If you’re a CIO, IT Director, or Head of Transformation, you probably didn’t approve Dynamics 365 Business Central simply to “modernise finance.” You approved it to simplify your application landscape, improve data quality, reduce manual work, and give the business clearer, more reliable visibility.
Yet in many organisations, even a year after go-live, Business Central still coexists with spreadsheets, legacy tools, and improvised workarounds. The ERP may be technically deployed, but real adoption remains partial and fragile.
This gap between deployment and effective use isn’t inevitable. More often, it comes from treating Business Central as a one-off implementation project rather than an ongoing capability, and from underestimating how much day-to-day guidance users need when core processes change. In this article, we’ll explore how to close that gap using a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) like Lemon Learning, so Business Central becomes a well-used operational backbone, not just another system on your architecture diagram.
On paper, Dynamics 365 Business Central is designed to streamline operations end-to-end. It covers finance, purchasing, sales, inventory, projects, and service, all integrated with Microsoft 365.
The symptoms are familiar:
Business units export data from Business Central into Excel or legacy tools because “that’s how we’ve always done it.”
Support teams handle a long tail of Level 1 tickets that are really “how do I complete this step?” questions: posting groups, dimensions, approvals, error messages.
None of this means your implementation partner did a poor technical job. It simply means the change was never fully absorbed by the organisation. Traditional approaches—train-the-trainer sessions, lengthy manuals, or one-off webinars, place a heavy burden on people’s memory, especially in an environment where Dynamics 365 Business Central is constantly evolving through Microsoft’s release waves.
For leaders accountable for ROI, the consequence is that you have spent serious budget on an ERP that still depends heavily on human heroics and spreadsheet glue. That is not sustainable. The alternative is to treat Business Central adoption as a product in its own right, designed, instrumented, and improved over time with a Digital Adoption Platform providing the in-app layer between your processes and your users.
In practice, this means moving beyond project thinking and adopting a structured Dynamics 365 Business Central playbook for CIOs that defines how governance, user guidance, change management, and measurement continue long after go-live.
When you talk to IT teams who have lived through a Dynamics 365 Business Central rollout, a pattern emerges. The project team hits its technical milestones: environments provisioned, data migrated, integrations wired, core processes tested. Go-live happens. The board sees the announcement slide. Then reality sets in. Finance teams still export everything to Excel. Operations lean on side systems. Support queues fill with “how do I…?” tickets on posting groups, dimensions, approvals, and error messages that feel opaque to busy business users.
The issue is rarely that Business Central cannot support the processes you designed. Microsoft documentation makes clear how deep the product runs across finance, supply chain, projects, and service. The issue is that most organisations stop at deployment. Training is treated as a pre-go-live event, with generic webinars and thick slide decks. Three months later, new joiners have little more than tribal knowledge; everyone else is improvising.
To fix this, you need to treat Business Central like any other critical SaaS platform in your stack, such as Salesforce, Workday or Microsoft 365, and design an adoption layer around it. That’s where a DAP such as Lemon Learning comes in. A DAP overlays your ERP with in-app walkthroughs, tooltips, AI chatbot and a searchable help panel, so users can get just enough guidance in the live interface instead of switching between PDFs and tickets.
Start by mapping real workflows, not just modules. For finance, think “close a period with the right postings and reconciliations,” “run vendor payments without rejected files,” or “produce management reporting with the correct dimensions,” not abstract menus like “General Ledger” or “Cash Management.” For operations, it might be “receive goods against a purchase order,” “adjust inventory with the right reason codes,” or “ship a partial order correctly so invoicing and stock stay aligned.”
For each of these, define the happy path, the minimum data for first-time-right, and the most common error modes. Then build short, interactive guides in your DAP that click through Business Central’s actual pages and fields, explaining in plain language what each step means for downstream processes and controls. A 90 second guide that walks an AP clerk through “post a vendor invoice with the right dimension set and approval flow” is worth more than a 30 page PowerPoint everyone ignores.
Equally important is field-level help. Business Central’s standard tooltips and online help are powerful, but they do not know your specific chart of accounts, dimension scheme, or approval policy. With Lemon Learning, you can add contextual explanations directly on top of sensitive fields, posting groups, dimension combinations, document types, so that when a user hovers or clicks, they see “for project-related costs, always use dimension X; this feeds our profitability reporting” rather than arcane labels. That is how you move from “the system feels random” to “the system makes our rules visible.”
You should also design for change. Business Central is cloud-first: Microsoft updates capabilities frequently. That’s a strength from a product perspective, but it breaks static training. A DAP lets you update guides in days, not months, as new features land or local requirements shift. You can turn each quarterly wave into a small, guided experience, “what changed in bank reconciliation,” “how to use a new analysis view” instead of another tidal wave of documentation.
Finally, align your ERP adoption model with other tools your people use. Many Business Central customers are already deep in the Microsoft ecosystem: Outlook, Teams, Power BI, and increasingly Copilot. Your guidance should reflect that. A finance user reconciling accounts might follow a Lemon Learning guide that shows how to jump from a Business Central ledger entry into a Power BI report, or how to use Copilot suggestions safely inside Business Central without bypassing your checks. When employees experience ERP training as an integrated part of their digital workplace, not a separate, painful event, you get more adoption with less pushback.
Underneath, the architecture is the same play you run on Salesforce or Workday: build targeted in-app guidance for the workflows that matter, keep it aligned with process and policy, and update it as the system evolves. Business Central isn’t a special case in that sense; it’s another strategic platform that needs a digital adoption strategy if you expect it to deliver its promise.
Once you have an in-app enablement layer in place, you can finally get serious about measuring Dynamics 365 Business Central adoption in a way that matters to your board. This is where most ERP programmes fall short: the dashboards you see are full of licences, sessions, and generic uptime, not the business outcomes you actually care about.
Start by instrumenting the basics. From the ERP side, use Microsoft’s standard telemetry, reports, and admin tooling to understand which companies and roles are active, which modules they use, and where errors spike. From the adoption side, use Lemon Learning’s analytics to see which guides users open and complete, where they abandon flows, and what they search for in the in-app help panel. Together, this shows you both “what people do in Business Central” and “where they struggle and ask for help.”
Then tie those signals to real KPIs. For finance, that might be first-time-right rates on vendor invoices, number of voided or reversed postings, speed and accuracy of period close, or audit findings on key controls. For operations, think in terms of stock accuracy, order-fulfilment errors, and cycle time from purchase requisition to receipt. Support metrics matter too: volume and handling time of Level 1 and Level 2 tickets tagged to Business Central, broken down by process (e.g. “AP invoice posting,” “bank reconciliation,” “inventory adjustment”).
With that stack, you can run targeted experiments. Suppose you see a high volume of “dimension error” tickets and a lot of abandoned attempts on the general journal page. You build a guide that explains your dimension model in context, with examples, and attach it to the relevant pages. Over the next month, you watch whether: a) more users complete the guided path; b) dimension-related error messages and tickets fall; and c) the quality of your financial reporting improves (fewer journals needing rework, more complete dimensional analysis). If yes, you’ve just proven that a small adoption intervention materially improved data quality and reduced support load—exactly the kind of outcome CIOs and CFOs expect from an ERP investment.
External benchmarks can help you stress-test your approach, but they do not replace your own data. Whether your AP team in Germany or your warehouse in the US is actually using Business Central properly today. Only your telemetry can do that.
As you mature, you can build a simple ERP adoption scorecard that sits alongside your broader digital adoption metrics. A few examples for Business Central:
• Percentage of target users who complete guided flows for high-risk processes (e.g. payments, journal entries, inventory adjustments).
• Reduction in Business Central “how do I…?” tickets after DAP content is deployed for a given workflow.
• Time-to-productivity for new finance or operations hires (days from access to independent completion of key processes, as measured by guide usage and error rates).
• Correlation between guided usage of Business Central and reduction in shadow spreadsheets or side systems reported by internal audit.
Present these numbers in CFO language. If guided invoice posting cuts rework by 30% across 50,000 invoices a year, translate that into hours and cost saved. If improved adoption shortens month-end close by a day, quantify the impact on working capital and management attention. If analytics show that guided security and segregation-of-duties flows reduce audit issues, frame that in terms of risk and remediation cost avoided.
In short, Dynamics 365 Business Central will not deliver its promise just because it is in the cloud or integrated with Microsoft 365. It delivers when your people consistently execute the right steps, in the right way, with minimal friction and minimal reliance on your support teams. That is exactly what a Digital Adoption Platform like Lemon Learning is built to do.
For CIOs, IT Directors, and Heads of Transformation, elevating Business Central from “our new ERP” to “a well adopted, well measured operating backbone” is one of the quickest ways to prove that digital transformation efforts are more than re-platforming. It shows that you can turn complex tools into tangible outcomes: fewer tickets, better data, and a return on the ERP line in your budget that you can defend with confidence.