The benefits of secure, low-code web development
Through low-code tools like Power Pages, Microsoft’s Power Platform offers businesses the opportunity to move fast when developing bespoke applications and tools. Because Power Platform is low cost and scalable, the overall financial benefits to an organization can be substantial. According to one Forrester study, it can deliver a potential 140% return on investment and a 45% decrease in development costs.
When a longstanding iSoftStone client — one of the nation’s most popular discount retailers — wanted to create a site where its teams and vendors could collaborate on purchase orders (POs) and other logistics, Power Pages offered a natural starting point.
Then, when it wanted to improve and further develop the Power Pages site into a tailored solution that would more fully connect to the company’s internal business systems and tech stack, iSoftStone was delighted to provide Power Platform developers to support its IT team.
A connected, data-driven Power Platform solution
Our client’s POs had to be manually tracked across multiple, unlinked systems. Each PO required extensive manual entry and processing, estimated by one business user to sometimes be as much as five hours of work.
We took full advantage of Power Platform’s thousands of connectors to develop a collaborative PO site that easily syncs with third-party business systems like SAP and allows access from multiple authentication services.
Says Sehrish Kantoo, an iSoftStone developer on the project, “We did a lot of work automating the invoice generator and providing forms editable grids for vendors to easily key in the data that the merchandizing team could just as easily pick up.”
The new site has a common data store that provides a single source of truth across business teams and vendors. It unifies the PO process from end to end. New vendors can be onboarded via the tool and there’s been improved efficiency in managing milestones and tracking progress.
The new estimated workload? It’s now just 5 or 10 minutes, with a reduced communication burden and fewer errors from manual updates.
Smoother processes, easy collaboration
Vendors are delighted by the ease of interacting with the solution and business users are too. The functionality is seamless and IT tickets are rare.
The success of the solution, together with iSoftStone’s collaborative work style, won the trust of the client’s business and technology teams. Our remit grew. One of our offshore developers now leads a group tasked with a range of Power Platform projects for the client.
Empowered users, happy vendors, business synergy — and a supported in-house technology team. That’s the true power of developing on Power Platform and partnering with iSoftStone’s team members.
