The Dynamics partner in the new Business Central world

In this new Business Central era, the classical partner needs to change. Thanks to the new development paradigm (make changes without touching the core), the partners needs to change their development and grow strategies.

What we can expect from any partner?

Well, the partner´s developers need training in the new language, you know, events and hooks, also, they need training in the power apps and how can we merge those new tools to Business Central.

The consultants need to be trained in the new interface and how they can do the old things in the new environment (changes a lot).

These are normal tasks in every version launch but, are the partners doing these tasks? Or are they starting with the old ostrich politic?

There are some partners in the market that instead of jumping in the train, they try to stop the advance avoiding selling the new tools to their customers.

How do they try to do it? Its very simple, Business Central is a cloud product and they sell the new product in al old way, “on premise”.

Why? Because the partner doesn’t want to invest time and money in the personnel training. This is a “money and cost” focused partner and everybody needs to run away from a company like this.

The new world partner likes the invest word, because this action gives him more “value” and the ability to create new apps and give the ecosystem a more universal solutions. Also, empowers their personnel to be more creative and suggest new ideas and products.

As an example, some people have the crazy idea to export the local functionalities into extensions instead local versions. What we can win with this approach? Easy, if one of my customers want a special feature like cartera module (Spain version) or contracts (Russia version), I only need to add the extension to the company. An old-fashioned partner (I know one for sure), starts asking for the Spanish version because the customer needs the local functionality. And if the customer needs the Russian functions? The partner is going to create two companies?

A modern partner, starts to create their own solutions, take all those old developments from previous projects and check with their solution architects which ones are the best sellers, then, they create a development program to make those solutions a salable extension and in how many parts (extensions) are going to be developed.

Once the team has defined which are the “new products”, the next task is define the time and effort assigned to the new projects, then allocate the authorized cost for these tasks and finally, define the tracking dates.

As an example, in Mexico we have a lot of fiscal reports, but one stands out over others, the DIOT (Informative declaration of operations with third parties), all ERP implementations needs this report, so, why we don’t develop this?

The most important part for a partner, the partner is a customer associate, you are supposed to know your client´s process, their needs and how to achieve a successful implementation; you don’t need to rely in “global integrator” that doesn’t know the real customer process or needs; if you as partner do this, you are loosing a lot of money and market value, you will become a simply reseller of another people´s intellectual property with no rights to ask for changes.

The real value of the partner is their people, their intellectual property, their market knowledge, so, why in the hell they throw that in the trash?

Business Central is a new paradigm, a new (and refurbished) language, a new way to do the things.

Is your Dynamics partner part of this new culture? Are you feel like a part of this brave new world?