Dynamics 365 F&O + unified data lakehouse for a multi-site manufacturer

The challenge

The client operated four manufacturing sites across northern Italy, each on a separate legacy ERP instance with local customisations accumulated over 15 years. Consolidating financial results for month-end required a five-person team four days of manual reconciliation work. Plant managers had no real-time visibility into stock or production throughput — decisions were made on data that was at least 24 hours old.

What we built

We ran a two-week discovery to map all business processes, custom fields, and third-party integrations across the four legacy ERP instances, producing a full data lineage map and a risk-ranked migration backlog.

Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations was deployed in a single multi-company configuration, with site-specific manufacturing workflows and a custom inter-company posting engine built to handle the group's internal trading volume. Data migration pipelines extracted, cleansed, and loaded ten years of transactional history with full reconciliation to legacy source totals.

In parallel, we built a cloud data lakehouse on Azure Synapse Analytics with Synapse Link providing near-real-time data export from F&O into Azure Data Lake. dbt transformation models fed a Power BI semantic layer, meaning dashboards reflected the current state of all four plants with a 15-minute refresh cadence.

Results

All four sites went live on a single Dynamics 365 F&O tenant in twelve weeks — on schedule and within budget. Month-end consolidation time dropped from four days to four hours. The Power BI dashboards gave plant managers real-time production, stock, and finance visibility for the first time, and the finance team reported a 60% reduction in the time spent on reporting activities.

Technologies used