What Can Power Platform Do For Your ERP?

Power Platform is one of the most dynamic Low Code/No Code platforms on the market, but limiting what you use it for to just custom apps could be leaving a lot of meat on the proverbial ERP bone. Here are four real world examples of how you can use Power Platform to enhance your Microsoft Dynamics F&O or BC (or any other ERP!) experience without getting developers involved:

1. Custom Batch Jobs – Do you have any process that needs to run regularly in your ERP system? You can set a recurring Power Automate flow to read data out of D365 and perform actions on that data. A simple example of this in F&O would be to read all transfer order lines that are supposed to ship in the next 5 days, and then automatically reserve the transfer order line so it can be shipped on time without being stolen by another order.
2. Simple Integrations – Some integrations have robust requirements, volume and transformations that take heavy duty code. But for the simple ones, such as an FTP file drop, Power Automate can come to the rescue. With Power Automate’s out of the box connectors, you could automatically connect to a platform such as Survey Monkey, or do an HTTP request to HubSpot and transfer data with ease.
3. Modifications Not Needed In Platform – Sometimes tables are required to be built into the ERP system to support business processes, but for scenarios where you may need to only interact rarely with ERP data, building a Power App with Power Platform support, may be a good option. 
4. Approval Workflow – Approval workflows have been around since the dawn of business. However, in the ERP world they haven’t advanced much recently. Both BC and F&O now offer options to send an approval out to Power Automate and build all of the logic there, and return the flow results back to the ERP. 

While sometimes a code-first approach is best, sometimes speed to value is important to deliver. Using Power Platform for any of the above use cases, with the right governance model and business justifications can both improve efficiency and cut costs.