A 2,000-person MEP contractor moves service and finance forward on one plan

Service and finance were running on different numbers

The contractor builds and services mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems, and both its construction side and its service side run through Dynamics 365. Finance and Supply Chain and Field Service were live, but they didn’t work as one system.

Its leaders reviewed both sides together, because the cost sits in the handoffs

Most of the cost in a contractor’s operation sits in the handoffs between service, projects, and finance, and a review of each side alone would have missed it. The goal was to connect two links of the contractor’s Service Operation: the job and the invoice.

The contractor’s service, finance, and IT leads traced how work, cost, and data move from the job to the invoice, side by side with Ludia’s senior architects.

They came out with a blueprint of how the operation will run and a phased roadmap. Each phase has a scope, an owner, and a reason for its place in the order. The leadership team can fund it one phase at a time, without committing the whole budget up front.

The contractor’s team owns the plan and the reasoning behind it

Their leads sat in every working session, so the reasoning moved to them as the work happened. Every recommendation comes with the design decision behind it, written down.

The roadmap is theirs to run in-house, with Ludia, or with another partner. Their team can make the next change without waiting on a consultant.

One plan moves service and finance forward together

The contractor now has one plan for both sides of the business. It is sequenced so service and finance improve together and neither waits on the other.

Microsoft FastTrack validated the contractor’s plan

The roadmap went through full Microsoft FastTrack validation. Its leaders can fund each phase knowing the plan was checked against Microsoft’s own standard.

Ludia’s part: senior architects worked alongside the contractor’s leads using Microsoft’s Success by Design↗ practices, the method FastTrack uses. They wrote down the decision behind every recommendation so the team could carry the work forward on its own.

For your IT team: what the review covered

The review covered configuration, integrations, and data in Finance and Supply Chain and Field Service together. The yardstick was Microsoft’s Success by Design practices. The blueprint documents the target architecture, and each recommendation carries the architecture decision behind it.