The seven stages a programme moves through, the eight waves data arrives in, how equivalence is proved rather than asserted, and what a controlled cutover and hypercare period actually involve.
Everything in this path so far has been about the target: how D365 models an organisation, a ledger, a product, a process. This module is about getting there.
Orient looks like a formality and prevents an entire class of failure. This whole path is essentially an Orient artefact: when a finance lead says "company" and an architect hears "legal entity", the resulting design is wrong in a way nobody notices until testing.
Data does not migrate in one pass. It arrives in waves, each depending on the one before, and each with a gate that proves it landed.
This is the conversation to have early, because the answer shapes the entire migration.
Reconciliation is a design output, not a testing task, and treating it as one is a recurring cause of late failure.
Process testing is the one most often thinned. It is also where cross-module design errors surface — the posting profile that works for a sale but not for a credit note, the dimension that defaults correctly from the customer but not from the project.
The runbook lists every task with an owner, a duration, its dependencies and its rollback point. It is produced by rehearsing, not by planning.
Go-live is not the finish. The first period close in the new system is where design decisions are examined for the first time by people doing their real jobs under real deadlines.
Transition succeeds on sequence, evidence and readiness far more than on technology.