See How Food Manufacturers Are Transforming with HSO
Building a Scalable Operating Model for Complex Manufacturing
How a global food producer standardized core business processes with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and HSO—improving consistency across operations and creating a stronger foundation for expansion.
About the Company
This global food manufacturer produces specialty ingredients used by commercial bakeries, food producers, and other customers around the world.
Its North American operations span eight manufacturing facilities and include several distinct production streams.
Challenge: Multiple Plants, Multiple Ways of Working
Manufacturing some of these products is far more complex than producing a conventional packaged food product. They are biological processes, with production cycles that are highly sensitive to time, temperature, and other factors. Yields can vary. Product potency and quality must be carefully managed. Formulas, ingredient scaling, shelf life, lot control, and batch genealogy are critical to both operational performance and food safety.
The company also moves raw materials, partially finished products, and finished goods among its plants, creating significant intercompany activity across a highly regulated manufacturing and supply chain environment.
To support these operations—and create a stronger foundation for continued growth—the manufacturer began a major modernization initiative centered on Microsoft Dynamics 365.
Over time, the company’s North American facilities had developed different systems and processes for performing many of the same activities.
Infor LX served as the primary legacy ERP, supplemented by QuickBooks and numerous specialized applications. Even facilities producing similar products could operate very differently from a systems and process perspective. That fragmentation created challenges across the organization.
Manufacturing information was difficult to view consistently across sites. Procurement, inventory, warehouse, planning, and supply chain processes varied by facility. Intercompany transactions became especially complex because products could begin production at one plant, move to another for additional processing, and potentially move again before reaching the customer.
At the same time, the company needed to accommodate very different manufacturing requirements. Different ingredients involve different routings, scheduling considerations, quality controls, inventory requirements, and shelf-life constraints. The existing technology environment made it increasingly difficult to create consistency across those operations.
The challenge became even more important as the company looked toward future growth and acquisitions. Adding another facility to an already fragmented operating model risked adding still more systems, processes, and complexity.
The company needed more than a new ERP and a standardized way of running the business.
The Solution: Rethinking What ERP Modernization Could Accomplish
The company had already begun adopting Dynamics 365 in other regions of the world. For North America, however, the goal was not simply to copy another implementation or move legacy processes from one application to another.
HSO approached the engagement as an operating model transformation. Rather than asking how the company could recreate what employees were already doing in Infor LX, the teams began with a different question: How should these processes work on a modern Microsoft platform?
That distinction became central to the transformation. HSO brought experience in both Microsoft Dynamics 365 and complex process manufacturing, helping the company evaluate where processes could be standardized around Microsoft best practices and where genuine manufacturing requirements demanded flexibility.
The objective was not to force eight manufacturing facilities into an inflexible model. It was to eliminate unnecessary variation while preserving the operational differences that mattered.
The result was a strategy to consolidate multiple ways of working into a standardized North American operating model—one that could support the business today while making future expansion easier to manage.
Creating the Operational Backbone for North America
HSO extended the company’s global Dynamics 365 template and adapting it for its North American manufacturing environment.
Built on Dynamics 365 Finance and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management in the Microsoft Cloud, the solution is now the operational system of record across finance, manufacturing, procurement, inventory, warehousing, planning, quality, sales, and order processing.
That foundation is especially important in a manufacturing environment where product traceability extends across complex biological production processes. As products move through each stage of production, the company must manage formulas and ingredients, monitor quality characteristics, track batches and genealogy, account for variable yields, and manage shelf life. Wet and dry products create different production, scheduling, inventory, and distribution requirements.
Dynamics 365 provides the common platform connecting those activities across the company’s North American operations.
Just as importantly, HSO does not require the manufacturer to abandon specialized technologies that continue to serve the business well.
Dynamics 365 provides the common platform connecting those activities across the company’s North American operations. Just as importantly, HSO does not require the manufacturer to abandon specialized technologies that continue to serve the business well.
The Dynamics 365 environment integrates with approximately a dozen existing solutions, including manufacturing execution systems, product lifecycle management, transportation management, EDI, payroll, expense management, financial planning systems, and packaging automation.
Instead of pursuing an expensive rip-and-replace strategy, the company was able to preserve those investments while creating a modern operational backbone that connects them. This approach combines standardization with flexibility: Dynamics 365 established the common processes and data foundation, while specialized applications continue supporting the areas where they provide the greatest value.
The Results: Building a More Connected, Scalable Manufacturing Business
The transformation is designed to give the company something its fragmented environment made difficult to achieve: a consistent view of operations across North America. Bringing finance, supply chain, manufacturing, procurement, inventory, warehousing, planning, and quality management onto a common ERP foundation will allow the organization to manage operations more consistently across its facilities.
That standardization simplifies intercompany processes as materials and products move among plants while providing better visibility into manufacturing and supply chain activity.
It also creates a more scalable model for growth. Instead of introducing another set of systems and processes each time the business expands, future acquisitions can be brought into a reusable Dynamics 365 operating model. That can reduce complexity, accelerate integration, and help the company apply consistent business practices across an expanding North American footprint.
The platform also gives leadership greater flexibility as market conditions change. In an industry facing constant pressure from input costs, supply chain volatility, regulatory demands, and tight margins, the ability to see and manage operations across facilities becomes increasingly important.
Modernization, in this case, is therefore about more than replacing aging technology. It is about creating a business architecture capable of supporting continuous operational improvement.
What’s Next: A Platform Built for Continued Transformation
The Dynamics 365 implementation establishes a foundation that can continue evolving long after the initial ERP transformation is complete.
Because the company is standardizing on the Microsoft Cloud, its operational data will reside within an ecosystem that can support advanced analytics, automation, Copilot, and AI-driven business processes as its strategy evolves.
Elsewhere in the global organization, HSO and the manufacturer have already explored and deployed AI agents supporting activities such as order entry and supply chain processes. While those capabilities are not currently part of the committed North American scope, the new platform creates the foundation needed to introduce similar innovation when and where it delivers business value.
That ability to evolve was one of the advantages of choosing Microsoft Dynamics 365. For a manufacturer operating complex processes across multiple facilities, modernization could not mean sacrificing manufacturing capability for standardization. Nor could growth mean continually adding more disconnected technology.
With HSO and Microsoft, the company is taking a different approach: standardize what should be common, preserve flexibility where the business requires it, integrate the specialized technologies that still provide value, and create a modern operational backbone capable of supporting whatever comes next.
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