Food Production Company Integrate Orders, Shipment & Invoices with Legacy Desktop Applications using Power Automate RPA

Overview


VNB Consulting assisted a Food Production company integrate orders, shipments & invoices with Legacy desktop application using Power Automate RPA

Customer Profile

Customer is a food production company offering ground beef purveyor. Customer is one of the main suppliers of ground beef to the popular chains. It sells more than 80 million pounds of ground beef with revenue approaching $250 million. Customer company has been one of the biggest suppliers for nearly 40 years delivering high quality ground beef to Burger fanatics across US.

Customer Situation


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Customer was looking to embed a new Transport Management System (TMS) into their IT systems. With this, there was a need to integrate the cloud based TMS with their on-premises ERP System. The ERP system is a legacy desktop application with very minimum scope for integration with currently available technologies or API’s. Also, there was a limitation to directly connect with the DB/backend system of the ERP. Therefore, for integration of Orders, Shipment writebacks and Invoice processes, there was a lot of manual effort that was being steered by the customer. They were also not able to write data to their backend system, therefore, a lot of manual effort was involved.

Our Solution Offering


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After conducting a detailed assessment of the client’s requirements, our team recommended ERP and TMS Integration using Microsoft Power Automate and Microsoft Power Automate Desktop/Win Automation. The application integration interfaces were developed using Power Automate Flow, UI Flows and Power Automate Desktop/Win Automation processes. Using Robotic Process Automation (RPA) OOB from Microsoft Power Automate, the interfaces would connect to the TMS APIs. For write-back messages from TMS to ERP, the solution was designed to hold this data in a staging area. Power Automate API flows were exposed to TMS to put data into the staging DB. Once the data was staged, Power Automate UI flows and Win Automation processes were used to automate entry of shipment as PO and Invoices into the ERP system and also update Order with the TMS unique order number and details for reporting purposes. The solution provided has the following benefits - • Low code Development: Leverage a low-code experience with a step-by-step record and play back experience • Automation: Automate in a single platform across apps and services that don’t have APIs • Seamless Integration: Seamlessly integrate UI automation with API-based automation by combining UI flows with regular flows • Optimize Application Security Power Automate: Customize, build, and manage UI flows scripts in a secure cloud environment • Improved business processes: By automating these processes, customer can focus their efforts on analyzing information, establishing goals and supporting their teams • Accuracy and Quality: RPA offers improved services to processes that have a high probability of human error, thereby increasing accuracy. RPA optimizes capabilities that multiply the organizational capacity • Faster: As bots are handling the execution here, a larger amount of work can be done in a relatively much shorter period and achieve faster delivery

Customer Benefits

  • Centralize Information: Centralized all information so that every stakeholder in the supply chain can easily view and access the same data as their peers. Working off of the same set of information reduced the risk of error and made processes flow more smoothly.
  • Minimize Manual Entry: With ERP integration, orders flow automatically into the TMS without any need of rekeying orders.
  • Better Productivity: The solution reduced a lot of manual effort, thereby increasing staff productivity and reducing scope of manual errors.
  • Ease of use: Power Platform based solution is easy to use for the users who are already working with Microsoft 365. They have a good integrated experience on the app along with the other Microsoft 365 apps in use within the organization.

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