If you run operations at a food processing company and you're weighing Tellency ERP vs Microsoft Dynamics 365, you already know the stakes are different than in most industries. A bad ERP decision in a metal shop is annoying. A bad one in a food plant means a lot-traceability gap during a recall, expired stock you can't move fast enough, or a HACCP record an auditor can't follow. So let's compare these two honestly — including the spots where Microsoft Dynamics 365 is flat-out the better choice.
I've deployed AI agents inside operations teams, and I've also sat through enough six-month ERP implementations to have opinions. I'll share specific numbers where I can, and qualified ranges where I can't back a figure with a real source.
What food processors actually need from an ERP
Before any feature table, get clear on the non-negotiables for a food plant. These aren't nice-to-haves:
- Lot genealogy and one-up/one-down traceability — you need to run a mock recall and trace a contaminated lot forward to every customer and backward to every supplier in minutes, not days. FSMA 204 in the U.S. raised the bar on this.
- FEFO picking and shelf-life control — first-expired-first-out, not just FIFO. Perishables punish you for getting this wrong.
- Catch weight — buying or selling by piece but pricing by variable weight (think poultry, cheese, fish, meat cuts).
- Formula/recipe management with yield variance — production output rarely matches theoretical yield, and your costing has to absorb that.
- Allergen tracking and quality holds — cross-contamination control and the ability to quarantine a batch before it ships.
Here's the thing: both products can do most of this. The real question is how much you pay, how long it takes, and how much of it you have to bolt on.
Tellency ERP vs Microsoft Dynamics 365: feature comparison
Microsoft sells two relevant products, and conflating them causes most of the confusion. Dynamics 365 Business Central is the SMB tier. Dynamics 365 Finance + Supply Chain Management (the old Finance & Operations) is the enterprise tier with the deeper process-manufacturing engine. Neither one ships with full food-specific functionality out of the box — in practice you add an ISV like inecta or YAVEON for recipe management, allergen tracking, and deeper traceability. That's normal in the Microsoft world, but it's a real line item.
Tellency takes the opposite approach: AI-native ERP with invoicing, inventory, HR, and procurement handled by agents, built to replace SAP and NetSuite-class systems, deployed in about a week. The trade-off is the reverse — less of a 25-year food-specific partner ecosystem, more built-in automation.
FactorTellency ERPMicrosoft Dynamics 365*Lot traceability / recallBuilt-in lot tracking with AI-assisted trace queriesStrong native traceability (SCM) + FSMA 204 tooling; deepest with a food ISVCatch weightSupported via dual unit of measureMature native catch-weight in SCM and Business CentralRecipe / yield managementBuilt-in, AI-assisted; lighter for complex process scalingVery deep, especially with ISV add-ons — best-in-class for complex formulationDemand forecastingAI agents forecast demand nativelyAvailable via Copilot + Azure ML, more configurationCustomizationNo-code, natural languagePower Platform + partner dev (powerful, but needs developers)Starting price~70% below SAP/NetSuite-class pricingBusiness Central from ~$70–$100/user/mo; Finance/SCM ~$180–$210/user/moDeployment~1 week~3–9 months typical for Finance/SCMEcosystem maturityNewer, growingMassive partner network, decades of food deploymentsRead that table fairly. On raw *depth of process manufacturing — multi-level formulas, potency-based purchasing, concentration scaling — Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain with a seasoned food ISV is genuinely stronger than almost anything else, Tellency included. If you're a large processor with complex chemistry in your batches, that depth matters.
Pricing and total cost of ownership
This is where food processors get surprised, so let's be specific.
Microsoft's published rates put Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain Management around $180–$210 per user per month each, with attach pricing dropping the second app to roughly $30 per user. There's also a minimum of 20 full users on Finance & Operations. Business Central is much cheaper per seat (Essentials lands in the $70–$100 range), but it's the lighter engine.
Now add the parts that don't show on the price page: the implementation partner (food-specific Dynamics projects commonly run well into five or six figures), the food ISV license on top of your Microsoft seats, and the integration work. Industry benchmarks for mid-market ERP implementations frequently put total first-year cost at several times the software license alone. That's not a knock on Microsoft — it's how enterprise ERP works.
Tellency's pitch is roughly 70% below SAP- or NetSuite-class pricing with deployment in about a week, which compresses both the license line and the implementation line. For a 30-person processing operation, that gap can be the difference between a budget you sign off on this quarter and one you defer to next year.
My honest take after years of these decisions: don't compare sticker prices. Build a three-year total cost of ownership that includes implementation, the ISV layer, integration, and the internal hours your team burns during a long rollout. That last one is invisible on every quote and it's often the biggest number.
AI capabilities — where the real difference shows
This is the cleanest dividing line between the two.
Microsoft's AI story is Copilot layered across Dynamics, plus Azure Machine Learning if you want to build custom demand-sensing models. It's capable, and the Azure side is powerful for teams with data engineers. But a lot of it is assistive — it drafts, summarizes, and suggests, and the heavier predictive work needs configuration and, often, a data team you may not have.
Tellency is built around agents that do the work, not just suggest it. In a food plant, that looks practical: an agent that reconciles supplier invoices against receiving weights and flags the catch-weight discrepancies (those short-weight deliveries add up fast), an agent that watches shelf-life dates and reprioritizes picking toward FEFO automatically, an agent that drafts and chases purchase orders when an ingredient dips below safety stock.
Consider a typical example: a mid-size sauce manufacturer running 40-plus SKUs across multiple expiry windows. The daily grind of manually checking which lots to ship first, which raw materials are aging toward their use-by date, and which invoices don't match the weights received — that's the work agents handle well. Businesses adopting this kind of automation commonly report meaningful time savings on repetitive ops work; I'd treat double-digit percentage reductions on those specific tasks as realistic rather than any single dramatic ROI figure.
Where I'll be straight with you: AI agents are not ready to own everything. Final disposition on a quality hold, a regulatory sign-off, a supplier relationship negotiation — keep a human on those. Any vendor telling you agents run your food-safety decisions unsupervised is selling you something. Agents should remove the 80% that's repetitive so your people focus on the 20% that needs judgment.
Deployment time, integrations, and support
Deployment is the most underrated factor in this whole comparison. A Dynamics 365 Finance & Supply Chain rollout for a food processor is realistically a multi-month project — data migration, ISV configuration, testing against your recipes and lots, training. Three to nine months is a fair range. The upside: you get a system tuned precisely to complex requirements, backed by a partner who's done food before.
Tellency's roughly one-week deployment is the headline, but understand what makes it possible: no-code, natural-language customization instead of developer-led configuration. You describe your process and adjust in plain English. The trade-off is that extremely specialized, deeply custom workflows may not reach the same ceiling as a fully bespoke Dynamics build.
On integrations, Microsoft wins on breadth — if your plant already runs on Office, Teams, Power BI, and Azure, Dynamics fits that stack naturally, and the connector library is enormous. If you're not a Microsoft shop, that advantage shrinks. Tellency connects to common business tools and pairs with the broader Aiinak platform (AiMail, CRM, Helpdesk), which is worth a look if you want sales, support, and ops agents sharing context.
Support follows the same pattern. Microsoft offers a vast global partner network — you can find a certified food-focused Dynamics partner in almost any region, which de-risks a big deployment. A newer platform like Tellency gives you more direct access to the vendor but a smaller third-party ecosystem. For a global enterprise, that partner depth is a real Microsoft advantage. For a single- or few-site processor, direct vendor support often moves faster.
Which one should you choose?
Don't pick based on a feature checklist. Pick based on your plant's reality.
Choose Microsoft Dynamics 365 if: you're a large or multi-national processor with complex process manufacturing (potency-based formulas, concentration scaling), you're already deep in the Microsoft/Azure stack, you have or can hire a data team, and you have the budget and patience for a multi-month, ISV-supported implementation. The depth and partner ecosystem are worth it at that scale.
Choose Tellency ERP if: you're a small-to-mid food processor who wants AI agents handling invoicing, inventory, and procurement out of the box, you need to be live in weeks not quarters, and the 70%-lower cost meaningfully changes what you can afford. For SMB processors, that combination is hard to beat.
One non-obvious piece of advice: run a mock recall during your evaluation, on both systems, with your own lot data. Not a demo dataset — yours. Time it. The platform that lets you trace a lot forward and backward fastest, with the least manual digging, is the one that will protect you when it actually matters. Everything else is negotiable; that isn't.
If the AI-native, fast-deploy path fits your operation, try Tellency ERP and walk through a traceability scenario with your own SKUs before you commit. And if your needs lean enterprise-complex, take Dynamics seriously — a fair comparison sometimes ends with the other product, and that's fine.
Originally published on Aiinak Blog. Aiinak is an AI agent platform that runs your entire business — deploy autonomous agents for Sales, HR, Support, Finance, and IT Ops.
