering technology, I still say today, that's the easiest part.
You've got to deal with people, you've got to deal with process,
[00:24:34] Phillip Blackmore: The product doesn't change. Products evolve, but fundamentally the product is what the product is.
[00:24:39] Kerry Hughes-Wright: That's the thing that doesn't change.
[00:24:41] Phillip Blackmore: Yeah. Human beings do, emotions do.
[00:24:44] Kerry Hughes-Wright: Exactly and moving people from the processes that they know and love and in sectors like housing, you have got people as you do in lots of businesses who've been doing what they do for many years. They're comfortable with what they do, they're comfortable with the systems that they know and taking them on that journey and managing them through that, the change management, the business transformation side. I think I've said it to you before and I always used to say it when I was on the partner side. I would always worked heavily with sales teams. Was always big part of pre-sales and I would always get kicked under the table by some of my colleagues because I was very open and honest about what these programs mean to the client.
[00:25:32] Phillip Blackmore: Yeah, they've got to take a level of ownership as well.
[00:25:35] Kerry Hughes-Wright: Exactly.
[00:25:35] Phillip Blackmore: It's not just kick it over to the partner and let them get on with it. You've got to invest your time and energy. It's your program, it's your business.
[00:25:43] Kerry Hughes-Wright: I know, but Phil, how many times have you seen it where programs get into difficulties and when you start peeling the layers back it's misunderstanding at the outset. Expectation management that I think quite often the partners sell these things as if they're going to is kind of deliver everything and underplay the part the client really needs to step in and do.
And I know some partners, over recent years have tried to kind of sell a different model whereby it's supposedly more templated and we'll this and that and then you do this. But even that, I think unless that client has got a really strong team, which is going to bring us bang up to date in a second, unless that client has got a really strong team. It's not possible. It's such a journey that they need to go on. So HCL, Power Objects, again, loved it.
What I have loved in all of those roles has been bringing in new talent. It's always been something that I've enjoyed as most partners do. I've led with the support of colleagues, but we have run, I'm going to say apprenticeship schemes, consultant in training. I've done that many times and we have to do that to keep bringing new talent into the D365 market.
[00:27:10] Phillip Blackmore: Absolutely.
[00:27:11] Kerry Hughes-Wright: You and I both know it's grown. We know that there's so much work out there, but if anybody listening to this, anybody coming in new to D365, I would say give yourself time to learn your craft.
[00:27:27] Phillip Blackmore: Yes. Don't oversell yourself.
[00:27:30] Kerry Hughes-Wright: Don't think that you've been at it for two years and therefore well, surely by now I should be a senior consultant. It takes time. Learn your craft. You know, when we've gone through annual appraisals. I've always said there is nothing wrong with wanting to be the best you can be in the role you are in.
Until you are ready to move on. See I think, I do think that is really important that we bring in new talent, but I think new talent needs to recognise there is a lot to learn and experience for me is everything. It really is.
[00:28:06] Phillip Blackmore: It's vital they take their time. We see it far too often, people wanting to run before they can walk, asking for salaries or looking to go contracting before they should go contracting. But they haven't really, as you say, learnt their craft properly, and the problem then is you're always mismanaging expectations.
If you are asking for a salary of X and it's 20, 30% above probably what's in line with your skillset, you then there's a disparity. Client that's hired you is thinking they're getting X. Your delivery capabilities are Y then the individual doing the job's not happy because they're being put under a level of pressure and having work put upon them that they haven't got the skillset or the capability to deliver.
That's then when you get the issues. Then the customers who are receiving that, if it's from a consultancy, that resource, you know, someone's been put in as a finance lead when they've only been touching the product for three or four years. Take your time, learn the product. There's great opportunities there, but you've just got to be a little patient.
So then we go from HCL onto current day, which is you took the move out of the partner channel in the permanent world to make that kind of leap and go contracting, and I remember at the time, speaking to about the organisation at the time who you're working with now, and sort of saying that I think this could be, you know, for a first sort of step into that world, it could be a great opportunity. Organisation that have had a, they were on Microsoft Dynamics, they'd tried it, had a few issues, maybe it couldn't quite landed properly. But you know, you kind of go in there and have that background of your experience and we talk about really shaping experience.
You know, you couldn't have gone in there really for them at a better time, but also for you, a great opportunity to have that independence where you go. I'm going to own this and I'm going to deliver something. Which was, you know, it's really exciting.
[00:29:48] Kerry Hughes-Wright: The timing was perfect. I think I'd sort of taken things as far as I could at HCL. So it was time for me to look for that next thing, and as you say, Phil, I've always been pretty risk averse. I've been quite happy as a perm Always enjoyed everything that I've done, but it just felt the right time for me.
You spotted the opportunity, spotted the match. When I interviewed I was a little bit worried because sort of the last 10 plus years I'd been in practice leadership roles and not as hands-on. Although I knew that in those practice leadership roles, I was still doing everything that needed me to do.
Fortunately, they saw that. So large global organisation, grows through acquisition, highly acquisitive organisation. Even whilst I've been with them. I think there's been another 40 plus legal entities acquired in the time I've been with them. Which is, I'm just starting the fifth year.
Now, anybody listening to this may think, wow, that's a long time. But if I just break that down. So acquisitive organisation on a number of different legacy finance systems. Heavily reliant on AX 09 in about 50% of the organisation. Three different versions of NAV and then a different mix, and tho those different versions of NAV are as per geographical regions, Europe, Americas and Middle East, and then a myriad of QuickBooks, Sage, Xero. So through these acquisitions, you acquire legal entities that are using various different legacy finance systems. So the program of the rollout of FO. The main premise and reason for that program is to get all of those legal entities off their legacy finance systems onto a single global platform.
As important, or probably more important, global processes, global solution. Basically, when I joined, I had probably four to six weeks of what I class as project startup in the classic delivery terms. So, worked with a small team, really sort of got to understand what had they done to date. So when they tried to do this previously, how could we leverage that? How could we maximise that investment? I didn't want that to be lost, and so we were able to kind of build on a lot of that information that had been gathered, but restructure it.
First thing that we did was to get them thinking about their business processes. So the start point for me is always, what are your processes? What are you delivering? Build out your business process taxonomy, and of course I brought a methodology with me which was documented. We heavily use Azure DevOps. I think it was a shock to the system for a lot of people. Even the partner that we were engaged with. We still work with them. The extent to how I wanted to use Azure DevOps. They were concerned about. They were concerned it was going to take time away from sort of the hands-on delivery.
[00:33:10] Phillip Blackmore: Right.
[00:33:10] Kerry Hughes-Wright: But without DevOps, you don't have the structure. You can't hold and record your information. Our ADO backlog, our solution backlog, actually is our solution design document. They use a story narrative, the acceptance criteria, how the system is configured, that is all captured in DevOps.
So we spent probably six weeks getting the project restarted. And then preparing for some process validation workshops in May, June, July of 2021. We had a configured system based on that process taxonomy, built ADO out based on that process taxonomy. Our ways of working were through the methodology and educating people in the methodology. Getting them used to the language of delivery, and then we went live with our pilot in December 2021.
Then layered on top of that as we went into 2022, we've got integrations. I'm not going to say they're complex because I don't think they're necessarily complex, but again, the challenge is that the systems that we're integrating with are different per legal entity.
[00:34:32] Phillip Blackmore: Right.
[00:34:32] Kerry Hughes-Wright: We're testing, inspection, certification, organisation, and our labs have limbs, laboratory information management systems, operational systems, and they differ from legal entity to legal entity.
So that integration that we've got from the operational system to the finance system so that you finance system is the single source of the truth for invoicing. That is different every time as well. So we went live with integrations in August 2022, and then we've just kind of moved on from there. We're 65% the way through the organisation. Pretty much all of the EMEA region, Middle East region are on FO now. About 30% of the US, but there's still quite a long way to go with the US and that's the main focus. Whilst there's still a few to finish off,in EMEA and on the Middle East.
I often wonder, and I've asked myself this question many times, and as you know, Phil, I know a lot of people within the D365 community, and I often wonder, could we do this quicker? And actually every single rollout that we do is its own mini implementation project. So even though we've got our global solution, we are not that templated. The data is different each time. So when I say that, we could go from one AX legal entity to another AX legal entity and find that somebody has used a different field for a value that we need to migrate for the customer record and therefore we've always got to go through a series of test cycles to make sure that everything is correct. So, yeah, it's been fun. It's been interesting.
[00:36:23] Phillip Blackmore: I think it's one of the true success stories out there, you know, and I was talking to a chap, Adam Seaton last month, and there's so much negativity out there around projects and programs and you see it, and I think that's sometimes just with life that we live in today, people like to promote more negative things and positives.
But I think when we really look at, there are some great positives. There are some great success stories out there, and I think is truly one of those really true success stories that over the last three or four years, what has been delivered there is incredible. What's continued to be delivered is incredible and I think, you know, if Microsoft are looking at like proper case studies of like, show us a truly global successful D365 FinOps rollout, there aren't many better examples I don't think.
[00:37:03] Kerry Hughes-Wright: Yeah, and I think we took some sensible decisions quite early on and again, through speaking to contacts, through networking. One of the big things we discussed in the early days, back in 2021. So we heavily uses CE as well as FO for finance, and we also had the HR app, and HR has now come back into FO so we've got two FO instances, but on the CE side, a lot of maturity and a lot of really good work has gone into CE solutions.
However, it was not compatible for dual-write integration. So Microsoft heavily promote dual-write integration. When I was at HCL, Project Operations was coming out as a separate app and we were looking at that and we were getting into difficulties with dual-write there, and so we did some proof of concept work around the dual-write integration and we quickly realised that if we were going to go the dual-write route. We were going to get into difficulties with a lot of what we had already built in CE and it was going to change the shape of the program if we did that, and so we instead worked with our partner Annarta, and we builtwhat we call non dual-write.
So our integration between CE and FO follows the principles of dual-write because we don't want to lose sight of it for the future because I do think that it will be the right way for CE and FO to talk to each other. Microsoft will probably disagree with me and say it's there now, however, having spoken to people who did go the dual-write route and they tell me they still don't have it right, and it allowed us to keep moving forward.
Within the next 18 months, we'll have all of those legal entities onto FO, and then I think that opens up future opportunities having all of the organisation on a single finance platform. I think it makes their future acquisitions more seamless. The way that we manage each of those rollout waves is a template that can be used for the future.
[00:39:21] Phillip Blackmore: But it has that foundation, like you say, when you go back to the very beginning when you went in there and sort of setting up and how, I guess you work robust in your thinking around the utilisation of Azure DevOps. You know, you've created a foundation of a project there that allows the chaos to kind of go on around it. But fundamentally, you always come back to those kind of anchor points, those foundations and say, this is what we must do day in, day out. We do not deviate from these working methods and you deal with the chaos as and when it comes in.
[00:39:52] Kerry Hughes-Wright: Yeah, just one last thing as well, just on sort of ways of working methodology. We have never been without a project plan, multiple project plans, that underpin all of this. So even though we heavily use Azure DevOps, we have a templated approach to the project plans.
So we've got a couple of project managers looking after the rollout waves. We've got project management for our ongoing developments. Phil, they're all in the same format. If I need to consolidate them, bring them together, and we do, because we've got global timelines that we look at. We're able to do that, and again, everybody's got different opinions, different approach. I have had some people say to me, but if you are using DevOps, why do you need a project plan? And I'm like, well, if you're asking me that question, you're not going to succeed.
[00:40:42] Phillip Blackmore: Just before you go, Kerry, I'd like to ask this question. If you were sat opposite a CTO, CIO and they said, Kerry, I'm just about to start a D365 FinOps program, what are the few snippets of advice you would say to someone? You've only got, I guess, a couple of minutes with them just to kind of give them a, what kind of pieces of advice or guidance would you say?
Look, just be aware of this or be mindful of that or make sure you do this. Is there anything or a couple of things that spring to your mind when that kind of question pops in your head?
[00:41:11] Kerry Hughes-Wright: Definitely, I would say make the right people available from within your business to work on that program. They know the processes, make them available, backfill them if you need to. Build a community of super users on top of those people who are going to be full-time. You need to have a network of people who will champion.
This all sounds so obvious,
[00:41:37] Phillip Blackmore: Hmm. Yeah, but always happen.
[00:41:39] Kerry Hughes-Wright: Cleanse your data. Get on top of your data. If you're going to start a program, start cleansing your data now. I cannot stress enough the importance of the quality and how much easier it's going to make that data migration if your data is clean.
If you are a global organisation, think about how you data is structured. Think about how you want to analyse your business. One of the biggest areas is customer data. I would say more so than vendor data, and the way that you manage your customer data, especially if you're working with CE as well as FO you really need to think about that.
Think about you as a business. Don't just appoint somebody from within the business because they've got business knowledge. If they don't have delivery knowledge, they're going to struggle. So might well be that you need to think about bringing in some temporary additional expertise to add to the skills within your team that you might not have.
[00:42:40] Phillip Blackmore: Yeah, no brilliant. You're a busy individual, so I really do appreciate you spending the time chatting with me this morning on that. Thank you for listening today. Please subscribe to stay up to date with our latest episode or watch the full episode on YouTube now.