Dynamics 365 practice

Keep Your Dynamics 365 Running at Its Best — 24/7 Managed Services

You have already bought the platform, and the question now is whether it keeps earning. What you probably do not have is somebody watching it between incidents — testing Microsoft’s updates against your customisations before they land, and spending a defined number of hours each month making it better rather than only making it work.

Talk through what you are dealing with

Where this starts

The problems this practice solves

Almost none of these are platform faults. They are ownership gaps — nobody whose job it is to watch, to test an update, or to say what is left to finish — and that is what this closes.

The rollout stopped somewhere short of live, and nobody can tell you what is left to do or what it would cost to finish.
You are paying a licence for modules nobody has opened since go-live.
Your month-end runs on exports into Excel, and the spreadsheet is the version people actually trust.
A batch job failed overnight and you found out from a user rather than from a monitor.
Every Microsoft update is a week of held breath, because nobody is certain which of your customisations it will break.
The partner who built it has moved on, and the only documentation is in the heads of people who no longer work here.

In plain terms

What this actually is

You already own the platform, so the question is no longer what to buy. It is whether anyone is accountable for it between incidents, and what arrives each month that proves they were.

What Finance and Operations covers

Start with what you own. Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations — F&O, in every document you will be sent — is the part of Microsoft’s business platform that runs the money and the movement: your general ledger, budgeting and month-end close, your purchasing and supplier invoices, your stock, warehouses and transfers, your production orders and costing. It is the system of record for what you owe, what you hold and what things cost, which is precisely why a bad afternoon in it is not an IT problem but a trading one.

A support contract versus a managed service

A support contract and a managed service are sold in similar language and are not the same purchase. A support contract is a queue: something breaks, you raise a ticket, somebody fixes that ticket, and the arrangement is measured by how fast tickets close. A managed service is accountability for the environment. The same incidents get handled, but so does the work that stops incidents happening — the monitoring, the update testing, the configuration drift nobody reported — and a defined number of hours goes on making the thing better rather than only restoring it. The honest test between them is whether anyone is paid to notice something when you have not complained.

What happens when Microsoft ships an update

Which brings up the thing that actually keeps people awake. Microsoft ships updates to this platform on its own schedule, and you do not get to decline them. If your environment has been tailored — and it has, or you would not be reading this — then every update meets code and configuration Microsoft has never seen. Handled properly, that means an assessment of what the update touches, a copy of your environment to try it on, a regression test of the things that matter, your sign-off, and a rollback plan you could actually execute. Handled badly, it means your month-end finds out first.

The useful question is not who to ring when it breaks. It is who is accountable for it not breaking, and what you receive each month that proves they were.

The capabilities

What gets covered

Six things make up the cover. Most engagements use all six, because leaving one out is usually where the next incident comes from.

Monitoring that finds it before your users do

System performance, batch jobs, integration uptime and patch status watched continuously rather than checked when somebody complains. A failed overnight job raises an alert on this side, not a ticket on yours.

Monitoring
Batch jobs
Integration uptime
Patch status

Incidents worked to a defined severity and a defined clock

Triage, root cause analysis, resolution and a prevention plan, against response times agreed in your service level agreement during onboarding rather than negotiated during an outage. Severity is defined in writing, so nobody argues about what critical means at two in the morning.

SLA
Incident management
Root cause
Severity tiers

Updates tested against your customisations first

Every release wave and routine patch gets an impact assessment against your environment, deployment to a sandbox, regression testing and your sign-off before anything reaches production — with a documented rollback if it still goes wrong.

Release waves
Sandbox
Regression testing
Rollback

Consultancy hours for the changes you actually want

A defined allocation each period for configuration changes, workflow adjustments, new reports and the enhancements that never make it onto a project plan. Break-fix is the floor, not the ceiling — the hours are yours to spend on improvement.

Consultancy hours
Configuration
Workflow
X++

The integrations nobody else owns

The connections between Dynamics 365 and everything else you run — the interfaces, the scheduled syncs, the third-party systems — monitored and maintained as part of the service rather than treated as somebody else's problem when they fail.

API
Integrations
Third-party systems
Azure

A monthly account of what you got

Governance reviews with a service report you can hold up: incidents raised and resolved, time to resolution, performance against the targets you agreed, hours used and what they bought. Where a target was missed, the corrective action is written down.

Governance
Service reports
Ticketing
Baseline

How the work runs

How open-ended work is run

Cover has no delivery date, because nothing is being delivered — it is an arrangement that starts and then continues. What you get instead of a date is a clear way in, a written standard, and a clear way out.

Before anything is agreed
An assessment of what you actually have
A full audit of your environment: the customisations, the configuration, the integrations, the code quality and the issues already outstanding. It does not matter who built it — there is no requirement that the original implementation came from here.
Agreeing the service
Response times, severities and who to call
The service level agreement is written before cover starts: what counts as critical, what response each severity gets, how something is escalated and through which channel. Your internal team keeps the business decisions and the user administration; the platform expertise sits here.
Setting up
Into your tools, not ours
Access provisioning, monitoring configuration, and integration with the ticketing and collaboration tools your team already uses — so the engagement joins your process rather than adding a second queue to check.
The starting point
A baseline you can measure against
A complete record of the environment as it stands at the start, in documentation you keep. Every change after that is measured against it, which is what makes an improvement claim checkable rather than a matter of opinion.
For as long as it runs
Reviewed, adjusted, and yours to leave
Governance reviews look at system health, what was improved and what is next, and at whether the shape of the cover still fits. Your environment, your documentation and your baseline are yours — a handover to another partner is a process, not a hostage negotiation.

No date is published for work of this shape, and none is implied. If what you need first is a scope and a date you can hold someone to, the three diagnostics below carry both.

Fixed-scope options

Start with a diagnosis, or hand the environment over

If you are not ready to hand over the environment, the first three answer the question first, and each of those has a written scope, a published price and a date. The last is the standing arrangement this page describes.

Every offer, across every practice →

Questions

What buyers ask about managed services

What are Dynamics 365 managed services?
It is a standing arrangement in which responsibility for the health, performance and continuous improvement of your Dynamics 365 environment sits outside your team. Rather than waiting for you to report a problem, the environment is monitored, incidents are resolved, updates are managed and the platform is optimised — so your people spend their time on the business rather than on platform upkeep.
How is this different from Microsoft's own support or a standard IT helpdesk?
Microsoft's support covers licensing, product bugs and platform-level issues. It does not cover your environment, your customisations, your integrations or your business processes. A standard helpdesk reacts to tickets. This differs on both counts:
- Your specific Dynamics 365 configuration is known, not just the product in general.
- Issues are found and fixed before your users report them.
- Customisations, integrations, workflows and business-process changes are in scope, not only the base platform.
- You get consultancy hours for improvements, not only break-fix responses.
- You are dealing with a specialist extension of your team rather than a third-party ticket queue.
What is included in the scope — and what is not?
Included in every engagement:
- Proactive monitoring: system performance, batch jobs, integration uptime and patch status.
- Incident management: triage, root cause analysis, resolution and prevention planning.
- Patch and update management: impact assessment, regression testing and controlled deployment.
- Consultancy hours: configuration changes, enhancements and workflow adjustments.
- Integration support: monitoring and maintenance of third-party system connections.
- Monthly governance reviews and transparent service quality reporting.
Not included by default: new module implementations, major re-implementations, or large net-new development projects. Those are scoped and priced separately.
What are your response times, and is cover available around the clock?
Response times are set by severity tier and agreed in your service level agreement during onboarding. Typical commitments:
- Critical, meaning the system is down and the business has halted: response within one hour, around the clock.
- High, meaning a major function is impaired: response within four business hours.
- Medium, meaning partial impact with a workaround available: response within one business day.
- Low, meaning a minor issue or an enhancement request: response within two to three business days.
Around-the-clock cover applies to critical and high-severity incidents. Extended cover for the lower tiers can be agreed if your operations need it.
Can you manage an environment a different partner implemented?
Yes, and it is a common starting point. Onboarding begins with a full environment assessment — customisations, configuration, integrations, code quality and outstanding issues — so the system is understood before any cover begins. There is no requirement that the original implementation came from here.
How are our customisations protected when Microsoft releases an update?
Every update, whether a major release wave or a routine patch, is assessed against your environment before it is applied:
- Impact assessment: how the update affects your customisations, integrations and active workflows.
- Sandbox testing: changes go to a non-production environment and are regression-tested first.
- Sign-off: your team validates the behaviour in test before anything reaches production.
- Controlled release: production deployment follows a documented plan with a confirmed rollback procedure.
- Post-deployment monitoring: performance is watched in real time after every release, so unexpected behaviour surfaces early.
What if we already have an internal IT team?
This complements an internal team rather than replacing one, and most organisations using it have their own IT staff. The difference is that Dynamics 365 needs deep specialist knowledge that a generalist team cannot always sustain alongside everything else on their list:
- Your team keeps control of business decisions, user management and day-to-day operations.
- The Dynamics 365 specifics sit here: platform monitoring, update management, integrations and X++ customisations.
- Work happens inside your existing ticketing and communication tools, so nothing about your process has to change.
- Escalation paths are agreed upfront, so your team always knows when and how to bring someone in.
What does onboarding involve, and how quickly can we start?
How long it takes depends on how complex your environment is, and it is scoped before it starts rather than estimated at you. It covers:
- Environment assessment: a full audit of your instance, customisations, integrations and known issues.
- Service model agreement: response times, severity classifications, escalation paths and communication channels.
- Tooling setup: access provisioning, monitoring configuration, and integration with your ticketing or collaboration tools.
- Baseline documentation: a complete record of the environment at the start, used to measure every change after it.
No existing managed services partner is required to begin, and no Microsoft cloud solution provider — CSP — relationship either.
How do we know the service is actually delivering value?
Because you get a written account of it every period rather than a reassurance. Each month you receive:
- A service report: every incident raised and resolved, time to resolution, and performance against the targets agreed.
- A service review: system health, what was improved, and what is coming next.
- A log of consultancy hours used and what they produced.
- Forward-looking recommendations — what is planned next and why.
Where a target is missed, the corrective action is agreed in writing at the next review. You keep a documented record of what was promised against what was delivered.
Is there a minimum term, and can the service scale up or down?
Engagements are usually structured on an initial twelve-month term, because the parts that pay for themselves — the accumulated knowledge of your environment and the proactive improvements — take time to compound. After that it continues on a rolling basis:
- Consultancy hours can be adjusted up or down at the start of each period, based on what you have planned.
- Additional modules, environments or integrations can be added to scope at any time.
- If your needs change significantly mid-term, the engagement is adjusted rather than held to a scope that no longer fits.

If your need is broader

If none of that is quite your situation

Plenty of what lands here does not fit a cover agreement: a stalled rollout that has to be finished before anything can be maintained, an upgrade off a version that is running out of support, a licence bill nobody can reconcile against actual adoption, or an honest second opinion on whether this platform is still the right one for you.

Describe what you are dealing with in a free consultancy session and you will get a straight read on how it would be approached, what it depends on, and where the risk sits. If the answer is that you need less than you think, that is what you will hear.

If bulk distribution is part of what your Dynamics estate has to handle, the D365 Bulk Stock Distribution utility is one we have already built on top of Finance & Operations — a product overview rather than a client story, but it shows the shape of the work.

Tell us what you are dealing with

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