Beyond the Software: Business Central Done Right-Stephanie Clark of Elliott Clark Consulting, Part 1

The Integrate Intelligently Podcast — with Jeff Brickler, Scott Brickler (CADTALK), and Stephanie Clark (Elliott Clark Consulting)
Stephanie Clark of Elliott Clark Consulting joins Jeff Brickler and Scott Brickler for the top of the episode — her path from manufacturing manager to ERP consultant, why she started Elliott Clark Consulting, and her "process, technology, automation" philosophy for ERP implementations.

Welcome & Guest Introduction
Host: Welcome back to the Integrate Intelligently podcast. I'm your host, Jeff Brickler, and today I'm joined again by my brother, founder and CEO of CADTALK Software, Scott Brickler. We're honored to have our guest today, Stephanie Clark — a Microsoft Business Central consultant. Stephanie, welcome to the show.
Stephanie: Thank you. Glad to be here.
Host: I know you work with manufacturing companies, and obviously so do we — CADTALK is an integration platform for the engineering-to-manufacturing handoff. You always ask everybody what their origin story is for getting into ERP. It's not usually something you dream about growing up.
Stephanie's Origin Story: From Manufacturing Manager to ERP Consultant
Stephanie: Honestly, there's a little truth to that — I'm a bit of a weirdo. I didn't know it was ERP at the time, but when I went to college at the University of Kentucky, I got two degrees: one in accounting and one in decision science, which is a bit of an unusual degree there. It's in the school of business, but it focuses on manufacturing operations or IT, and you can blend the two. I did manufacturing operations, since that was always my passion, but I also wanted to work with business systems — mixing accounting and manufacturing felt natural.
I got started in this a long time ago. I went to work for a company as their manufacturing manager, and on my first day they said, "Hey, we just got this new ERP system called Navision, and you're in charge." That's how every project starts, right? Grab whoever's new.
It ended up being perfect for me — I fell in love with Nav. This was way back, Nav 1.0. I started as an end user, did that for a couple of years, and my consultant told me I had a knack for it and would make a good consultant. I applied, became one, and the rest is history.
Host: Eventually you started your own firm too, right?
Stephanie: I did. People can look me up on LinkedIn and see I've worked for a lot of the major players in the channel.
Starting Elliott Clark Consulting and Doing Things Differently
Stephanie: About two years ago, I decided I wasn't going to keep working these long hours for someone else, and I wanted to approach things a bit differently. So I started Elliott Clark Consulting. Now I get to work my hours — which are still super long, as you both know as business leaders — but that's okay.
Side note: I'm based in Northern Kentucky, just across the river from Cincinnati, and my nephew actually goes to UK.
Host: We're right in the neighborhood then — we get to Cincinnati about once a month for a client up there, so next time I'm around I'll let you know and we'll grab lunch.
Stephanie: Absolutely.
Host: We've got a lot of good restaurants these days — Cincinnati's apparently a top-20 food destination now.
Stephanie: You guys are crazy foodies up there. My waistline can attest to that.
Host: You've worked at a lot of the big resellers and GSIs out there, and now you have your own business. What's the thing that every one of your customers knows about you — the thing where they go, "if you talk to Stephanie, she's going to bring this up"?
Process, Technology, Automation — In That Order
Stephanie: My clients would immediately say I'm going to hound them on process. I'm super big on business process. I did a conference two or three weeks ago for CPAs and bookkeepers, and my whole session was about helping them understand that you have to fix the process before you're ready for ERP. I say it over and over in every session: process, technology, automation, in that order, every time. If you try to automate a bad process, you just end up with bad data moving through a bad process, faster.
I harp on my clients constantly about aligning the business process first, then using the software as a tool to accomplish that process more efficiently. Automation takes the human element out and helps things move even faster — but only if you already have a good process and good data.
Host: Was that something you specifically wanted to do differently than the firms you'd worked for in the past?
Stephanie: 100%. It's something I'm passionate about, and so are the consultants who work with me — incidentally, all of them have worked for me before, in past roles across the channel, so they've followed me and share that same passion. A lot of consultants out there can talk features and functions and know exactly how the software works, but then they walk away and the client's process still isn't any better, because they never lined up those features and functions with a strong business process. That's where we start. If you go to my website, you'll see "process first" all over the place. People talk about industry best practice, but they don't always know what that means or how it evolves to fit their specific business. That's really what we look at.
Host: It's like when you buy a system like Business Central hoping your business improves — but a lot of people just make the new system do the same thing they did before. There's a lot of pressure to do that, because implementing these systems is stressful, so the instinct is "let's go back to what I know." But then you've thrown away all the value — the re-engineering of the process is really where the value is.
The Lift-and-Shift Trap: Why Copying Old Processes Into New Software Doesn't Work
Stephanie: I have a client in Cincinnati I visit pretty regularly — I didn't do their original implementation, I came in afterward through what we call our second opinion service. They were on QuickBooks and paper for everything — inventory, manufacturing, all of it — and they did a straight lift-and-shift into Business Central, then couldn't understand why nothing was right. The operations team struggled because they'd never run a system before; everything had been on paper. It just didn't work — not because the implementers did anything wrong, they taught the system fine, but they never matched the business process to the system or helped the team reimagine how the process needed to flow. Things work differently once you introduce a system where there used to be paper.
Host: It's a common refrain with any software — "this software doesn't work," whether it's BC, CADTALK, SAP, whatever. That's usually a tell for me, because these are global platforms with thousands and thousands of customers using them every day. They work. So something else must be off.
The "Second Opinion" Service: What's Really Wrong When ERP Feels Broken
Stephanie: We see that regularly. With our second opinion service, people come to us saying, "I don't know what's wrong, but something's wrong — it just doesn't feel right." We go through their Business Central configuration and look for the things people commonly struggle with, and there are real consistencies. Everybody tends to struggle with inventory costing — one of my favorite parts — and that data accuracy. When we dig deeper, past the basic software settings, it's usually that people are doing things outside the system, or there's a broken process somewhere, maybe in more than one spot.
Host: I've seen a similar backstory — getting thrown into an ERP implementation early in my career, and a lot of the friction of actually using the system caused a lot of the problems. The data was bad because it was just too hard to enter, or the screen wasn't as easy to use as the last one — and nothing's as easy as Excel. That friction causes bad data, and then you get less value out of the system you bought.
User Adoption, Low-Cost Implementations, and the Risks of Moving Too Fast
Host: That's something happening in the Business Central world right now specifically — there's a lot of pressure toward lower-cost, packaged implementations.
Stephanie: We offer those too, so I'm not bashing them. But what I find is you lose a bit of that hand-holding, because it's really "train and go" — push the data in, train and go. You don't get the same level of user adoption, because let's face it, there are a lot of fields on the screen and maybe only a third of them apply to you. It gets hard. Any time you start new software it's going to be hard, because it's different, and humans don't like change. But you have to push through it. ERP implementations have a bad rap out there — it doesn't have to be that ugly, but I'll never tell anyone it's easy.
Host: As long as you set the expectation that it's going to be difficult but worth it if you do the hard work — otherwise it's just difficult and not worth it. I think everyone's been on an ERP project in some way. You start talking to a company and they say, "we do it this way," or "we need to customize everything over here," or "this is just our process" — and then they want the software to do things it typically doesn't do. That's usually a sign of special-snowflake syndrome.
Stephanie: Exactly — "we're different." I try to tell my clients I don't want to take away their true differentiators, but just because you've always done it this way doesn't mean there isn't a better way. Most of the time I can talk them through the hiccups in their old process and help them see how streamlining it would make things more efficient. There's a reason most software packages work the way they do — there's a standard flow to it, and that's what people need to understand. It's hard.
Host: Like, "my differentiator is I do it all on paper" — that's not going to get you very far, especially in today's AI world.
Data Quality: Why You Have to Get Your Data Right Before You Go Live
Host: Part of the challenge and the workarounds usually comes back to data quality. When data quality is poor, you have a choice: go through the process of cleaning it up first — easier now with AI — or take the garbage you had and put it straight into the new system, and get the same outcome either way.
Stephanie: And having that data quality and integrity not at the level you want has real impact — and the thought of cleaning up all that data isn't appealing to anyone. It gets overwhelming. I'm working with a client right now on a very old version of Nav — not quite as old as the version I started on, but not far off — doing a re-implementation onto Business Central. They never used the manufacturing module before; they kept their bills of materials outside the system and did costing gymnastics in Excel. They're excited to start using manufacturing, and I have to tell them: first we need to get our BOMs right, and before that, we need our item list right. That's been a challenge — they're ready to start processing production orders and doing everything, and I have to say, we're not close, we need good data first.
We don't have to start with everything, either — start with the handful of items that make up 80% of what you do. That 80/20 rule is a real thing. We're working through it, but without good data, everything's wrong: costing, planning, all of it.