A firm built around the gap that big partners leave open.
Ludia Consulting was founded in 2018 by Lucas Diaz and Andreas Vogel. Both spent years inside large Microsoft Dynamics partners. They started Ludia to operate the way large partners cannot, while keeping the things customers actually came to them for.
Microsoft Dynamics, with the senior people on the calls.
Lucas and Andreas both came up inside Hitachi. They saw the same thing from the inside: a buyer signs with a senior partner, the implementation is staffed by a team three layers removed, and by month six the customer is paying invoices to a project they no longer feel ownership of. Then the AI wave arrived and pointed in the same direction, only at scale. Cheaper bench. Larger ratios. More distance between the senior person on the slide and the team on the standup.
We started Ludia in 2018 to take the founders' Dynamics experience and give it a purpose. That phrasing is Lucas's, and we have kept it because it is accurate. The work has to be excellent. The people we hire deserve to do their best work. The communities we come from deserve a firm that operates the way it talks. That is the firm. The order matters.
Three things we do that we expect to be measured on.
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01
The senior person who pitched is on the standup.
We staff engagements with the same senior architects and consultants from kickoff through stabilization. We do not hand engagements off to a junior pod after the contract signs. This is the operating model, not the marketing claim.
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02
We use AI as the engine, not the headline.
Our AI Implementation Methodology applies AI to the parts of a D365 implementation that benefit from speed and breadth — discovery, requirements analysis, risk surfacing, environment configuration. It is how a small US team covers the ground a larger partner would need fifty people for. It is not what we sell.
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03
We work with Microsoft Engineering, not just with Microsoft.
We run a formal Innovation Committee with Microsoft Engineering, established in 2023. Lucas holds the Microsoft FastTrack Recognized Solution Architect title for D365. We partner directly with FastTrack and the product teams. Customers see roadmap before the broader market does and get product engineering in the room when a platform-level decision has to be made.
Minority-owned, deliberately. The work runs through that fact, not around it.
Ludia is minority-owned and intentionally inclusive. The framing matters. We are not running a diversity program inside a generic firm. We built the firm so that being minority-owned, sharing opportunity broadly, and running Dynamics for Good are part of how the company operates, not statements on a values page.
Lucas's family heritage is part of this. He is the descendant of a great-great-grandfather whose resilience as a minority shaped the family. That is the personal reason. The business reason is that a firm that takes its values seriously in unprofitable engagements tends to take them seriously in profitable ones. Customers tell us this is what they noticed first. It is also why our retention is what it is.
Both founders. On the calls. On the standups.
Lucas runs the front of Ludia's house. He owns commercial growth, leads the most consequential client engagements, and built Dynamics for Good from a personal commitment into a working program inside the firm.
He works the way Ludia is built to work. The person who pitches an engagement is the person on the calls when something goes sideways. Customers know to expect a direct read, not a managed message.
Microsoft credentials. Microsoft FastTrack Recognized Solution Architect for Dynamics 365 (2023). Graduate of the Microsoft Partner Catalyst Accelerator program (Black Channel Partner Alliance and Microsoft Black Partner Growth Initiative). PMP and CSM.
Before Ludia. Manager of the Microsoft Dynamics National Practice for Field Service at Hitachi Solutions (2008–2012). Earlier engineering roles at WebMD, Epiq Systems, and a research role in nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy.
Lucas is descended from a great-great-grandfather whose resilience as a minority shaped his family. It is part of why Ludia is deliberately built as a minority-owned firm creating opportunities for everyone.
Andreas runs the back of Ludia's house. He is the one customers want on the whiteboard when a Dynamics 365 environment has to absorb a hard requirement and still hold up at scale.
Twenty years inside Microsoft Dynamics implementations, from AX through D365. Speaks at the Microsoft Community Summit on developing Dynamics 365 and Power Platform solutions in Visual Studio. Specialty areas: D365 architecture, mobile platform integration, enterprise mobile applications.
Credentials. MBA, Portland State University. BS Computer Science, Drexel University. PMP certified.
Before Ludia. Independent Dynamics AX consultant. Principal at Single Coil Inc., specializing in Microsoft Dynamics AX mobile platform integration. Senior Consultant at Hitachi Consulting. Earlier engineering roles at WaveQ, PACCESS, and Compoze Software.
Earlier life: pro hockey in the German Oberliga with the Hoechstadt Alligators. Some of the steadiness on a difficult delivery comes from there.
Saying no is part of the operating model.
A firm that says yes to every engagement is a firm where the senior people get spread thin and the customer feels it. Three things we decline, in order of how often they come up.
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N°1
We won't sell implementation hours we can't staff with senior people.
If we cannot give an engagement the people who pitched it, we will say so before the contract goes around. We have lost work because of this. Customers have come back later because of it.
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N°2
We won't take work where we'd be the wrong partner.
If a customer's needs sit outside our practice — a pure ERP replacement we cannot do justice to, a vertical we have no business operating in — we will name the partner who probably fits. The relationship lasts longer than the engagement we declined.
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N°3
We won't manage a message that doesn't match the work.
If something is going sideways on an engagement, the customer hears about it from us before they hear about it from steering. The shortest path to a renewal is being the person who told the truth.
Want to know if we're the right fit?
The fastest way to find out is fifteen minutes with Lucas or Andreas. No pitch deck. We will tell you what we'd do, what we wouldn't, and whether the timing makes sense.