You know exactly who to call when the nightly posting routine fails. You also know that person has been there eleven years, wrote most of the custom code, and is the only one who remembers why the shipping interface has that one exception in it. Everyone in the building treats this as normal, because it has been normal for a long time.
The market for people who can maintain a fifteen-year-old ERP on a deprecated language keeps shrinking. That would be manageable if the rest of your hiring were easy, and it isn't.
Deloitte's 2025 Smart Manufacturing and Operations Survey found that 69% to 72% of manufacturers report moderate to significant difficulty hiring across IT, operational technology, data science and engineering, application development, and cybersecurity roles Deloitte Insights. Every one of those is a role you are competing for against companies that can pay more and are not asking anyone to learn a platform that is winding down. Adding "maintains our legacy ERP" to the job description does not make the search easier.
The same survey found that 65% to 70% of manufacturers now outsource many technology, data, and cybersecurity roles. That is not a failure. For most IT teams of four or five people it is the only way the coverage math works. The question worth asking is what you are buying with it.
When outside hours go to keeping an aging system upright, patching servers, and rewriting an interface every time a partner changes a file format, you are renting maintenance. When the platform handles that work itself, the same budget buys people who build things your business asked for. Same spend, different return.
Tribal knowledge is a real asset right up until it is a single point of failure. The person who knows the system is also the person who cannot take two weeks off during close, cannot be moved to a project that matters more, and is quietly the reason the upgrade keeps getting deferred.
Vendor and ISV support follows the same curve. As a product nears end of life, the people who know it well move on to what is current, and the support you can buy gets thinner.
In Dynamics 365 Business Central, a large share of what used to require a specialist developer now runs on Power Platform. Power Apps and Power Automate work over Business Central data through Dataverse virtual tables, and those are skills you can hire for, contract for, or teach someone on your team in a reasonable amount of time. Customizations live in AL extensions rather than modified base code, so an update does not become an archaeology project.
Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain Management follows the same pattern at enterprise scale. Power Platform sits over Dataverse, extensions stay separate from the application, and Microsoft operates the service. Nobody on your team is scheduling a weekend to apply a patch.
The quieter benefit is documentation. Standard capabilities come with training, certifications, and a labor market. Your custom layer comes with whatever is in one person's head.
AI is built into Microsoft's ERP now, and some of it is genuinely doing routine work. In Business Central, the Sales Order Agent reached general availability in July 2026 and the Payables Agent has been shipping GA capabilities through the year Microsoft release plans. In F&SCM, Demand Planning Copilot, generative insights for demand analysis, and Copilot warehouse workload insights in the Warehouse Management mobile app are all generally available.
Other pieces are still in preview, including the unified Copilot chat experience and the Expense Agent. We say that plainly because the difference matters when you are planning headcount. Build the plan on what ships today, and treat the preview list as a reason to keep watching rather than a reason to hold a seat open.
Deloitte and The Manufacturing Institute project that US manufacturing could need as many as 3.8 million new employees between 2024 and 2033, with up to 1.9 million of those roles going unfilled The Manufacturing Institute. Deloitte's 2026 Manufacturing Industry Outlook adds that more than a third of 600 surveyed executives named equipping workers with the right skills their top concern about deploying smart manufacturing Deloitte Insights.
Read together, those numbers say the same thing your own hiring pipeline is already telling you. Waiting for the labor market to loosen is not a plan. Reducing how many scarce specialists the system requires is.
We have spent nearly 40 years and more than 1,750 implementations working with manufacturing IT teams, and we are a Microsoft Inner Circle member for AI Business Solutions. The pattern we see is that talent risk almost never gets fixed by hiring. It gets fixed when the system stops requiring knowledge only a few people have, and your team gets to own the outcome instead of babysitting the platform.
If you want a read on where your current stack concentrates risk, take the IT Modernization Readiness Assessment. It takes a few minutes and scores talent and support alongside seven other areas.