Background
Blue Yonder Airlines is a private airline company established in 1963 in Boston. The company completes over 2,000 flights a day with flights operating exclusively in North America. Blue Yonder Airlines is in the planning phase for replacing its current enterprise resource planning (ERP) with Dynamics 365 Finance, Supply Chain Management, and Commerce and is making solution architecture decisions prior to engaging the remainder of the implementation team.
Current environment
Technology
1. Blue Yonder Airlines operates on a custom-built ERP solution.
2. Blue Yonder Airlines uses a proprietary reporting and analytics platform that reports on data between multiple systems, including the ERP solution.
3. The ERP solution automatically pushes transactional data every five minutes to a separate database that the reporting and analytics platform uses for sales and operations planning (S&OP) activities.
4. SQL Server Reporting Services (SSRS) reports are used for several financial reports that are sent to vendors in the existing ERP solution.
5. Users utilize a third-party tool that selects alternate layouts of the reports depending on the users' requirements.
6. Blue Yonder Airlines currently uses Microsoft 365 and Office 365.
Implementation
1. The implementation of new solutions and features follows an Agile implementation strategy.
2. Blue Yonder Airlines has several highly skilled project managers.
3. Blue Yonder Airlines has a live Microsoft Dataverse instance that runs several model driven Microsoft
Power Apps apps. Several initiatives using Microsoft Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents are in the middle of implementations.
Development
1. There are five different functional groups, called pods, which fully own their development cycles for
different functionality in their ERP.
2. All code is deployed and managed by using Microsoft Visual Studio projects.
3. All development environments are currently hosted by a third-party company. The current costs are very expensive.
4. Blue Yonder Airlines plans to use the new ERP implementation to address performance and integration issues.
Licensing
1. Blue Yonder Airlines does not require licensing on its ERP solution because the system is custom.
2. Most users have more access within the ERP solution than required.
Requirements
Technology
1. The previous custom ERP data will be replaced with Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations apps in the current reporting and analytics platform.
2. Only native Dynamics 365 capabilities should be used.
3. The level of effort required from IT staff must remain the same.
4. Standard SSRS reports will be used.
5. The current third-party financial reporting tool does not integrate with Dynamics 365.
6. Blue Yonder Airlines has a highly experienced in-house team of implementation experts. It will implement Dynamic by using only internal employees. No Microsoft partner will be engaged in the implementation.
Data
1. Historical data will remain in the current system for reporting purposes.
2. Some sample data that needs to be migrated to Dynamics 365 includes:
- Data set 1 - Active airplanes - Planes that actively transport customers
- Data set 2 - Queued flights - Completed flights but not yet invoiced will be migrated
- Data set 3 - Flight consumption measurement - Units of measurement of gasoline consumed per flight
- Data set 4 - VIP customers - Customers that average $3,000 USD per flight
Development
1. Each of the pods' development teams must be able to deploy all of its code independently from one another.
2. Overlayering of base Microsoft or third-party code must be prevented.
3. Each developer must have their own environment.
4. Development environment costs should be as low as possible.
5. Developers should be able to access their development environments 24 hours a day.
6. The development team must create a performance strategy that involves the functional implementation team and the different development teams by using Microsoft recommendations.
User configuration
To save on implementation costs. Blue Yonder Airlines will determine which base security roles to assign to which users to conduct their day-to-day operations. Only base security roles will be used without modification.
Issues
Development
The development and functional teams are not taking ownership of the performance benchmark testing.
There are no functional designs, benchmark scenarios, or expectations setting created to date.
Security
Blue Yonder Airlines does not know how to configure the security of the users to enable access to complete its day-to-day operations.
Licensing
1. A licensing compliance audit has determined that the correct number of employees are added to the system but too many base and attach licenses are being used.
2. Some users will likely have to consolidate duties to maintain compliance.
