The real transformational power of the Intelligent Enterprise is realized when companies harness the end-to-end business process integrations that connect the supply-side to the demand-side of an enterprise.
Leveraging data from every facet of a business maximizes investments in cloud, mobility, analytics, and artificial intelligence provides to provide actionable insights that empower companies to make proactive, real-time decisions that lead to optimized performance, improved efficiencies, reduced costs, and better value for customers.
One key technology enabler for bridging systems, processes, and digital gaps throughout the enterprise is the Microsoft Power Platform.
Many of our manufacturing customers run SAP as their ERP to drive their core engineering, manufacturing, & supply chain processes, and the Microsoft Power Platform and Power Apps can maximize and compliment the capabilities of SAP. SAP is great at complex transactional processing, and the Power Platform can augment it with user-friendly tools to improve the buying and selling experience.
A recent customer success story came from a worldwide provider of fluid power solutions to EM's, manufacturers, and end users for a variety of heavy duty mobile and industrial equipment.
This customer needed to improve their requisition process and automate their invoice receipt process quickly – and they had no off-the-shelf solution to support the initiative. They looked to the Power Platform to fill that digital gap, and eLogic utilized Power Automate to create an approval process flow based on levels of approval authority and delegation and incorporated an invoice recognition scenario using artificial intelligence.
Their team can now submit purchase requests through a web form, which goes to the purchasing team for review and approval or collaborate to make changes, which are tracked in the system. The request then goes through a pre-defined approval process, and once approved, it automatically creates a purchase order in SAP. In the app, the original requester can also track the purchasing process.
The buyer then receives an invoice from the company they just purchased from. Optical Character Recognition and an AI model from Microsoft reads the invoice and enters the details into a form that can be automatically approved if it matches the original order. If the AI picks up on a discrepancy, it is flagged and moved to a manual approval. It can then post to SAP against the original order as well, as part of that request in order to track every detail.
The end result was an extension of their SAP environment with a user-friendly experience that increased user satisfaction, along with a reduction in costs to support purchasing and invoicing.
I invite you to click here to learn more about some of our other Power Apps topics, such as Power Platform Governance.
