Ian Hilton

Introducing our ERP expert and Dynamics 365 Consultant, Ian Hilton

Your name and job title

Ian Hilton MSc
Head of D365 Practice and Consultant

Your accreditations or qualifications

Certified Data Protection Officer
ISO 27001 Lead Implementer
MS Certified D365 Functional Consultant (MB-800)
ITIL v4 Foundation Certificate in IT Service Management
Prince2 Practitioner Certificate in Project Management
MSc Information Security Systems Management (Distinction)

Explain a little about your area of expertise and what you do at Economit

I've spent most of my career delivering large-scale ERP projects and managing and directing teams of IT Professionals.  I now head up the D365 Practice here at Economit and act as principal consultant on Business Central and D365 projects for our clients.

What attracted you to this type of role and how long have you worked in this area?

I’ve worked in IT for 25 years after spending my early career as an engineering apprentice in the steel industry and realising that crawling under arc furnaces in the dead of night was not for me. I took the chance of a redundancy package that offered a retraining element and decided to undertake a Master of Science degree in Information Systems Management and, as they often say, I never looked back.

My favourite bit of my job is...

The day-to-day variety of working in multiple sectors with ambitious businesses who are struggling to get their head around their information technology challenges.

In my spare time, you’ll find me…

On a football field probably. When my daughter was small, she wanted to play football, but there weren’t that many opportunities. I ended up volunteering as manager for the local U11 girls’ team and studying for my FA coaching badges to help them be the best players they could be. My daughter ended up playing for Leeds United Women in the National Reserve League before going to University, so I didn’t do too bad a job. I’m now at Sheffield United Community Foundation starting the same journey all over again with my foster daughter's U11 team.

My first memory of technology was...

I bought my first personal computer back in 1995 for about £1,200 (about £2,500 in today’s money) to replace the ageing word processor I had for doing my University assignments. It had 8MB of RAM a 250MB hard drive and ran Windows 3.1 which I loaded from 20 floppy discs (about 30MB in total). I had a modem so that I could dial into the internet for email and I later fitted a CD drive when delivering software on CD-ROMs became popular. How far we have come in 28 years!

The best piece of IT advice I’ve ever been given...

Talk to business leaders in the language that they understand, don’t try to bamboozle them with tech speak.

My top takeaway for clients is...

Customising ERP software to fit your back-office processes won’t give you any competitive advantage- no business ever made more money by having a custom payables process, so my advice is don’t do it!