A major producer of soft drinks is developing its e-commerce line of business. The employees of the e-commerce department manage the stock of goods at the warehouses of e-commerce platforms. Every week the manager logged into each platform's portal and manually downloaded current stock and sales data. Then they merged the data from different platforms in Excel to calculate the recommended quantity of products for replenishment. After that, an employee manually created shipment orders for each warehouse in the ERP system.
This process required 8 hours of manual work per week, and the data was updated no more than once a week. As a result, there was a lack of goods at the marketplace's warehouse (out-of-stock), and the company lost profits.
A service was developed on the Power Platform to automate the work with marketplaces services for the e-commerce department:
Dataflow collects sales and stock data from marketplaces through API interfaces. Some data was not available through this method, so RPA scripts were developed on Power Automate Desktop to simulate user actions on the server. As a result, automatic daily data updates were achieved.
Data from different marketplaces were standardized inside the Power BI data model. The recommended quantity of products for replenishing warehouse stocks is automatically calculated for each warehouse. The Power Apps application embedded in the dashboard allows the manager to refine the system-calculated data for greater accuracy.
Using Power Automate, warehouse data, product information and the required quantities are transferred to the ERP system for order creation.
The implementation of the service has completely automated the process of collecting and preparing data on sales and product stocks on marketplaces, and has simplified the process of creating orders to replenish stock in warehouses:
