A Dynamics 365 deployment that assigned full application licenses to users who only needed one module had quietly inflated the run rate for years. The practice restructured it around base and attach licensing and real roles. This is how the estate was matched to how people actually used it.
A national multi banner retailer running Dynamics 365 across store operations, supply chain, customer service, and finance, with several thousand users provisioned over years of phased rollouts. The renewal carried the accumulated footprint forward, including a large population assigned full application licenses where base and attach licensing would have covered their actual use at a fraction of the cost.
Dynamics 365 licensing rewards customers who understand its base and attach structure and penalizes those who do not. A user who needs a primary application is licensed for it at the base rate, and additional applications for that same user attach at a steeply reduced rate. The retailer had largely ignored this. Across years of phased rollouts, users had been provisioned full application licenses for each module they touched, as though every application were a separate full priced seat rather than an attach to a base the user already held.
The estate had also accumulated genuine shelfware. Modules provisioned for pilots that never scaled still billed. Users who had changed roles retained licenses for applications they no longer opened. Team member licensing, which covers light users at a low rate, had been underused in favor of full licenses for populations whose interaction with Dynamics was occasional and read heavy rather than transactional.
Nobody had mapped the license assignment against actual application usage. Dynamics 365 is one of the easiest Microsoft estates to overpay for, because its pricing structure punishes exactly the assumption that every module is a full seat.
The engagement reconstructed Dynamics 365 usage by user, identifying each user's primary application and the additional applications they genuinely used. That map exposed the structural error immediately: large populations holding multiple full licenses where one base license plus attaches would cover identical use. The practice rebuilt the license assignment around that structure, designating a base application per user and attaching the rest at the reduced rate the licensing model intends.
Genuine shelfware was retired in parallel. Pilot modules that never scaled were removed, role changed users were reassigned, and light users who only consumed information were moved to team member licensing rather than full application seats. Each move aligned the license to the work, and because Dynamics attach pricing is so much lower than full licensing, the structural correction alone produced most of the savings.
The practice timed the restructuring into the renewal so the corrected footprint became the baseline Microsoft renewed against, rather than a mid term change negotiated from weakness. The structure of Dynamics licensing is where the money is, long before you get to the discount.
The renewal closed with roughly 44 percent of the affected population moved from full application licenses to base and attach structures, genuine shelfware retired, and light users moved to team member licensing, removing $6.2M from the agreement inside eight weeks. Every user retained the functional access they actually used, delivered through the correct license structure rather than a stack of full seats.
The retailer also adopted a provisioning discipline that assigns the right license structure at the point of onboarding, so new Dynamics users land on base and attach rather than defaulting to full licenses. The estate now stays aligned to the licensing model between renewals instead of drifting back toward full seats for everyone.
The engagement reflects the firm’s broader record across Microsoft contracts: more than $420M in cumulative client savings, over 340 engagements delivered, and an average 79 percent reduction in audit financial exposure, built on 20+ years of combined practice depth across the Microsoft estate. The figures above are verifiable on a reference call arranged through the practice.
The practice helps enterprises restructure Dynamics 365 estates around base and attach licensing and genuine user roles, capturing the savings the pricing model intends. Two analyst calls, no pitch, and an honest read on the footprint.