We count the estate. We do not estimate it.
A paid, fixed-scope discovery for organizations running an ERP that has grown too old, too customized or too undocumented to replace on assumptions. It answers four questions from one pass through your estate: which Dynamics 365, which ISV licences you no longer need, what belongs in Fabric, and where agents would actually pay.
The quote arrives before the facts do
A replacement number lands on the CFO’s desk built on a scope nobody has verified. The estate it describes has been customized for fifteen years and never inventoried.
Nobody holds a current inventory
There is no list of what has been customized, by whom, or whether anything still depends on it.
The destination is assumed, not assessed
Business Central, Finance and Supply Chain, or phased coexistence. The answer usually arrives before the analysis does.
Customizations get rebuilt by default
Removing one is a decision, and nobody has the evidence to make it. So it moves across, at cost, and the debt survives the migration.
The estimate is a range with a template behind it
Variance does not disappear. It reappears in month nine as a change request.
The cost of an ERP program is set when the scope is agreed, not when the invoices arrive.
Countable, not conversational
Every current-state process, customization and integration is mapped to a countable object in Microsoft’s published Business Process Catalog. That is what lets a finance leader ask where a number came from and get an answer.
- 15End-to-end processes
- 92Process areas
- 643Business processes
- 2,600Scenarios
- 225Structured questions
Microsoft refreshes the catalog several times a year. AIM re-bases the counts against the current release at the start of every engagement.
Auditable
Every finding traces to a named catalog object, so a recommendation can be checked rather than trusted.
Comparable
Your estate is assessed against the same reference frame as every other engagement, not against one consultant’s checklist.
Re-usable
The scope counts that come out of discovery are the counts the implementation is priced from. Nothing is re-derived later.
Four stages, one decision
Each stage closes with a written output. Nothing carries forward on a verbal.
Understand the estate
Configuration, customizations, data, integrations, workflows, reporting, security and operational process, inventoried rather than described.
Rationalize what exists
Every item gets a disposition and a named destination. There are five of them, and three were not practical options three years ago.
Define the target state
The platform decision, and everything that has to move in sequence with it, assessed against your estate rather than assumed from your size.
Build a practical roadmap
Phased plan, cost-informed sequencing, value hypothesis, risk register and a recommended next investment you can take to a board.
Stage two is where the money is. Most of what gets rebuilt in an ERP program did not need to exist in the target state at all.
The decision has a date on it
These are Microsoft’s published lifecycle dates. Extended support on NAV is security updates only, which means no new features, no bug fixes and, for a finance system, no regulatory updates.
NAV 2016
14 Apr 2026 / Already unsupported
NAV 2017
Jan 2027 / Security updates only
NAV 2018
11 Jan 2028 / Final NAV release
Dynamics GP
31 Dec 2029 / Security patches to Apr 2031
New GP perpetual licence sales ended 1 April 2025 and new subscription sales ended 1 April 2026. Existing customers can add users but cannot buy new GP instances. GP customers on v18.1 to v18.5 need to move to the current version to stay inside the lifecycle at all.
Four questions, one pass through the estate
The same inventory feeds all four. That is why they cost one engagement rather than four, and why the answers are consistent with each other instead of arriving from four separate teams with four separate views of your business.
Which Dynamics 365
Business Central suits most small and mid-sized NAV and GP estates, and is Microsoft’s own recommended path from NAV. Finance and Supply Chain suits larger, multi-entity or operationally complex organizations. Phased coexistence is the answer where a full replacement carries more risk than the business can absorb at once. Assessed against entity count, operational complexity and integration surface, rather than assumed from your revenue.
Which ISVs you can drop
Every ISV licence in the estate tested against what the platform covers today rather than what it covered when the licence was bought. Microsoft has absorbed whole categories into the base product. Where a genuine gap remains, AI-assisted development has made building the extension a serious alternative to renting one, and you own the code and the upgrade path.
What Fabric unlocks
Reporting and analytics lifted out of the ERP and into Fabric, so they stop constraining how the ERP itself is designed. A surprising share of ERP customization exists only because somebody needed a report the system could not produce.
Where agents pay
Agent candidates drawn from the process inventory the assessment has already produced. Knowing which processes are still manual, and how much volume runs through them, is what turns an AI ambition into a shortlist with an order of work.
Security, identity and governance findings route to our co-sell partner Arancia. Standalone Fabric build-out, Purview assessment and AI readiness work are separate engagements, quoted separately, and the discovery is deliberately scoped to exclude them.
Dextre drafts. AIM decides. You approve.
Dextre is AIM’s AI-enabled delivery and modernization platform, built for our own product engineering before it was applied to client work. It runs the structured authoring so the consultants spend their time on judgement.
What Dextre does
- Generates process-scoped question sets from the catalog
- Structures workshop output into decisions, risks and open questions
- Drafts the customization, integration and dependency inventory
- Performs first-pass fit-to-standard classification
- Traces each current-state process through to a disposition
- Drafts target-state mapping and interface specifications
What Dextre never does
- Decide what your target platform should be
- Decide whether a customization is worth keeping
- Make any trade-off with an audit or compliance consequence
- Migrate code, data, integrations or customizations automatically
- Issue a finding that no named AIM consultant has reviewed
- Replace the judgement of the people who run your business
The value is not code conversion. It is spending less of the budget rebuilding customizations that should not survive the move.
Five gates, every one of them human
No Dextre-drafted artifact passes a gate on its own authority. Each gate requires a named owner, a documented decision and a dated record.
- Gate 1Scope boundaries
- Gate 2Requirements sign-off
- Gate 3Architecture and security
- Gate 4UAT acceptance
- Gate 5Go-live authorization
AI is a delivery copilot, not a decision-maker. The saving comes from removing drafting effort, never from removing judgement or accountability.
Eleven artifacts you own outright
Standard formats, no proprietary tooling needed to read them, yours whether or not AIM delivers the next phase.
- Current-State ERP Modernization Assessment
- Customization, Integration and Dependency Summary
- Retain, Replace, Retire or Redesign Matrix
- Target-State Platform Recommendation
- Modernization Roadmap and Phased Delivery Plan
- Risks, Assumptions and Dependencies Register
- ISV Register and Cost Recovery Analysis
- Fabric, Data and Agent Opportunity Map
- ROM-Level Effort and Cost-Driver Assessment
- Executive Readout Presentation
- Recommended Phase 2 Statement of Work
Out of scope, and priced separately only by written change: full implementation, production migration, code remediation, data conversion, detailed solution design, and standalone Fabric, Purview or AI readiness assessments. A discovery that quietly grows into a design engagement is a discovery that was mis-sold.
Two to three weeks
Kickoff and information gathering, interviews and technical analysis, findings validation, roadmap development, executive readout.
Duration depends on timely access to stakeholders, documentation, ERP and application access, and the technical people who know the estate. Three weeks is the default for a multi-entity or integration-heavy environment.
The questions that come up first
Why pay for a discovery when other partners run one free?
A free discovery is a sales qualification exercise, and it ends in that vendor’s product. A paid one carries a fixed scope, named deliverables and a recommendation AIM will put its name to, including a recommendation not to proceed. You also own the output.
We already have a replacement quote. Why spend more before spending a lot?
The quote prices a scope nobody has verified. The discovery either confirms it, at a fraction of the program cost, or finds the variance before it becomes contractual. Independently testing an existing quote is one of the most common reasons clients run this engagement.
Is AI writing our requirements?
No. Dextre drafts, a named AIM consultant reviews, and a named owner on your side approves. Five gates sit across the work, and nothing passes one without a documented decision and a dated record. Leverage is deliberately lowest exactly where accountability is highest.
Is the answer always that we should move to Dynamics 365?
The assessment decides which Dynamics 365 and in what sequence, not whether Microsoft is the right vendor. AIM is a Microsoft partner and we say so up front. Where the honest finding is that the timing is wrong, that a phased coexistence beats a full replacement, or that fixing reporting removes most of the pressure to replace at all, that is what the readout says. The discovery is written to be useful to an organization that never buys the implementation.
You say we may be paying for ISVs we no longer need. How do you establish that?
By testing each one against current standard capability rather than against the capability that existed when it was bought. Microsoft has moved several categories into the base product, so some licences now duplicate something you already own. Others are genuinely load-bearing and stay. The discovery tells you which is which, alongside what each renewal actually costs you.
Does this only apply to Microsoft Dynamics estates?
No. The current state can be any ERP. The Microsoft Business Process Catalog is used as the reference frame for the target state, which is how a legacy estate on any platform gets mapped onto a countable set of processes.
What happens to our data during the engagement?
Data handling, access and retention terms are agreed in writing before kickoff, and security and governance sit with our co-sell partner Arancia. Ask for the written answer at the working session rather than taking a verbal one.
Built for estates running Dynamics GP, NAV, AX and SL, legacy Business Central, SAP ECC and older, Oracle E-Business Suite, JD Edwards, PeopleSoft, NetSuite, Infor, Epicor, Sage, Acumatica, and heavily customized or unsupported on-premises environments.
A 60-minute working session
Bring your business, finance, IT and ERP leaders. We confirm the discovery scope, the priority questions, the artifacts you already have, and the fastest path to an informed modernization decision. No preparation required.