Business Central Works Better When the Whole Stack Is Behind It.
When I started L&L Consulting Services, I made a deliberate choice about who to build it with. Most of the team I brought in didn’t come from IT consulting. They came from finance departments and operations roles, the same chairs many of you sit in when you engage with us. Controllers who’d run month-end closes that took two weeks. Operations leads who’d watched a system implementation promise more than it delivered. People who knew firsthand what it costs when the software works technically but doesn’t actually work for the team using it. I came from the technology side, but I’d spent enough time with clients to know that the gap between a system that passes go-live and a system that genuinely changes how a business runs was almost always a people and context problem, not a software problem. Building a team that had lived on the other side of the table felt like the only way to close it.
More than two decades later, that’s still how we work. We implement Business Central for manufacturers, distributors, service, and food and beverage companies, and we approach every engagement from the perspective of the finance team that has to live with the result, not just the project team that delivers it. It’s why our implementations tend to hold after go-live, and why the gap between what we promised and what clients actually got was rarely in the ERP itself.
But there’s always been a limit to what we could deliver on our own, and it’s always been in the same place. Business Central doesn’t run in isolation. It depends on a Microsoft licensing structure that determines which tools are available to it. It runs on IT infrastructure that someone has to own and maintain. The financial data moving through it sits inside a security and compliance posture that an auditor or a cyber insurer will eventually examine. For more than twenty years, none of that was ours to own. We built the ERP and handed it to whatever environment the client already had in place, and when that environment wasn’t set up to fully support what we built, the gap showed up in ways we could diagnose but couldn’t fix.
What that gap looked like in practice
The most common version was licensing. A client would be running Business Central on a Microsoft plan that had never been reviewed against what the ERP actually needed. Tools that should’ve been active were misconfigured or replaced by third-party alternatives the client was paying for separately. We could identify it clearly, but it wasn’t something we could address ourselves.
The second version was infrastructure. The IT environment Business Central ran on was managed by a team that had no visibility into how the system was built or what it needed from the environment around it. When infrastructure issues came up, and they always do, the client ended up in the middle coordinating between us and another firm to find an answer that should’ve lived in one place.
The third was security and compliance. The financial data in Business Central is among the most sensitive data a company holds, and in manufacturing, distribution, service, and food and beverage, it often carries regulatory weight too. When the security and compliance posture around an ERP is owned by a firm that was never part of the implementation, the gaps don’t surface until an auditor or insurer asks a question nobody prepared for. We could see those gaps coming. We just couldn’t close them.
What changes now
Last month L&L Consulting Services merged with TechWise Group and Lumen21. TechWise Group manages the Microsoft environment and licensing for hundreds of mid-market companies, with solution designations across the areas that matter most for a Business Central environment. Lumen21 brings a SOC 2 Type II certified security and compliance practice built for regulated industries, with frameworks spanning HIPAA, SOX, FDA 21 CFR Part 11, NIST CSF, PCI-DSS, and FDIC. Together, the three firms offer something none of us could separately: an ERP practice with the full supporting stack in the same firm, under one accountable team.
For clients in an active implementation, the licensing review, infrastructure design, and compliance architecture now happen alongside the ERP configuration rather than after it. The team responsible for the environment the system lands in is the same team that built it. For clients whose Business Central is already live, the gaps in the surrounding environment are now conversations for one firm to own rather than a coordination exercise across three.
If your Business Central environment isn’t delivering what you expected, the answer is almost never in the ERP itself. It’s in everything around it. That’s the conversation I’d like to have. And if you’re thinking about an implementation, I’d like to show you what it looks like when the whole team is in the room before the project starts, not after the gaps appear.
Munir Latif
Partner, ERP and Business Central Practice, TechWise Group
In Their Own Words
“IT support, security, and compliance only work when you can see the whole environment. Companies have been forced to piece that together across multiple vendors, and the gaps are where the risk lives. Bringing Lumen21 into TechWise Group closes those gaps. When managed IT, ERP, and security are all under one team, we can build a posture that reflects how the business actually operates, not just how the firewall is configured.”
“Companies have been buying Microsoft 365 and Azure from one vendor, managed IT from another, security from a third, and ERP from a fourth, and wondering why none of it works together. That is the problem TechWise Group was built to solve. Adoption does not happen in isolation. It happens when the security posture supports it, when the ERP data is connected to it, and when the IT environment is stable enough to build on. That is what one accountable team makes possible.”
“ERP implementations fail most often because of what happens outside the ERP, and for most companies that meant calling a different vendor for every piece. L&L Consulting Services has always brought finance-first expertise to Business Central. What TechWise Group adds is everything that has to be true around the ERP for the implementation to actually hold. Infrastructure, security, Microsoft 365, all of it, from one team that owns the outcome.”