Investing in a business application—be it managing one's customers, tracking inventory, coordinating global resources, or just being able to get real-time visibility to cash flow—has never been so important. Gone are the days when companies invested in business applications, such as CRM and ERP, to simply streamline their supply chain or manage their sales pipeline. And gone are the days when these business applications were selected, implemented, and deployed by the IT organizations alone. Companies, and individuals within them, are relying on these business solutions to provide them a competitive advantage—an advantage that includes not only using the facts and data to generate information, but also to transform it to the knowledge that can be applied to gain a deeper understanding of the environment and provide a reliable business operating system for enabled intuition. This intuition of where to invest, how to plan, and when to execute in a well-planned, analysis-rich, and coordinated manner is what provides a competitive advantage to today's organizations. The expectations of business transformation that business solutions can provide through product or service innovation, customer delight, and operational efficiency are making it even more critical to "get it right" and "provide the business backbone". Sales, marketing, operations, and services are joining the finance and IT organizations to enable this collaborative change. We need to ask ourselves what we can do to not only provide this competitive advantage to our customers, but also to provide a solution to our customers, for them to be able to manage their own customers and businesses with better decision making.
When Microsoft decided to invest in a methodology for Microsoft Dynamics solutions, there was one goal in mind—provide our customers with a Microsoft Dynamics purchase, implementation, and an ongoing experience that is unparalleled in the business solutions industry. We determined that we needed a Sure Step way to achieve this customer experience—an experience that is predicated on learning from successful implementations, and equally from the ones that went sideways due to a lack of integrated due diligence and execution approach.