Contoso Pharmaceuticals
Background
Contoso Pharmaceuticals distributes specialty pharmaceuticals, ingredients, and raw materials throughout North America. The company has 33 offices and 12 warehouses across the US, Mexico, and Canada. As their customers' needs grow in sophistication, Contoso wants to delight customers with breakthrough products, exceptional service, and on-time delivery of materials. They want to automate time consuming and manual processes that are prone to error. Contoso wants to consolidate and automate ordering and fulfillment processes.
1. The company has a fleet of 500 delivery trucks. The company has 150 drivers and uses third-party contractors to deliver goods.
2. The company has 400 warehouse workers and 30 finance clerks.
3. Contoso has 85 sales representatives and 50 customer service representatives. Sales representatives spend most of their time on the road visiting customers or prospects.
4. The IT department consists of four system administrators and six system analysts.
Current environment
Overview
Contoso Pharmaceuticals has a custom enterprise resource management (ERP) system. It is difficult to integrate other applications and services with the system. Office staff manually key in purchase orders, customer orders, and invoices after they receive a scan or hard copy of an agreement.
Applications
1. The company uses a custom supplier management system named SMSApps that runs on each user's workstation. The system is costly to run and maintain. SMSApp does not have an API.
2. Sales representatives manage customer requests by using Dynamics 365 Sales.
3. Contoso has Microsoft Power Platform development, user acceptance testing (UAT), and production environments.
4. Administrators create one Accounts Payable (AP) mailbox for each environment to support testing.
5. The use of a DLP policy and Desktop Flow development is specified as part of the automation requirements.
Security
You assign all users one or more Microsoft Dataverse security roles.
Business process
1. Sales representatives create quotes by using a Microsoft Word document template. The template allows representatives to include product quantity, and cost estimation details that will be needed to fulfil an order.
The representative converts quotes to a PDF file and emails the file to the customer for approval.
2. The sales representative alerts the finance team about the new order and emails the finance team a copy of the quote for processing.
3. The finance teamprints the quote and manually creates a purchase order (PO) into SMSApp to request materials from a known and trusted vendor.
4. The SMSApp distributes the PO to stakeholders. The system sends a copy to a shared finance team mailbox.
5. Once a PO is fulfilled by a vendor, the system sends an email to the finance mailbox. The finance team releases an order to the warehouse.
6. Materials are shipped from the vendor to one of Contoso's warehouses. Warehouse workers enter key information from the waybill into SMSApp. The materials are unloaded and racked in the warehouse until they are shipped to customers.
7. Upon checking for new daily orders in SMSApp, they see an open order is pending that is awaiting the newly received materials
8. The Warehouse worker loads an order onto a truck for delivery and marks the order as complete in SMSApp.
9. Sales representatives provide fulfillment status and tracking information for orders.
10. A finance clerk prepares an invoice and sends the invoice to the customer by email. The clerk sends a copy of the email to the shared AP mailbox.
11. The AP team monitors the shared mailbox to confirm that the customer has paid the invoice.
Requirements
Functional requirements
1. Large volume orders must be processed before other orders.
2. Invoices must be cross-checked with received items against packing slip for shipments.
3. The finance team must be able to analyze patterns in transactional data to conduct fraud prevention activities.
4. You must automate the process of entering data about incoming orders into SMSApp.
5. The solution must follow the principle of least privilege.
Purchase Order Quantity flow
1. You must create an unmanaged solution to update purchase order details in SMSApp.The flow must use a manual trigger.
2. Members of Accounts Payable team will be testers for the solution. They must be able to access the Purchase Order Quantity flow.
Flow for processing invoice data
1. You must create a flow to monitor the AP mailbox. When an invoice arrives as an attachment in the inbox, the flow must automatically process the invoice data by using a form processing model. The flow must cross-check the received items against the packing slip.
2. You must use different Accounts Payable email addresses for development user acceptance testing (UAT), and production environments.
3. You must use an environment variable to represent the Accounts Payable mailbox for the environment in use.
4. You must be able to use the environment variable across multiple cloud flows, a custom connector, and a canvas app.
Technical requirements
1. Users must only be allowed to connect to and access systems that are required for the employee to perform required job tasks.
2. All automation flows must be either co-owned or shared between staff.
3. All employees must be able to access the new environment to build personal productivity automations.
4. You must distribute the workload for desktop flows to optimize productivity.
5. A DLP policy must be created and applied to the Development environment. Connectors required by the data entry automation flow must be added to the policy.
Order fulfillment flow
You must automate the customer communication process by using an unattended desktop flow. The flow must check the fulfilment status of each active order in SMSApp. If an order is fulfilled, the flow must send the customer an email that includes tracking information for their order.
Monitor flows
1. All data extracted from Invoices should be stored in a custom Dataverse table.
2. You must assign users from the finance to the Finance business unit. You must add these users to a new security role named Finance.
3. Finance users must be prevented from creating or deleting invoice records.
4. All users must be able to view invoices.
Issues
Invoice data
All users report that they can see and modify invoice data.
New environment
1. The IT department creates a new environment that includes Microsoft Dataverse. An employee reports operational issues in Power Platform Admin center.
2. A user switch to the new environment and creates a cloud flow named FlowA that triggers a desktop flow. The user reports that the cloud flow does not trigger the desktop flow to run.
3. A user attempts to create a Desktop flow in the default environment. A Dataverse error message displays.
Data entry automation flow
An administrator runs a new desktop flow in the development environment to automate data entry into SMSApp. The flow automatically reverts to a suspended state.
Order fulfillment flow
The warehouse team observers that the order fulfillment flow has stopped working. Orders are flowing into SMSApp but customers do not receive tracking emails. A system administrator is troubleshooting the flow on the target machine.