New products often need to be approved by other colleagues in different departments within your company. A standardized approval process is vital in order to maintain a clear overview and ensure high efficiency and productivity throughout the approval period. Cegeka has built a user-friendly canvas app using Microsoft Power Apps to streamline product approval – saving time and money, and also reducing stress for everyone involved.
The challenge
One of our customers in the leather chemical industry was struggling with their existing approval process for newly developed chemicals, whereby:
- An employee added a new chemical to AX, the precursor to Microsoft Dynamics Finance & Operations.
- He or she then notified all reviewers, who all then embarked upon their own approval process for the item without any predetermined flow.
- Once all reviewers had approved, the employee then had to recheck all the parameters in AX and adjust them if necessary.
Together with our customer, we devised a solution to make the approval process less time-consuming, less cluttered and far more transparent.
The approach
Using Microsoft Power Apps, we developed a canvas app to streamline the full approval process:
- Before being entered into AX, all newly developed chemicals are first submitted in the app.
- Once the item has been submitted, Microsoft Power Automate automatically notifies reviewers. Now, instead of having all reviewers check the item simultaneously, it follows a predefined flow along the relevant departments. This in turn makes the whole approval process a lot more structured.
- One by one, each reviewer can inspect the item, add comments, and approve (or reject) it. All data is automatically stored in Microsoft Dataverse.
- The submitter is able to monitor the process closely and knows who is reviewing the item at any given moment.
- Once the item has been approved by all the relevant reviewers, the submitter just needs to manually enter it into Microsoft AX, together with all the appropriate parameters.
The results
The new approval process is a big step forward for both reviewers and submitters:
- Reviewers are now instantly notified that they will be receiving a new item for approval.
- Submitters now have a much better overview and can closely monitor an item’s approval status.
- Only when an item has been approved by all reviewers is it added to Microsoft AX, together with all the correct parameters. This eliminates any duplicate work for submitters.
If, in the future, the customer decides to switch to Finance & Operations, the final stage in the approval process – the manual entry into AX – can also be automated.
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