Path to MVP and Mastering Dynamics 365 Business Central with Kim Dallefeld

Mark Smith: 0:37
Welcome to the MVP show. My intention is that you listen to the stories of these MVP guests and are inspired to become an MVP and bring value to the world through your skills. If you have not checked it out already, I do a YouTube series called how to Become an MVP. The link is in the show notes. With that, let's get on with the show. Today's guest is from Dallas, fort Worth in the US of A. She's a senior BC consultant. She was first awarded her MVP in 2023. She is experienced as an end-user partner and consultant. She was first awarded her MVP in 2023. She is experienced as an end-user partner and consultant. Her mission is to empower companies to get the most out of NAV and Business Central by bridging gaps, identifying needs and conferring solutions and providing training and support. You can find links to her bio in the show notes for this episode, as well as any social channel that she is operating on. Welcome to the show, kim. Thank you, nice to be here Now. You've only been a B at an MVP for a wee while.

Kim Dallefeld : 1:47
Did you get a chance to go to the MVP summit recently? I did not. Yeah, just too busy at the moment.

Mark Smith: 1:53
Too busy, that's for a lot of people, right. There's a lot going on, right. So I understand that, before we unpack your story into technology and running your own company and everything business central in our vision, or NAV, tell us a bit about food, family and fun. What do they mean to you and your part of the world?

Kim Dallefeld : 2:15
Oh, yes, I have a big family, uh, I'm one of 10, and so, yeah, lots of brothers and sisters and cousins, and and then I have four kids. I can't call them kids anymore. My youngest is 30. So, um, yeah, and, uh, grandkids In fact I've got a granddaughter in the other room right now um, so, yeah, it's, it's getting together as often as we can, which, in Texas, is a little bit hard. I'm in Fort Worth, two kids are down in Houston, one's in Austin and one's local, but you know, so everybody's kind of all across the state and it's it's a big state so it takes a while to do the drives, but, um, yeah, fun is outdoors. Uh, as much as possible, right, uh, go into lakes and um, all that good stuff. I grew up in the country, so, um, feeding chickens and riding horses and things like that, and food, all kinds of food is good, especially Mexican food in Texas.

Mark Smith: 3:21
So, yeah, you make me feel hungry. I thought I came from a big family I'm one of seven siblings, but you've definitely topped that right. So that's amazing. And I grew up rurally as well, and so I know what it means to feed chickens. And, yeah, interesting, tell us about how you got into tech. How did you transition from that rural lifestyle to one of technology and one, in, ultimately, a business central with Microsoft?

Kim Dallefeld : 3:50
You know it's really funny. I was on my last semester of college and I took an introduction to data processing. It happened to be a business basic programming class and I loved it. But I was on my last semester. A lot of computers were going into businesses and I happened to get into a business when Ford Motor Company started selling systems to their dealers and I was with one of the very first that we put in. The funniest story I have of that and I have to share this I did something on the keyboard one day. I don't even know what I was doing, but it came up and it said shut her down, clancy, she's a pumping mud.

Mark Smith: 4:51
Wow.

Kim Dallefeld : 4:52
And I thought I broke this brand new computer system. Oh my gosh, I literally yanked the door open to this special room. You know, keep the computer cool. I don't know what I thought I would see. And so I called Ford and I told them they're like no, no, no. Years later I'm actually working on a nav system in Louisiana and I told the story and one of the people there said I know the developers who put that in it wasn't ever supposed to leave development right, it was just it was something they put into catch and error and they forgot to take it out. But so it kind of went from there. You know, in having having seen that programming, I have a knack for numbers so I have did a lot of accounting.

Kim Dallefeld : 5:50
I got into nav kind of haphazardly when nav was first coming to the U? S. It was actually, I think, called a Vista and a company out of Houston said hey, I was doing some just consulting for him. And they said would you look at this? People keep calling me and they want me to sell this and I don't have time to look at it. So he said spend an hour. So I looked at it and I said you know, if you don't start selling this, I think I'm well. I was so impressed with it and so he signed up. He was the eighth company in the US to start selling the system, and a few months later Navision came to Houston and trained about four companies and I happened to get trained. I hate to tell you how long ago that was.

Mark Smith: 6:30
I know how long ago was that.

Kim Dallefeld : 6:41
It was in January of 1996. Yeah, so I'm starting my 29th year of working on the product and it's, you know, we've always it's, it's been such a great product and we've always been sharp resources Right. So I learned development, I learned implementation because you had, because you had to kind of learn it all, because nobody else out there knew it, and so salespeople are out there selling it and people are saying help, help, and so that's kind of how I got into it. And it was really probably seven, eight years later where they started trying to get together a user group. And as soon as I found out about it, by that time I was an independent consultant and oh, then I went to work for an end user and I found out about it then, and so I got involved and started helping organize meetings and things like that. And, lo and behold, I started speaking, which I can talk a lot. I've never been one to stand up in front of people and talk, but I learned that and I've been involved with the BCNAV user group really since about 2005. With the BCNAV user group, really since about 2005. And you know, we helped put on Summit. We used to do a lot of local chapters and I, you know, it's just fun to help people. You know they struggle with the software, they, you know, and you can say, oh, just go do this and their eyes light up and they get a big smile and you know it. Just, it makes it worth it to help people like that.

Kim Dallefeld : 8:19
So, and I guess I went to a session where a bunch of a bunch of ladies talked about just being women in tech right, and one of them had said in tech right, and one of them had said you know, I want to see more female MVPs, and she was like one of either the first or the second female MVP in kind of the NAB business central space, and somebody came up to me and I said you know, I really need to do that. They said somebody came up to me and and I said you know, I really need to do that. They said you're not already an MVP, and I said no, and she said, well, you're gonna be. And so she helped me. I've never done a blog before, uh, which I totally enjoy.

Kim Dallefeld : 9:07
Um, I try to find something that I don't know about and go learn about it and then write up what I learned and do screenshots and try to help people, and so I've learned a lot, and I think that's the thing when you're helping others, you learn right, Because you may not know the details of something till you dig in to try to help somebody else. So it's a win-win for me. You know to help others and also do this, so yeah, I could talk about this for a very long time.

Mark Smith: 9:42
This is awesome. This is awesome. How big do you think the community is in NAVBC now that just in your sphere that you have engaged with?

Kim Dallefeld : 9:52
So to give you some background, we did our very first kind of get together, trying to bring people together was in Vegas I don't even remember what year now and I think there were maybe 50 people there. Mm-hmm, this year we're expecting and last year actually we had 5,500 people. Now I have to say that's not just BC, because we bring all the user groups right GP, f&o, crm, power Platform. So because there's users that cross over, a lot of those they're using one or two of the products and they all have needs, they all want to know more and get more out of their system. But I think we always we probably hit 800 to 1,000 of that 5,500, maybe a little more so, and there's a lot of times where it's a lot of new people right. So I don't know, I think the user group probably pushes a couple thousand. You know, in North America.

Mark Smith: 11:04
Tell me your thoughts on the journey between NAV, bc. There seemed to be a bit of a tumultuous time in that transition. Back in the day and I observe from outside because I'm not a consultant that works in that space, but I work for a company that has about 6,000 consultants working across BC projects globally and it was actually interviewing, uh, an mvp inside my business in that space that I realized how big a deal bc has become. As in you know, there's been a separation for a long time. Microsoft is kind of more marketed f and o um because that's for the enterprise. And then I'm seeing these massive enterprise deployments, global deployments, using bc end-to-end.

Kim Dallefeld : 11:52
So it's obviously has the capability to serve that end of the market you know it, it really is scalable, and not as much as fno, but it is scalable. You know, when I first saw bc, I was like I can do that. You know, it's not that much difference. I, I can see it. Then I got in there and I was like where is everything? Because in Nav you had these little pictures at the top of your menu and I'm very visual, so it was easy for me right. Then I get to Business Central and they're not in the same places. And when I first got in in the earlier versions we had three places where it was called Navigate and there was one in Nav. So when you wanted to navigate you went to that one, and now we had three choices.

Kim Dallefeld : 12:38
I did a session with a friend and we called when we got it and what we did was we compared the user interface. Here's what it looks like in VC, here's what it used to look like in Nav and what are the differences. And when we put that together, it really helped me and so I've shared that with so many people going. This will help you make the connection. And we talked about the great navigate debate why are there so many? And since then they've changed the terminology some, which has really helped users. So it's a very different user interface. But what I see is that people who are new to the product they didn't come from now but they just installed VC they take to it so fast because it makes sense.

Kim Dallefeld : 13:28
Some of the stuff now did was maybe a little old school or maybe it was written in Denmark and there's different communication right, we all speak differently, but but this interface and with telemetry that they're using, they're looking at what things do people click on all the time, right, and they're adjusting that user interface to put those front and center so you don't have as many clicks to go do things, and I think that's a really big thing for a lot of users.

Kim Dallefeld : 14:07
I find it really helpful. I'm like, oh, it's right here, and to be able to show users that helpful. I'm like, oh, it's right here. And to be able to show users that the ability for users to quickly adjust their screens to what they want to see is also super powerful. And they've just added so many shortcut call them shortcut tools, but tools to let me adjust the data that, oh my gosh, the analyze views where we have pivot tables in Business Central People just their eyes, you know, light up and the data that they can get to. I've always felt like we got, had a lot of data that we could get to, but now how do we present it, how do we show it? And we're getting more and more of that, which is exciting.

Mark Smith: 14:59
I like it.

Kim Dallefeld : 15:00
Yeah.

Mark Smith: 15:00
In the next 12 to 24 months. What excites you most about this period that we're going into?

Kim Dallefeld : 15:09
Well, I didn't think I would have probably had this answer three or four months ago, but it's really co-pilot with AI. We have something coming out in, I guess, next month already. Yeah, 24 wave one. Yeah, for bank reconciliations, where because I was always like, how are we going to use AI in an ERP system? What's it going to do for us? Right, and we started seeing it.

Kim Dallefeld : 15:42
With some, we can do descriptions and we can do a formal description or a modern description and some of those kinds of things. So it's like, yeah, that's great, but how am I going to use it? And when we start seeing, oh well, we can match things in a better way with the analytical tools, the language, large language sets, the language interpretations, the ambiguities that language has, and just simple matching that AI can do over writing, you know, from scratch algorithm and to really see that in action, to make my job easier as a finance person, right, or as a budgeting person, or even as a scheduler in manufacturing, what do I need to buy for inventory? I think that's going to be exciting for all users. Right now, we're limited to what's been built in and with AI we're going to stretch that, we're going to be able to do more, and that's just astounding. I'm so excited. I can't wait for some of it. Yeah, and Microsoft is doing a lot from a reporting standpoint too, because that's always a thing people are wanting right more ability to do reporting.

Mark Smith: 17:11
And is the reporting pretty much Power BI or does it have its own reporting surface built in?

Kim Dallefeld : 17:16
Well, it does have reporting built in and I think there's layers of reporting right. So there's going to be the operational reports that need to reside in the product right your invoice, your production order, simple things like that. And then there's a layer, maybe more for mid-management, working on collections or payments or something like that, and then there's kind of executive, higher level reporting and I think we're going to see different kinds of tools for each of those layers. It's not going to be something that happens overnight. You said like 18 to 24 months. We're going to continue to see improvements, putting more power in users' hands for those different tiers, and that's exciting. I really think users are going to embrace that a lot.

Mark Smith: 18:16
And where do you see the Power Platform coming into the BC story?

Kim Dallefeld : 18:20
Well, you know, it's already being used a lot. We see people creating forms where they can put those on portals and let customers and vendors set up things or view things, give them power to do something versus making a phone call, sending an email. We're also we as power platform a lot for implementations to extend workflows. To extend workflows. I don't think you'd ever build all the workflows that people can dream up in their organizations, so that will continue to grow. I wish I knew more about Power BI and Power Platform, but I spend so much of my time in the product training on the product, helping people with setups and things like that that I never kind of find the time to do those. But I do see those just extending more and more the power of the product and people use it all the time. Right now. It's amazing what we're seeing people do with Power Platform and Power BI.

Mark Smith: 19:35
Yeah. So my final question tell me your thoughts on the MVP program.

Kim Dallefeld : 19:41
You know, it was like reaching the summit of Mount Everest for me. I walked around, I think, on cloud nine four days. I it does allow me to, I think, speak with more confidence. I mean, I've been doing this a long time, but once you hit that and other people recognize what you've put in and your level of knowledge on the product, people look at you like this is somebody who knows what they're talking about. So you better do your homework right, know what you're speaking about.

Kim Dallefeld : 20:26
I was a little disappointed that I wasn't a little more involved with what things were being considered for the next release or in doing more testing of a release and we've actually started conversations with Microsoft about that and they're like we should definitely have our MVPs doing that. So I think it was just somebody saying, hey, we could help, right, and so they were very receptive. I feel like I've never wanted to be the person who reached out all the time and asked a million questions of Microsoft personnel because they're always so busy. But I feel like now and I still don't want to reach out every day, which I could, but when you really have something to say I think there's a more openness to listen because you've put forth that effort to raise yourself up and help others that maybe they want to hear. You know they want to hear what you have to say. So I think it's a great program. I have no problem with the fact that you have to keep up with it.

Kim Dallefeld : 21:40
Right, I'm doing my first renewal and saying you know, gosh, did I do enough last year? Right, you know I do some two or three things every month, but, um, is that enough? And I, I think, writing my blog. I'm finding that I'm, I'm, I'm providing a link to my blog for different people going. You asked me how to do. You know ACH is here in the United States. It's out there on my blog. You want to know how to close your year? It's, I've got a blog for it. So that kind of thing has really helped the community as well.

Kim Dallefeld : 22:22
I'm also one of the three BC3 amigos. We have a podcast. We're not as nice as your podcast, but and we just get together there's three of us and we just talk about issues, right, and one of the things we talked about was AI. How do we see AI really being used? And, like I said, four months ago, we were like I don't know, I don't see where it's going, and that's all. That's all of a sudden changed. So yeah, I'm still on cloud nine half the time to be able to put MVP behind my name.

Mark Smith: 22:54
It's so cool. So that's the Three Amigos podcast. I've seen it. You guys seem to have a lot of fun on there. A lot of joking around. And I checked it out on YouTube. So make sure, if you're listening to this, go and take a look if you're in that BC or NAV space. Kim, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Kim Dallefeld : 23:12
Totally enjoyed it, Mark.

Mark Smith: 23:17
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If you like the show and want to be a supporter, check out buymeacoffeecom forward slash NZ365 guy. Thanks again and see you next time. Thank you.