Most conversations about a Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central investment focus on modules, licensing and integrations. Fewer focus on the interface itself: the role centre each employee opens first every working day, and the part of the system that rarely gets a line item of its own. That gap has a cost. Gartner research reports that 70% of ERP initiatives fail to fully meet their original business case, with a quarter failing outright, and names limited organisational change management among the recurring causes. An interface nobody can easily adjust to their own role is a change-management gap that doesn't appear in a business case until adoption stalls.
What the standard role centre actually allows
Business Central ships with a role centre for each user role, and Microsoft gives every user room to personalise it: fields, columns and actions can be moved, hidden or resized, and views can be reordered, without a line of code. That flexibility stops at the edge of the existing page. A user can rearrange what is already there; adding a colour scheme, building a new dashboard, or changing the page's underlying structure sits outside personalisation entirely. Microsoft's own documentation is explicit that personalisation “affects only your workspace,” and that anything beyond moving, hiding or resizing existing elements such as a new field, a different layout and company colour scheme, requires an administrator to customise a profile, or a developer. For a smaller business without either on staff, that is a support ticket and a wait, for a change that should take minutes.
Where the gap between purchase and adoption opens
None of this shows up in a demo. It surfaces months later: in how long a new starter takes to find their way around, in which reports get rebuilt as a spreadsheet because nobody wants to log a development request, and in which modules quietly go unused because the page in front of the employee was never built with their job in mind. Gartner points to underestimated complexity and limited change management as recurring reasons ERP investments underdeliver against their original goals. An interface that is slightly wrong for every role, with no easy way to fix it, is change management working in the wrong direction by default.
Why this matters more for South African SMEs
Small and medium businesses are not a side conversation in South Africa. The Department of Small Business Development estimates they account for roughly 87% of employment, and formally registered SMEs alone contribute close to R3 trillion a year to GDP. Sage's Small Business, Big Opportunity research found 78% of South African SMEs say digital technology plays an important role in how they operate, and Vodacom's SME research finds 81% see cloud computing as essential to staying competitive. Yet the same body of research consistently names cost, operational complexity and resistance to change as the barriers holding adoption back. For a business with no in-house Business Central developer, “essential functionality behind a generic interface” and “resistance to change” are often the same problem under two names.
A practical test for adoption
Braintree built BC Widgets for this specific gap: a preconfigured, graphical page for every Business Central module out of the box, colour schemes and layouts configured by the business itself without a developer, and the tools to build the dashboard each role actually needs, designed to work as well on a touch screen as at a desk.
The more immediate test costs nothing to run. Sit with three employees in different roles (finance, sales, a frontline or warehouse user) and watch each open Business Central for the first time on an ordinary morning. Note what they ignore, what they have quietly built a workaround for, and what they would change themselves if changing it did not mean logging a ticket.
That walkthrough gives leadership a practical basis for weighing what the standard interface is costing in training time and workarounds against the case for one configured around how each role actually works.
Let's grow.
Sources
- Gartner, cited in The Register, “ERP carnage continues as orgs jump in unprepared,” 13 November 2025
- Microsoft, “Personalize your workspace,” Business Central documentation, Microsoft Learn
- Department of Small Business Development, cited via EBnet, “Driving economic resilience through digital transformation of South Africa's SMB sector”
- Sage, Small Business, Big Opportunity research (2024), cited via EBnet
- Vodacom, “Levelling the SME playing field” research, cited via EBnet
