A partner with hundreds of staff and a thousand projects can still have nobody who has worked in your industry, a queue you will wait in, and a price to match. How to look at a Business Central partner as a business in its own right: industry experience, case studies, site visits, and whether they will still be here at go-live.
In the Goldilocks piece we said the partner has to be the right size too: big enough to resource the project and support you afterwards, small enough that you are not just another logo. This post is about what that actually means in practice, because the mistake we see most often is simple. The business picks the biggest partner in the room on the assumption that big means safe. Sometimes it does. Often it does not, and the reasons are worth spelling out.
A declaration first: Business Boxed is a boutique. We are not neutral on this. We have also worked alongside large partners that did a fantastic job, gave the customer a great project and looked after them long past go-live, and we will say so below. The point is not "small good, big bad". The point is that size is not the thing to measure.
A partner with four hundred consultants and a thousand completed projects is telling you three true things: they have capacity, they have process, and they have survived. Those are worth something. What they are not telling you, and what the sales deck is built to make you forget to ask, is:
This is the one that sinks projects, and it is the one that is hardest to see from the outside, because the partner will not volunteer it and the demo looks the same whatever industry you are in.
Take pharmaceuticals. A regulated manufacturer runs under GxP, and its computerised systems are validated under GAMP 5 (the ISPE's Good Automated Manufacturing Practice guide), with electronic records and signatures governed by rules such as FDA 21 CFR Part 11 and EU Annex 11. That changes everything about how a Business Central project is run: the system has to be categorised and risk-assessed, requirements have to be traceable to tests, the test evidence has to be formal and retained, change control has to be documented from day one, and the validation package has to survive an inspection. A partner that has never done it does not know what they do not know. They will run a perfectly competent standard project, hand over a working system, and leave you with no validation package, no traceability matrix, and an audit you cannot pass. That is a failure, and it was not caused by a lack of staff.
Pharma is the sharpest example but it is not the only one. Food and drink (lot traceability, allergens, BRCGS), aerospace and defence (AS9100, export control, configuration management), construction (CIS, retentions, applications for payment), charities (SORP, fund accounting, restricted funds), and anything with government contracts all have a way things are done that is not written in the product documentation. A partner without that fallback will design around it rather than into it, and you will discover the gap at UAT, when it is expensive.
What to ask: "Show me a live customer in my industry, name the consultant who led it, and let me talk to both." If the answer is a generic case study and a different consultant, you have your answer.
There are a lot of boutique Business Central partners now, all over the world, and the good ones give service that is as good as the large firms, often better: you deal with the senior people who sold you the project all the way through, there is no handover to a junior bench, decisions are made in a phone call, and the day rate does not carry a head office. Many were founded by people who left big partners precisely because they wanted to do the work properly.
The limits are real too. A six-person firm has six people. If two are ill or one leaves, your project feels it. They may not have a 24-hour support desk, a security certification, or the capacity to run three workstreams at once. For a global, multi-country, multi-workstream programme, that matters. For a UK business of 20 to 300 users, it usually does not, provided you check the next section.
This is the part most buyers skip. They evaluate the proposal, the people and the price, and never ask whether the company will exist in eighteen months. It is not a theoretical risk. Partners get acquired and the team you bought is dispersed; partners over-expand and fold; partners lose their Microsoft status; and partners quietly run out of cash mid-project and stop answering the phone. If that happens halfway through your implementation you can lose everything: the fees paid, the design knowledge in the consultants' heads, the half-built extensions, and a year.
So do the same due diligence you would do on any supplier you were about to depend on for a decade:
Every partner has case studies. Written case studies are marketing: they are chosen, edited and approved by the customer's PR. They still tell you something (the industries the partner is proud of, the scale of project they usually do), but treat them as the start of the conversation, not evidence.
What is evidence:
If you are running a formal selection, these are the ones that separate the partners:
Some large partners will do a fantastic job for you, give you a great project experience and look after you well beyond go-live. Some boutiques will too. Neither is true because of their size. It is true because of the five or six people who turn up, whether they have done your kind of business before, whether you can get hold of them, and whether the company behind them will still be there at the end. Those are the things to measure. Measure them, and the size of the logo stops mattering.
If you would like a second opinion on a partner shortlist, or help writing the RFP, that is the sort of thing a fractional CIO or CTO does, and it is a lot cheaper than finding out in month nine. Or book a 30 minute call.
