In a legacy ERP landscape stuck in years of daily incidents — with top-tier SQL expertise already in the room — Ivan committed to solve it or step aside. Lean Six Sigma root-cause analysis surfaced five systemic blockers, including memory contention between Power BI reporting and production SQL that multiple specialists had missed. Isolating the reporting load onto a separate server was the turning point. Resolution time fell below two hours. The team shifted from reactive firefighting to proactive delivery, with more story points and a better experience for the people using the system. The Black Belt lead recognized the work externally.
Read the full case studyERP engineering · Speaking
Ivan Milanov
It’s probably easier than you think.
Head of ERP, head of business applications, and an engineering director for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Sixteen years across NAV and Business Central, six of them line-managing business-critical platforms.
Currently Head of Business Central Engineering at PubliCare GmbH, a regulated healthcare business in Berlin: a six-person team, several hundred users across warehouse, finance, and clinical workflows.
MSc, Software Engineering & IT Management · Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt · MENSA International
- 16
- Years in NAV and Business Central
- 6
- Years leading the platform
- €1.5m
- Annual operating plan
- 6
- People on the engineering team
Work
What the record actually shows.
Path
Consultancy, product, commerce, healthcare.
Dynamics 365 representative on the JDS group Technical Review Board. Leads international NAV-to-BC upgrade planning.
Now
PubliCare GmbH
Head of Business Central Engineering. Regulated healthcare — warehouse, finance, and clinical workflows, several hundred users.
E-commerce
brands4friends / eBay
The BizTalk middleware: payment, logistics, and marketing interfaces.
E-commerce
Mister Spex
Hyper-growth retail. The same pressure, a different catalogue.
Product
RIB Software
ERP product development.
Consultancy
NORRIQ
Belgium. Client delivery, before the line-management years.
Practice
Comfortable leading the platform. Specific about the machinery.
Also comfortable leading Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations, or a comparable ERP, at the level of strategy, governance, vendors, and delivery — with platform specialists on the deep technical work.
- Line management and team development
- Performance management
- Roadmaps, budget, and effort planning
- Vendor management
- Scrum
- Senior stakeholder communication
Speaking
On stage as The Agile Jedi.
Scrum, Stoicism, Systems Thinking. Three lenses, learned the hard way — from production, not from a slide about production.
Oct 11–14, 2026
JavaCro’26
Rovinj
Systems Thinking for Performance: How to Diagnose and Fix Slow Systems Without Guessing
Sep 24, 2026
Agile Tour Sophia-Antipolis
France
The Agile Jedi: Stoic Principles for Complex Engineering Problems
Sep 17, 2026
ASCENT Annual Education Conference
Orlando
From Spider-Sense to Systems Sense: Navigating Ethical AI
With Sarah F. Wimberley
Sep 15–16, 2026
LDX3 New York by LeadDev
New York
Balancing AI/ML experimentation with data security and compliance
Co-hosted table talk
Sep 11, 2026
KCDC
Kansas City
Get Your Gloves On: Lean into Agile with Ivan & Sarah
With Sarah F. Wimberley
Jun 2026
WeAreDevelopers
Online
Community appearance
May 2026
DynamicsCon
Las Vegas
The Agile Jedi: Stoic Principles for Complex Engineering Problems
Jan 2026
{dev.talk}
Bournemouth
Community appearance
Nov 2025
Dynamics 365 Summit
Lisbon
Jedi Mindset for ERP Projects
Oct 2025
Cloud Lunch and Learn
Online
Community appearance
The 3S method
From firefighting to flow.
Regardless of what we discover, we understand and truly believe that everyone did the best job they could, given what they knew at the time, their skills and abilities, the resources available, and the situation at hand.
The retrospective prime directive, as he uses it.
From firefighting to flow. A team that can see the work, finish it, and stop living in the incident queue.
Watch: How Scrum, Stoicism & Systems Thinking Can Make You a Better Leader