[00:00:05.060] Hey, Romain.

[00:00:05.640] Good afternoon.

[00:00:06.590] Welcome to the podcast. It’s the end of the week. Thank you for having me. All right. Thank you for being here. Before we jump into a very interesting topic, why don’t you introduce yourself?

[00:00:17.180] Yeah, absolutely. I’m one of the directors at Lid working in our technology practice, specifically more with the Microsoft set of suite of applications we implement and deploy. Primary focus is usually business central ERP, but around that there’s all sorts of other Microsoft tools such as Power automate, and that’s what we’re covering today.

[00:00:39.950] All right, so we’re going to talk about automating anything. Exactly. All right. Okay, so good. As we know, the supply chain, and even within an organization now, there are so many systems, so many connections are required, and therefore, the need to integrate those systems systems to exchange data is essential for these organizations to be efficient in what they do. And in terms of integrating systems, whether it’s among different nodes or within the organizations between legacy systems that we want or need to keep with maybe more best of breed or newer systems, what has been used or what is at the forefront is what we call APIs, which is the protocol or the method that is best suited to connect systems, right?

[00:01:40.230] Yeah, absolutely. In a modern system and with modern apps Typically, the way to exchange information between these apps is through what we call API. API stands for Application Programming Interface. It’s essentially a protocol or a set of ways to connect between these different systems. In one system, you can expose data to another one through what we call an endpoint. Through that endpoint, systems can essentially talk to each other. Now, that is somewhat of a modern technology and what is now the best of breed in terms of connecting these different systems, but it’s not every system that has API capability. In such cases, we do have to find other methods of still exchanging the information between these systems. That’s where something like power Power automate can come in handy because it allows you to obviously use APIs for those more modern apps and systems and services. But when that’s not available, Power automate can still enable you to exchange information without necessarily going through APIs. So one of the examples we’ve come across there is we had a recent client where they have a franchise model. So they’re a franchisee, sorry, of a bigger franchise. I don’t know what the word is.

[00:03:02.520] They’re part of a franchise group.

[00:03:04.800] The company we work with is the franchisee. Correct. Therefore, they have a relationship with the franchisor.

[00:03:11.300] Exactly. In that context, obviously, they would dependent on the franchisor’s systems, which is a large organization. Those systems that the franchisor uses and that the franchisee is dependent on were pretty restricted in terms of both connected activity and access to the data, because obviously the franchisee only has access to their slice of that data.

[00:03:36.170] I’ll interrupt just to put a little bit more of context, because one may ask, well, between the franchisee and the franchisor, the exchange of data is absolutely normal, and that would be part of the contract anyway. But where we ran into something that is more specific is that in this, in the project we worked on, which is in the retail industry, the franchisee, our client, was growing and therefore owned many, many stores, right? To the point where in a distribution environment, they said, Well, not at the size that we have, the number of stores we have, yes, we have to purchase from our franchiser or franchises partners, but we also have some leeway in and managing the procurement and buying. So therefore, their objective is to say, Well, we will take on some of the distribution to our stores for a given set of product, let’s say, or vendors. So that’s the context where a franchisee is implementing distribution operations.

[00:04:55.780] Exactly. And through implementing that distribution, they obviously need to implement tools to support those operations. In doing that, they essentially implemented part of an ERP and a WMS to allow them to run operations smoothly. But of course, in the context of the entire network distribution, while they’re dependent on some information coming from other systems, specifically that of the franchisor. That’s where we came in and we said, Okay, well, because of the franchises restrictions in terms of connectivity and access to the information, we will leverage Power automate to help integrate some of these systems together, so the ones that the franchisee was implementing, and still be able to get the data from the franchiser.

[00:05:45.250] Can you just elaborate a little bit on that data? What is the information that they required that was actually difficult to get for reasons that you can explain as well?

[00:05:56.760] Classic things you would need to run a distribution operation. We’re We’re talking about product information. We’re talking about incoming shipments of products that are to be received at the warehouse they were building, inventory levels across the stores and across the network, and Maybe an additional complexity here is there was a dependency to a retail website as well. It was managed by the franchiser, so they didn’t have control there, but obviously, they fulfill part of those web orders. That just threw a wrench in the mix in terms of interdependence I can see there’s between the franchisee and franchisor. But that’s really it. It’s master data related to products, vendors, and stores, and then the transactions themselves in terms of what they’re about to receive and what they’re about to ship out.

[00:06:45.900] Yeah, and you can think, again, because of this model, the franchiser holds the master data of the products and what’s available. To start thinking about creating that on their own is a little bit… It’s probably not the way to Exactly.

[00:07:00.960] They have essentially a large database that holds all of that information. But as I said before, it’s sliced per franchisee. Everyone gets access to everything. Really, the problem was, how do we get that data out other than someone going in and clicking at the right places to get essentially what is an Excel sheet with the extracted information. This is where Power automate comes in handy because we can use that tool to streamline that repetitive task of someone going in and extracting, whether it’s daily or weekly, the information they need and just simulating some of these clicks. We’ll get into the detail of this a bit later, maybe. But it was a way to automate what would otherwise be a manual repetitive task through Power automate to allow them to get the information at the frequency they needed to then transform and work with the data and then push it out to the franchisee systems this times and then leverage it in their operations.

[00:08:03.090] Okay. Well, you say you want to talk about maybe some of the details. Yeah, go ahead. Please continue. Sure.

[00:08:12.880] We can separate Power automate into different categories of what it can do, and maybe we’ll get into that. Essentially, Power automate is an automation platform on which you can build workflows to streamline automation. But of course, to automate anything, you We need to connect to different systems that hold information. There’s the automation part, which is, okay, what is the sequence or the workflow of events and actions and triggers we want to build? There’s where does the data come from and how do we integrate the systems? Then there’s also something called RPA, which is Robotic Process or Robot Process Automation, which is the the lower level of this, where in those systems that are archaic and where we don’t have the connectivity, we can literally simulate a user input. Whether that’s a click or filling in the field or doing any manipulation on screen, we can record those actions and then have the system automate them instead of human so that we can get the same result without really needing to connect system to system. We’re just replicating a series of click, and then we can get the information we want in the format that’s available.

[00:09:22.030] In the case of the franchisee, that’s what they were doing. Then from that format, once the file exists, essentially, we can then transform, work on the data, and then push it to the various places and action upon it in the way we want.

[00:09:34.900] Just to recap, in the case that we’re talking about here, we have a franchisee that needs to extract data from a system that is outside of their organization. That ability to extract is limited, as you said, because the franchisor does not necessarily want to open the doors because there are security concerns or maybe not confidentiality issues.

[00:10:07.180] No, go ahead. There’s the security aspect of it, of course, but there’s also just availability of someone on the franchiser side, in this case, to work on those systems or to enable that connectivity. So even if the answer was, yes, we don’t mind opening the gates, someone still needs to open the gate and maybe develop an API or something like that. So we had a dependency potentially on a resource on the franchisor side that just wasn’t available to help us do that system-to-system connection. So one of the nice workarounds was Power Automate for that.

[00:10:38.370] And since, well, from the franchisor’s point of view, one of their franchisee taking on some part of the distribution because of their size was not actually quite uncommon, right? Because other franchisee are mostly… Because of the geography and the industry was, most of them have one store, and therefore the need isn’t there. So it’s not You could say, Well, let’s put the resource in, but there’s no need or real reason other than this specific case to do so. So you have this context of data availability that is either, I don’t want to say impossible, but what is made available to the franchisee and the way they want to use it is in an inefficient format. As we said, it cannot be connected in the way we would connect other systems within. Exactly. So that would be a very tedious. If we think about, Okay, well, we have to keep that process manual, it would almost eliminate or erase the benefits of wanting to do it yourself because the manual treatment of data, to put it in a form that is usable for, let’s say, WMS of our franchisee would be huge.

[00:12:03.070] You need someone that sits there and then downloads the report and waits 45 minutes for it to spit out the report in this particular instance. One of the nice things about Power automate is that you can schedule it at different times, too. Rather than someone doing it at 9:00 AM as the first thing of their day, we have Power automate run the flow 2:00 AM when there’s a less impact on the system in terms of performance so that when the people come in, the data is there ready to actioned upon. That’s one of the things as well. You can schedule these flows at different frequencies and at different time intervals.

[00:12:38.310] Okay. Then the franchisee has access to the integrity… Has It’s just the access to data that keeps its integrity rather than duplicate. Well, I assume it’s being duplicated, but the source remains unique. Correct.

[00:12:53.240] In this case, we were really just downloading a copy or slice of the data in what was an Excel format. And then from that, we can then do with it what we want. Okay.

[00:13:06.700] So that’s pretty good, actually, right? It’s a workaround that saves hours and hours of clinical work. Absolutely. And still get us as close as we can to respecting good practices of having only one source of truth for data. Exactly.

[00:13:25.930] And the other main benefit of Power automate is that the The effort to build this particular workflow in this systemized extraction, I should say, is low as well. In a matter of hours, someone with minimal coding experience can build these flows. It’s purposefully meant to be intuitive and user friendly so that someone that is not a developer or extremely technical can understand and maybe with some support can build these flows as well to extract that information. The lift to get that going and up and running and monitored is pretty low, and that’s one of the benefits of something like Powered Me.

[00:14:07.720] Okay, very nice. Other elements you want to bring up about, let’s say, that specific environment?

[00:14:16.340] Not necessarily. Just it was a fun example of using really the desktop automation. Typically, we don’t go, but we don’t have that many cases where that is a requirement. We usually deal with a bit more modern systems, but it’s nice to know that there is that back way of managing things. It’s still automating things even when you don’t have the latest capabilities in terms of integration.

[00:14:39.280] Yeah, because a platform that is used to automate tasks or clicks or the way you’ve described can also be done at a smaller scale. But it’s interesting to see here, actually, it was, we call it at a greater scale.

[00:14:55.680] Correct. Yeah. It goes from anything from a simple automation of you receive an email and you want to save the file somewhere in your SharePoint, that’s a very small scale automation just for you, to thousands of schedule scripts that are running daily to X. We’ve got all of that range in terms of what capabilities you have with Power automate. The reality is that the complexity of these flows doesn’t really differ that much between a simple thing like extracting an attachment from an email to building these larger, complex flows.

[00:15:30.840] Because it’s a sequence of steps.

[00:15:32.690] Because it’s a sequence of steps. And Microsoft has, and this is the selling point of it, it has a set of templates you can start from. So there’s hundreds of prebuilt templates. So likely what you’re trying to do in a business context in terms of automation might have been thought of or it’s closely related to something that’s already existing. So you can start from a template and adjust it from there or choose from building blocks to build your flow. And then the other part is, integration to other systems and apps and services is already also provided with the tool. So you’ve got thousands and thousands of existing connectors, whether that’s to Microsoft tools, but everything else, so Dropbox, Gmail, Yahoo, Bing, whatever you want. Microsoft has these prebuilt connectors so that you can, with a drag and drop, essentially connect to all these systems and build whatever you’re trying to automate.

[00:16:25.520] Would you see it being used in, let’s say, a similar fashion? Again, Maybe the franchisee example might be, I don’t want to say fringe, but it’s not that common that we run into this situation. But let’s say the platform would be used to connect other ERPs. Would that be possible with SAP or any other, or it loses its appeal?

[00:16:54.260] It’s definitely possible. I don’t know by heart which ERPs have pre-made connectors. Of course, the ones built by Microsoft have a large, extensive, I should say, connectivity. That said, there are hundreds of different tools, HubSpot or Salesforce or whatever other tool you’re using in your business applications. Those have existing connectors to power automate, and then you can leverage whatever you want. It always starts with some event or trigger or something that actions the flow, and then a set of actions resulting from that trigger where you define what you wanted to do, and then you can have conditions in there. If A, do this, if B, do that, and it allows you to streamline and to work those flow into your operations.

[00:17:39.340] Okay, very good. Any other top or points you want to make? Not necessarily.

[00:17:46.580] Okay. On that, parentheses of exactly what Power Platform does. I guess maybe one of the examples we can talk about is the one we use internally to make it a bit more specific. So we were relying on a bit of an outdated system for time entry as well. We’re not outdated, but limited in connectivity. It’s put that way.

[00:18:06.350] It’s not evolving as fast as our ERP.

[00:18:08.680] Exactly. That’s another example where we used exactly that desktop automation where we were able to get a report from our time entry tool where we record our hours and then transform that data, push it to a data repository, and then have Power BI that are KPIs and analytics is pulling from that data. So internally as well, we use power automate to run that flow so that everyone who’s making decisions in the business has access to real-time information of what we’ve been up to, essentially. Even though that data was in a less connected application.

[00:18:49.280] Yeah. So the overarching theme here is the… Because our example, we work in supply chain, but we’re not resolving a supply chain issue. But ultimately, as you say, for For us, time capturing our time is essential to our business because that’s how we ultimately invoice and collect cash. And even for ourselves, experts at the digital transformation, we have evolved and still parts of our business are using systems that are a little bit more archaic. But until we migrate, we are able to reduce the negative impact of dealing with with systems that may require a little bit too much of a manual input. Exactly. So ultimately, this solution, such as Power automate, is very interesting also to It could be, we call it a temporary solution because it’s easy and cheap to develop or to implement. It can be a very interesting interim solution until you can replace systems that need to be replaced.

[00:20:03.260] Yeah, and even in that scenario, let’s say you do replace that system and you have a whole bunch of logic built on the data you’ve extracted. If the source changes, likely it’s just a switch of the pre-existing trigger to the new system, maybe in a slightly different format, but everything else in your flow can remain the same. So the change required to point to something else, if you do change systems, is minimal again, and you can just keep essentially the same flow and continue running your business. Very good. Or even add a second source. Possibilities.

[00:20:33.600] Are endless. Endless. There you go. All right. Well, I think we’re good. Did we go around the subject? Are we good?

[00:20:39.610] I believe so.

[00:20:40.220] Okay. Well, thank you for being here. Thank you for having me. I’ll see you next time. Was this your first podcast? No.

[00:20:45.930] First one where we prepared.

[00:20:47.220] What was the other one?

[00:20:49.490] I was called in to participate.

[00:20:51.880] Okay, there you go. I’m sure that was great, too. Thank you, Romain. All right. Thanks a lot.