Retailers speed up their digital transformation with Power Platform

Seamlessly connect customers, your people, and your data

Online sales are going through the roof, shopping habits are changing rapidly, customers demand a personal approach, competition is fierce, and stores are slowly reopening. Insights from data and convenient digital tools allow retailers to react rapidly to these large-scale changes. Thanks to a software revolution you are empowered to develop tools with an operational and strategic edge much faster.

The COVID-19 pandemic put trends across the world into overdrive. Not only are many more people working from home, but we are also shopping from home more and more. Online sales rose by 44% in 2020 in the United States, and e-commerce is also seeing double-digit growth in Europe and the rest of the world. Now that more stores are reopening, retailers need to adapt to the new reality even faster. You need to know your customers well, design and manage your stores and supply chain efficiently, be shopping, provide your employees with convenient tools, and seamlessly connect your store’s front end and back end.

Digital transformation is a necessity for retailers

For retailers who want to improve customer loyalty, make their business more efficient, and respond to changes in an agile way, digitalization is a necessity. Digital processes are more efficient and reduce the risk of error, and the data they yield on analysis provide an enormous amount of insights. Developing and automating apps used to be time-consuming, complex, and expensive, thanks to Power Platform this in no longer a case.

What is Power Platform?

This low-code/no-code solution allows employees with no programming experience to build their own apps, automate processes, and launch chatbots. It also allows veteran developers to build complex solutions much faster than before.    One component of Power Platform is Power Apps. With Power Apps you can easily build business applications that work on smartphones, tablets, and desktops. You simply drag and drop content, like in a PowerPoint presentation, and you use functions, like in an Excel spreadsheet.

Connect everything

You can either start from scratch or select components from the extensive content library. With Power Apps, you can also modernize legacy solutions by giving them an interface for mobile use. With Power BI, you analyze and visualize data from all apps in dashboards. Workflows are automated with Power Automate by dragging functions and placing them in a row. In this way, you can connect all conceivable data sources and technology, such as Teams, Dynamics 365, Salesforce, SAP, Oracle, and hundreds of other solutions. With Power Virtual Agents, you can create and manage your chatbots, thereby automating your internal and external services.

Faster and better store audits

Many retailers use paper for all sorts of processes. Take store audits: employees use pen and paper to check sales volumes, stock levels, damaged products, the location of products, prices, whether marketing is up to date, and many more things. This process is time consuming and prone to errors, and papers sometimes get lost. Pepsi has used the Power Platform to build the Store Audit App for a fraction of the development costs and time. Store audits have since become faster, the data are available for analysis immediately, and data no longer get lost. This saved Pepsi over 1.5 million dollars in development costs, compliance penalty avoidance, and optimal resource use.

Automatically determine the optimal sales mix
Retailers want to bring together as many data as possible to achieve the optimal products sales mix. Which product sells best at which location, and what stock is optimal? To determine this, Pepsi used Power Platform to develop the Cold Space allocator. This app combines sales history, demographic information, and comparative warehouse data to determine the best product mix for a given store. When a salesperson enters the cold storage space availability and the configuration of a given store, the app returns the optimal product mix and quantities in a planogram.

Securely closing the loop

Power Platform not only gives your digital transformation a boost, it does so in a safe and controlled way. The Center of Excellence allows you to manage all apps under development and in use. As the apps are part of the Microsoft suite, governance and security are easily managed in a centralized way.

Make an app in a day!

Digitalizing processes helps retail move forward. Watch our webcast to see how Power Platform can help your retail organization digitalize faster. Find out which specific applications are available now. Do you want to learn how to digitalize processes faster, or would you like some help with this? Enroll in the App in a Day workshop! You will learn how to create a powerful Power Apps application in a single day. Power Platform lets you build your digital retail organization faster than ever before.