Power Apps for Microsoft Dynamics Business Central

What is Microsoft Power Apps?

Overview:

Microsoft Power Apps is a revolutionary low-code/no-code platform that empowers you to craft custom business applications effortlessly, without the need for coding. The true magic happens when Power Apps seamlessly integrates with Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics 365 CRM, allowing you to tailor and refine these solutions to match your unique requirements.

Benefits of Harnessing Power Apps for Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics 365 CRM

Enhance your core business applications, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM, with Power Apps for a new level of integration.

Increase Productivity: Power Apps simplifies the automation of tasks and streamlines workflows, liberating your workforce to concentrate on more strategic, value-added activities. This results in enhanced operational efficiency, as repetitive tasks are automated, and employees are free to focus on tasks that drive growth and innovation.

Elevate Customer Service: Custom applications created with Power Apps can revolutionize the customer experience. You can develop self-service portals, mobile apps, and other solutions that provide customers with greater convenience, access to information, and efficient problem resolution. The result is improved customer service, higher satisfaction levels, and increased loyalty.

Cost Efficiency: By reducing the expenses associated with developing and maintaining custom business applications, Power Apps helps you optimize your budget allocation. This cost-effectiveness allows you to channel resources into other critical areas of your business, promoting sustainability and growth.

Agility and Responsiveness: The agility provided by Power Apps enables rapid response to evolving business demands. You can create and deploy new applications swiftly and with ease, ensuring that your technology is aligned with your business needs. This level of agility empowers your organization to adapt quickly to changing market conditions and customer expectations.

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Use Cases for Power Apps with Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics 365 CRM

Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Craft custom CRM applications to monitor customer interactions, manage leads and opportunities, and provide superior customer support. By designing applications tailored to your unique CRM needs, you can enhance customer relationship management, drive sales growth, and ensure that no opportunity falls through the cracks.

Sales Force Automation (SFA): Develop custom SFA applications to oversee sales pipelines, create and track quotes, and generate sales orders. These tailored applications empower your sales teams with the tools they need to drive sales, improve conversion rates, and ultimately boost revenue.

Field Service Management (FSM): Build tailored FSM applications to schedule and dispatch service technicians, monitor service requests, and generate invoices. The result is an optimized field service operation with improved efficiency, faster response times, and enhanced customer satisfaction.

Project Management: Create custom project management applications for tracking tasks, managing resources, and reporting project progress. These applications streamline project management, enhance collaboration, and ensure projects are completed on time and within budget.

Inventory Management: Tailor applications to effectively manage inventory levels, handle orders, and generate insightful reports. By harnessing Power Apps for inventory management, you can optimize stock levels, reduce carrying costs, and improve order accuracy.

Human Resources (HR): Custom HR applications can help manage employee records, monitor vacation time, and facilitate payroll processes. These applications improve HR processes, enhance data accuracy, and support efficient and compliant HR operations.

How Zetamind Consulting Can Propel Your Business with Power Apps

Zetamind Consulting, a distinguished Microsoft Silver Partner, and a leader in providing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics 365 CRM solutions, is uniquely positioned to assist you. We specialize in designing, developing, and deploying custom Power Apps applications, meticulously aligned with your Dynamics 365 solutions, to meet your specific requirements.

Our team of seasoned consultants boasts profound expertise in both Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Apps. We collaborate closely with you to identify opportunities where Power Apps can optimize your business processes, enabling you to reach your business objectives seamlessly. Discover how we can supercharge your Dynamics 365 solutions with the transformative potential of Power Apps. Contact us today to explore the endless possibilities that lie ahead.

Real-world Success Stories with Zetamind Consulting and Power Apps

We partnered with a manufacturing company to create a custom Power Apps application, streamlining their order fulfillment process. The application allows sales representatives to input orders directly into Dynamics 365 Business Central, automatically generating picking and packing lists, reducing order fulfillment time by an impressive 20%. This resulted in faster order processing, increased customer satisfaction, and a competitive edge in the market.

For a retail company, we designed a tailored Power Apps application enabling customers to place orders through a self-service portal. Seamlessly integrated with Dynamics 365 CRM and Dynamics 365 Business Central, this solution ensures precise order processing and improved customer experience while lightening the workload of the sales team. As a result, the company achieved higher customer retention and expanded its customer base.

A field service company benefited from a custom Power Apps application to manage service technicians. This application provides technicians with visibility into their schedules, the ability to accept service requests, and real-time job progress tracking. It also integrates with Dynamics 365 CRM to generate invoices and reports. This has helped to improve the efficiency of the company's field service operation, ensuring faster response times, reduced operational costs, and enhanced customer satisfaction.

What can Microsoft Power Apps do for your business?

Building apps quickly and easily is clearly a ‘wow factor’, people in your organisation will be wanting to ‘have a play’ but it’s important to have control and reasoning behind all Power Apps inside of your systems landscape. Whilst there is tremendous value available, it should not become a free for all. You should approach the creation and management of Power Apps like you would manage your ERP and CRM solutions.

But Power Apps is designed to bridge the gaps you have in your business systems. Evaluating Excel spreadsheets, SharePoint Lists and Access databases is a good starting point to see if Power Apps has a place in your business, and potentially create some quick wins.

Drive the ability and benefit of managing your data centrally, if you have a lot of data centrally with ERP and CRM, why would you have other silos of data in your organisation?

How do Power Apps work with Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central?

Dynamics 365 Business Central can be connected to Power Apps as a data source as standard. Power Apps will then display a list of environments and companies that are available from Business Central.

But how exactly does the connection work? Well, as part of the connection, we are presented with a set of tables available to us, through API. But Microsoft doesn’t give us every API we ever need and remember customisations in Dynamics 365 Business Central require creation of custom API’s. So, you may want some help from us.

You then need to decide what the structure of your pages will be and how the user will consume and interact with data.

Where could we use Power Apps with Dynamics 365 Business Central?

A Power App could be a good way of enabling an item catalogue with pictures while sales reps/agents are out on the road. Maybe you want it to go further and enable a simple quoting and ordering app too?

How about using a Power App to manage incoming deliveries from suppliers. To help check them in; vehicle checks, temperature checks, weight on arrival, weight on exit?

Power Apps can be utilised to effectively manage non-conformances on the shop floor. These non-conformances can be related to suppliers, internal processes or customers. By allowing employees from any department to log and report non-conformances, the quality team can quickly investigate, assist with resolution, and implement preventative measures. This way Power Apps can facilitate a swift and efficient process for addressing non-conformances and ensure high-quality standards throughout the shop floor.

How about a new item request/creation app? When you are looking to add to your item catalogue, instead of giving all users the ability in Dynamics 365 Business Central to create items freely, how about a Power App to offer a layer of control and management.

Also, think about how Power Apps could be used out on the road by an engineer for example. We know that Dynamics 365 Business Central has service management functionality to generate demand for engineers, but a Power App could enable engineers to see and feed back job information. Plus with the ability for the Power App to work offline too, they’re a great option for any team member who is working away from their desk.

If you’re an existing Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central user with a cloud licence, depending on the type of licence you have, you may already have the ability to start creating and using Power Apps. So give us a shout on how we can get you started with your Power App journey.

How do Power Apps work with Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM ?

As Dynamics 365 CRM is already a Model Driven App (yes, just one that Microsoft have built for us and maintain and update), it is already in Dataverse, so we can create Power Canvas Apps on top of Dynamics 365 CRM. Alternatively, we can extend the Model Driven App of Dynamics 365 CRM itself or create a new app.

So, given this news, where could we use Power Apps to improve the CRM solution?

Power Apps can be used to improve the user experience for your sales team on the road. By creating a Power Canvas App on top of Dynamics 365 CRM, your sales team can access product catalogues and quote functionality with a simpler interface. A great alternative to using the Dynamics 365 CRM mobile app, which while great when your sales team are out on the road, doesnt include a simple to access product catalogue.

It can be used to bring data together inside of CRM, where we embed Canvas Apps inside of CRM to help interact with and view data easier, given we know that the UI in Model Driven Apps are more restrictive.

How about building a Canvas App for a very simple data capture screen for leads at a trade show? Attendee details can be inputted into your app and go straight into the lead pot in Dynamics 365 CRM ready for follow up immediately after the show!

Another potential use case for Power Apps is linking non-conformances to a case in Dynamics 365 CRM. The strong process management functionality makes Dynamics 365 CRM an ideal platform to track and manage non-conformances. People across the business may not be using CRM day to day, so a Power App makes it easy to collect the right data in the right place for the business.

If you’re an existing Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM user with a cloud licence, depending on the type of licence you have, you may already have the ability to start creating and using Power Apps, so give us a shout on how we can get you started with your Power App journey.

Find out how Power Apps can work with your ERP or CRM Solution

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Connect to and manage the data that matters to you

Whether you’re wanting to connect to your other Microsoft Apps like Teams, Dynamics 365 Business Central and Dynamics 365 CRM, or even non-Microsoft data sources, Power Apps is a hub for your data while also providing a front end that users find it easy to interact with.

Did you know that we can also create Power Apps directly within Microsoft Teams, so you don’t need to flit between different windows and screens – as we all know how integral Teams has become to our working life.

Power Apps can work with so much more than just other Microsoft products. Even though we love Microsoft products, we and Microsoft know you do use other applications too. There are a wide range of approved connectors available, so many that you could spend hours browsing through what is on offer.

However, if you don’t find one that works for you, you can create your very own connector to get Power Apps working exactly how you want it to, just as long as your data source has the right technical capability.

Microsoft Power Apps is here to help you get the most out of your business solutions.