Uncage Case Study - Integrating Standard Apps with Power Platform

Apps integration made easy with Microsoft Power Platform. This article presents a Power Platform Case Study from a New Zealand company.

Project Overview

Uncage is a New Zealand-based interior design studio specialising in residential and commercial interiors. 

AGCM was engaged to provide Uncage with a solution using Power Platform to integrate the standard SaaS applications used for business management and the off-shore Uncage team, and create a unified end-to-end business process. This Power Platform Case Study describes the challenge and a solution we developed to help our customer.

The Challenge

The company previously had a disjointed business process, managing leads, opportunities, sales orders, and customer information on HubSpot CRM, while handling invoices, customer payments, and accounting on Xero Software, both of which are SaaS platforms for small and medium-sized businesses. Additionally, Uncage's design team is located offshore.

The reliance on two separate business management applications, along with the offshore location of the design team, has led Uncage management in New Zealand to export data from HubSpot to create a manual spreadsheet for tracking the work of the offshore designers. This manual process has made it challenging for both management and designers to have visibility of the progress of the work.

The Solution

The proposed solution involves the use of three Power Automate flows, a Power App, and a Power BI dashboard.

Sales orders from the CRM application are imported into a custom Power App (stored in a Microsoft Dataverse database) to create work orders for the offshore team. This app is displayed on a large TV screen, serving as a Kanban board for visual management. The offshore team uses the dashboard to plan the work for the week, providing estimated completion dates for each work order and updating the status. This allows management in New Zealand to track progress and performance.

Once a work order is completed, another Power Automate flow sends a request to the accounting software, generating an invoice. After a bookkeeper reconciles the company’s bank account and assigns payments to the invoices, another Power Automate flow is triggered, sending a notification back to the CRM application informing about the payment.

Finally, a Power BI dashboard consolidates data from the three applications, providing management with almost real-time insights into team and business performance.

Some of the benefits of this solution include the reduction of time spent exporting data from one application and inputting it into others, as well as the ability to track entity operation and business performance in real-time.

If you want to know more about this solution, or how custom apps and automated workflows can benefit your business, do not hesitate to get in touch.