Extend Business Central using Power Platform to connect your data and automate tasks

Paul Duffy (00:00:14):
Hey everyone, thanks for joining the webinar today. My name’s Paul Duffy. I’m bringing you webinar on behalf of MNP in collaboration with Microsoft. And today’s webinar we’re going to be discussing extending Business Central using the Power Platform to connect your data and automate tasks.

Today is the second of three webinars that we’re running with you. We ran a webinar two weeks ago regarding Business Central and if it would be the right solution for your company, and in two weeks from now we’re going to be running another one around CDAP and funding opportunities to jumpstart digital transformation, which can be applied to Business Central and potentially Power Platform as well.

Today’s speakers are myself; I’ll be your host. I’m a director of client services here at MNP Digital. We also have Sean Panter from our Power Platform team and he’s going to be giving an overview of Power Platform and what it can do with Business Central. We also have Ahmed Amaoui and he is from Microsoft. He is the SMB sales lead and he’ll be talking about how you can do more with less with Power Platform. And we have Sean Henderson from MNP Digital as well. He’ll be taking us through a demo of – a live demonstration of what you can do with Power Platform and Business Central together.

But before we dive into Power Platform, I just want to give you all a quick overview of who MNP is and MNP Digital. So MNP is a large accounting firm that has been around for about 60 years or so. We specialize in tax audit and consulting. But more notably you’ll notice that in the bottom right-hand corner of the slide here that we’re growing to about 450 or more employees now specifically dedicated to digital solutions at the firm. Our firm is also one of the fastest growing in Canada. But specifically, within the firm our digital team is actually the fastest growing.

What does our digital team focus on? We have about seven different sectors at our firm under digital. We have Digital Advisory which is where the government grants and CDAP fall under. We have Applied Data Analytics, Application Development, Digital Platforms where Sean, Sean and myself reside under. Myself under the ERP side and Sean’s team under the Power Platform side. And then we also have Cyber Security, Cloud Services and Managed IT Services as well at the firm.

With that said, I’m going to pass it over to Ahmed who – or over to Sean who can discuss about Power Platform. Apologies. Pass it over to Ahmed here to talk about Power Platform and what you can do.

Ahmed Amaoui (00:03:23):
Thank you very much, Paul. Happy to be here with one of our top partners, MNP, and discuss a subject that is near and dear to myself and to my heart. As you can see in the jacket, Power Platform is something that at the heart what would do as Microsoft. And working closely with MNP we, and us as Microsoft, we have seen unprecedented changes, especially in the ecosystem of our partners.

And where we talked about business as usual, these past few years showed us that we’re actually going towards business unusual, because we’ve all seen the work – that the world can change. But in recent years, the worth of work has fundamentally changed for many organizations. There will be no return to the way things were. Like, in a new survey that we conducted with business decision makers 9 out of 10 see cutbacks on the horizon as economic uncertainty affect spending. More than before organization need the digital tools and platform that could help them do more with less so they can solve their business challenges on their own.

We’ve seen a huge bump of technology. And when I was talking to our customers before the pandemic, we were talking about road map for digital transformation for two, three years. And then the pandemic hit and then we’re talking weeks, months. How can we go online? How can we do curbside pickup? It actually forced us and forced a lot of organizations to incorporate the digital as a foundation of what we do.

At the same time, customers want more. And most will abandon a brand that provides poor customer service. Like agents need technology that provides seamless experience across a customer journey, fast issue resolution, and speedy and predictable product delivery.

 Meanwhile, organizations are facing a big shift in their work culture. The majority of surveyed workers want more flexibility in how they work, as well as to be empowered to work purposefully. They need to connect and be connected to processes and technology that support a flexible hybrid work. And that’s a perfect segue to my next slide.

Here’s – if you ask me, Ahmed, what is your favourite slide in all Microsoft, I would say this is this one. Why? Because it shows actually the heart of what we do as Microsoft. As a company helping our customers. Because speaking honestly, when we talk about our competitors and we talk about a lot of things, like, we could have really good competitors that do something similar and as I like to tell our customers, is sometimes it’s like ice cream. What is your preferred flavour? Hey Paul, you like chocolate ice cream, Ahmed likes vanilla ice cream.

But that’s the thing. But what the things we have, and once you have a lot of tools, a lot of disparate systems, what happen is you can have today platform as a service system with AWS, you can have a collaboration with Slack, you can use automation anywhere. You can use a lot of tools.

Of course, you can achieve your goals to a certain extent. But what this offers you is a little bit of an increased complexity because of disparate administration, security, and governance systems. Higher – multiple vendors equal higher TCO, equals multiple bills. But also, multiple people to talk to.

So as with Microsoft what we did for last decade, and we see a lot of the actors in the market trying to do the same by acquisition, is to build the one Microsoft platform. I know today we’re talking about Power Platform, we’re talking about Business Central, but I want to talk about the Microsoft cloud, because it’s the heart of what we do. Everything we need to have for our customers one single point of administration, security, and governance. And it all resides on security and management compliance. That’s the basis of what we do.

I always joke with our customers and say, like, Microsoft is the only security vendor you’ve never heard of. Like, Microsoft makes $20 billion of revenue just out of security. More than the 15 top vendors. We have teams, 8,500 people that are separated into red team and blue team. One is incentivized to hack our data centers, and the other one is actually to protect it. So, you inherit all that security from Microsoft. This is all top-down on what we call computer of the world which is Microsoft Azure. Our public cloud. We have more data centers than AWS and Google combined to actually better serve our customers in their regions. Out of this Microsoft Azure has already seen the simple – a small green logo. It’s an Azure SQL base that actually got elevated to create the Dataverse.

And what is the Dataverse? We call it the one single source of truth, because it actually helped us build a common data model that bring all different data base and all different data into an aggregated view so we can use it through the Power Platform by creating apps, automations, BI, or virtual agents. And we’re going to go to the details more in the slides that are upcoming from my side and from Sean Panter and Sean Henderson.

So now we talked a little bit about the local. How can our customers do more with less? Because there’s not a lot of developers. Since developers are needed more than ever. If you can see in that slide, please. What we have is also the developer tools. The developer tool is actually Microsoft with Visual Studio and acquisition of GitHub, we actually offer our customers the full extent of innovation. Coming from low-code to Procode and bridging the gap between both to create the fusion teams.

Finally, everything is built on the suite of M365, Teams as the one source of collaboration and of course for everything that is helping you have an unsurpassed resource planning system but also having the possibility to see your sales, your operations with Microsoft Business Central.

But truly what is Microsoft Business Central, it’s only an app that has been built on the Dataverse, this one single source of truth, and we just invested millions of dollars to actually make it what it is. But you get the same tools with the Power Platform to build apps similar to this. But what we are going to discuss today is actually the sensibility of Microsoft Business Central with Power Apps, because you can make it your own.

 And if it can go a little bit in the next slide, what I want to take about at the moment. Thank you very much.

Companies across all industries are rapidly adopting Power Platform to not only transform their business. More than half a million organizations currently use Power Platform every month. Ninety-seven percent of the Fortune 500 use Power Platform. And small to medium customers using the Power Platform have seen 50 percent year-over-year growth in their operations.

Here’s an example of some of the customers by industry. Whatever the industry we have, we have customers that are actually using from Coca-Cola to Pepsi to T-Mobile, to Toyota. The 3M. But then you tell me, Ahmed, you manage SMB. So why are you talking about Fortune 500s? I like to talk about Fortune 500 because today what the Power Platform does is it offers a small medium business the same power as a Fortune 500 to digitize their operation and automate their business processes.

This is so powerful because especially in the small/medium business, the VP of marketing is the VP of sales, the VP of operations. If we automate repetitive tasks for him or her, we actually save the company the operation and create more revenue streams. Because I think – I did a podcast recently and somebody asked me about, what really is Power Automate, what was the automation, what does it do? Is that – I found a simple answer by just saying, “It actually brings back human creativity.” The most important asset in a company is actually its people. But if their people are doing repetitive tasks, we’re actually removing their ingenuity and creativity to actually provide added value for the company. That’s where the Power Platform comes in.

But then again there’s an internal fight in every company. If we can move to the next slide, it’s actually the internal business and IT dilemma. We want to recognize the digital transformation and innovation isn’t easy to achieve. The technology is just one part. And again, on top of people process. And I want to add another one. Culture.

It’s a common to have a divide between business and IT. Because the business side are really, truly looking to do more with less. With budget and resource constraint, high business expectations, like for transformation, mixed with some challenging processes that may be slow and inefficient. While IT are trying to keep up with the business demand, establish partnership while maintaining existing technology portfolios, preventing shadow IT and security risk. While trying also to keep the company on the edge of innovation.

So how can be bring in that synergy between those two teams to create not IT in business, but the one company innovation team. As we introduce Low-code and how the Power Platform can help, you will notice that all of these points are reduced and managed. When you have a platform that enables innovation it really – it also enables the security guard rails, the compliance measure, this will lead to low residual risk for business, improving productivity for users, and improving employee and customer experience.

Let’s talk about Power Platform a little bit. If we go to the next slide, there is three true core things that we do with the low-code. And we’ll call the No code, the Low-code and the code first. That’s when we talk about Power Platform. We can go from the edge of No-code to the Low-code to the code first.

What does it truly mean low-code? Because I’ve been working with the Power Platform for a couple of years since its inception. Always customers say to me, “Well, we still have to do a little bit of coding. Where is the true No-code?” The true No-code comes in if you go to Power Apps, the maker of Power Automate, it’s all the templates that are available by Microsoft that you can reuse. If you thought about a use case, you may find the template for it. And just by drag and drop, connecting to the Dataverse and data sources, you can just use that experience to create an app for example, or an automation.

Low-code, you drag and drop, using for example, with the Power Apps, using a simple language, as simple as Excel to actually create functionalities for your apps. And I’m going to actually touch on that in the next slide. And finally, the code first is even if we have a Pro-code or C# or using Java, and they want to achieve their time to app faster, they can actually use the low-code to recreate components.

So, what is at the heart of the Power Platform? If we go to the next slide, it has five big pillars. Power BI, Power Apps. Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents, and Power Pages.

Power BI, I think is the most mature product we have. It’s for our business analytics. Everybody’s familiar with Power BI as the leader in the Magic Quadrant. But I want to talk a little bit about Power Apps, and I want to come back to that example of Low-code, Pro-code. And when people ask me, “Hey, Ahmed, what is Power Apps?” I tell them it’s like PowerPoint and Excel having a baby. Because you get the low-code with the drag and drop of the PowerPoint. And then you get a language like Excel because Excel is used by more than 1 billion people worldwide. And the language that Microsoft, which you see here under the hood called Power Fx is the language that Microsoft put for the programming of Power Apps.

Why Power Fx? Because if you go to that Excel and you open your Excel and you see the Fx bar, the formula bar, that’s where the Power Fx and language that is as simple as Excel to actually build your apps.

See for Power Automate, the workflow automation, the ability to create automation from Low-code and actually resolving some of the issues as we’re seeing as where maybe going towards a recession is actually – everybody’s thinking about cash flow. Business Central can offer you an amazing visibility on your OpEx, but Power Automate can actually do the vendor consolidation for you. Because we have more than 800 pre-built connectors that can connect to any API solution that is out there. And I’ll discuss that more in the next slide.

But finally – finally, finally you don’t need a PhD in machine learning to actually build a bot. with Power Virtual Agents you are able to create chat bots easier, drag and drop, similar languages, and actually better serve your customers, not only your external customers but also your internal customers which is your colleagues. And actually, create bots to help intelligent virtual agents to help choose and automize the processes.

Finally, Power Pages. I’m sure it’s called Power Portal. Well, it’s called site development and its site development. But I would say the most important thing about Power Pages is its ability to connect to the Dataverse. Dataverse as I said before is the one single source of truth, it actually aggregates all the data and helps to make your data talk.

Finally, AI Builder. AI Builder. Again, no machine learning to actually leverage an AI. You can actually use the pre-built AI builders to rebuild your own models. For example, you can do it with data, you can do it with images, you can do it with structure and data. And you could do it, for example, for contracts. So, for example, each time MNP sends me an invoice, I receive it from Sean, I get it in a company email. I want to extract those invoices and actually put them in my ERP through a process. What I would do is I will just take five of those invoices, put them through AI Builder and say, “Hey, here’s where we find the name of the customer. Here’s what we –” and we’re going to show that, and the team’s going to show that later. Here’s the numbers of items and everything we extract.

And once we do it, the model keeps learning by itself, the more invoices that are there and gets better accuracy. So that’s the beauty of actually – what I was talking about giving back the human creativity is by removing the redundancy and helping everyone achieve more and do more with less.

My final slide is about the connectors. And this – if you can go to the next slide, please. It’s about the connectors. We have 800 we’re going to 900 and 1,000. Because every time you have a SaaS application, so again, make the most of your investment, vendor consolidation, you have Dynamics 365 Business Central. You have Sales Force. You have another system, a disparate system, a small legacy system. Because we have pre-built connectors, anyone of those API application we can connect to that are in the market.

But if there isn’t, you can actually create your own through Azure API Manager with a simple click, publish to a Power Platform.

And finally, you would ask me, Ahmed, “If we have an old legacy system how would we do?” And this is where Power Automate Desktop would come in, because Microsoft can record the tasks done by a user to actually go and extract and put information in the legacy system.

I want to give it to my good friend Sean Panter to actually go more in details and talk to you about the Power Platform in some of the use cases.

Sean Panter (00:20:44):
Thank you so much Ahmed and thank you everyone for joining us today. Ahmed that was great intro for everyone around the power and capability of the Power Platform and I’m going to dive a little bit more into some of the specifics around the products in the stack.

Ahmed mentioned Power BI as being the most mature product in the stack of products of the Power Platform and it really does provide you with amazing capabilities in terms of being able to visualize your data and provide folks within your organization with more insight. This is so critical for effective modernization is the ability to provide folks with the ability to make better decisions by actually seeing the data or creating dashboards and reports on their own.

Absolutely you can reduce the amount of time spent with data prep. Power BI provides you with the ability to transform data and model data right within the platform itself. You won’t have to worry about preparing your data before bringing it into this amazing tool. You can also remove the complexity of managing multiple platforms. Our analytics solutions, for example, you can build a reporter dashboard in one place and the individuals that you would like to access it can do that via the mobile app, via a web browser in the portal, or via the desktop client. There’s a lot of different ways you can take these solutions and expose them to folks. And not only the tools that I just described, but you can also embed them in different places where people are actually working. You can take a Power BI, dashboard or report and embed it in a model driven app, a power app, you know, a portal, for example, that you have out there.

There’s so much capability that you can provide folks to make better decisions with Power BI and its amazing visualization capabilities.

So, move on to the next slide. Next, we’re going to talk about Canvas Apps. Canvas Apps provide you with the ability to create pixel-perfect applications, much like the ones that you would find in an app store. The amazing thing about these applications is that you can actually leverage the over 800 connectors that Ahmed mentioned previously. You can very securely connect to data within your organization, data that you already have in the system services or perhaps behind your firewall. You can do that safely and securely with Canvas Apps and create new experiences to enable patterns of work that perhaps were unachievable previously. Think about your frontline workers being able to have a mobile device in their hand, and to be able to take pictures, capture audio recordings, leverage the GPS capabilities. There’s a lot of creativity.

Thinking about what Ahmed mentioned there that folks can deploy in these solutions, and they create with Canvas Apps. And this is a part of the platform that Microsoft has been investing so heavily in and they have a no limit activation here. If you need to involve your professional developers to extend these solutions even further that capability is there for you to take it to the next level.

Move on to the next slide here. We’re going to be talking about model-driven apps next. Model-driven apps are another part of Power Apps, and they provide you with a lot of amazing capability to drive very structured business process forward. You can create a business process flow and link it into your app. You can see form the visual up on the screen there’s a series of dots. These are the steps that you integrate into your application, your model-driven app. And you can decide what information needs to be captured at each step along the way. It’s a very visual experience. People can instantly come into these model-driven apps or instance of data there and tell exactly at which step along the processes. You’re creating transparency and giving a place to drive a process forward.

You can create amazing forms for data entry. We often think about back-office processes when we’re talking about model-driven apps, if you need to provide a data entry interface or forms for capturing information with, model-driven apps are usually a great choice for that. And the amazing things about model-driven apps is they are actually a No code feature within the Power Platform. You aren’t writing any code here. You’re configuring the capabilities of the Dataverse and using a model-driven app to bring it into an application space.

We’ll move on the next slide here. Ahmed mentioned Power Pages. And Power Pages are an amazing way of creating new patterns for interacting with your business partners. You have folks outside of your organization that you would like to involve in your business processes, and this is a great way of doing that. You can create amazing portal experiences .and Microsoft has taken care of much of the heavy lifting here for you. You don’t actually have to create authentication providers for yourself. You don’t have to create that whole registration flow. Microsoft has taken care of those pieces of functionality in the portal. And then you can leverage all the greatness that is the Dataverse. You can create forms for capturing data, you can share information with your business partners and unlock new experiences so you can tighten those relationships and find new ways of gaining value and working with your business partners with Power Pages.

Ahmed also mentioned the amazing Power Automate. And there are two flavours of Power Automate. First, we’re going to be talking about Cloud Flows. Cloud Flows provide organizations with the ability to model out automation scenarios and integrate with systems and data that they already are using, leveraging those over 800 connectors. And the way that these work is that you start out with a trigger action, this could be something that happens on a scheduled basis. It could be data event happening out there, perhaps in SQL servers, some other service that you’re using or leveraging. There’s a number of different ways you can decide how an automation should be triggered. And then you can leverage all the connectors that are out there.

You have the ability to add actions after the trigger happens and model out a scenario that truly reflects the way that your business process should exist. This is a very powerful tool that we see many clients work with. And almost every Power Platform solution that we deliver leverages Cloud Flows to help automate these processes and find new ways of modernizing and integrating between system, services, and data that you’re already using.

The other part of Power Automate is Power Automate Desktop. And this is your robotic process automation tool within the platform. What we find most typically is with the Cloud Flow there’s going to be a point along the way, perhaps where you’re unable to digitally integrate. If you have a grey screen, green screen, or other legacy app that doesn’t offer APIs or perhaps it’s very costly to integrate with, it’s very simple to create a Desktop flow to take care of that work. You can simulate a user and their actions, clicking through an interface, submitting data. You can actually pass instructions into your desktop flow so that it knows what to do and then it will actually capture a response and send it back to the main cloud flow so you have this continuous stream where you need to leverage a desktop automation you can do that with. This is a great way of scaling these tedious tasks of data entry in legacy systems and modernizing them with the Power Platform.

So next we’re going to talk about Power Virtual Agents. Ahmed mentioned this amazing chat bot tool as well. This is an area within the Power Platform that we see so many customers getting incredible value from. This again is a codeless experience. So, this is a drag and drop space – design tool that you can create topic areas. There’s artificial intelligence infused within the topic. You don’t have to try and guess every single way someone might ask a question. The AI is able to understand the intentions people have when they ask things, and they connect people into the different topic areas.

Obviously, you can integrate these into your customer service scenarios. Many organizations use them internally. The key here is that you have new ways of unlocking amazing potential here with Power Virtual Agents.

Another feature I’m going to mention really quickly is that many cases that we find are that – or area aware organizations will want to expose some information in a chat. Maybe that’s residing in a cloud service or data store behind their firewall for example. You can leverage Cloud Flows and integrate them into your chats as well to expose more investigation securely in these conversations that you have in your Power Virtual Agent chat bots.

We’re going to move on to the next slide here. And I’m going to be talking to you next a little bit about a real-world example for invoice automation. We’ll move on to the next slide gain and I’m going to talk to you just about a few legacy scenarios that you may often see in invoice handling. Typically, there’s a very big manual effort in these types of scenarios. Maybe somebody’s sitting and watching an email in box for emails to arrive, and then they have some action to take once they find an email. This is a manual effort that takes up a lot of time. It can be tedious. This often results in a paper or an email chase. Another symptom here of legacy scenarios. People are always trying to find where is the invoice? Whose inbox is it in?

Another factor with these legacy scenarios is there’s a double entry pattern that often happens. Someone will bring the pdf of the invoice up on one’s screen, and then they bring up the other interface they need to type that invoice detail into. It’s a double entry factor which takes more time and presents a possibility for errors as well.

You may have multiple versions of the truth. As you’re forwarding emails, Excel spreadsheets around via email, you may end up with separate copies of these. And folks may not know which copy is current, which is always a problem when you have multiple versions of the truth existing like that.
You may lack process insights. As I described earlier, where is this invoice at in the stage of our AP or AR cycle? You may not be able to tell that very easily if things are trapped in people’s email inboxes or a file share somewhere.

Here also is an approvals gap that may exist. If you’re capturing approvals via an email, the record of that approval is going to be limited between the person that sent he email and who received. This is another symptom of legacy processes that can result in problems with record keeping down the road.
And finally, we have inefficient process controls. Emails and files can be lost or leaked and you’re not going to have an easy time keeping track of these things.

So next we’ll talk about what a modern process automation solution would look like. You can leverage digital automation. We’ve talked about Power Automate, Cloud Flows and Power Automate Desktop. This is a great way of automating things, and, in the demonstration, you’ll see an example of how that happens exactly with invoice automation. You can infuse artificial intelligence in your process. Ahmed mentioned – and I’m going to reiterate, we’ve seen so many clients of ours create their own artificial intelligence without writing any code. This can be done extremely quickly and integrated into your modern solutions.

You can capture and store data. The Dataverse is there as a service to store data in. And there’s so much capability beyond just storing data. You can create business process flows, apply business rules, create views, forms and the list goes on. There’s a very robust security model there as well that truly allows you to secure and manage data the way that it should exist to support your organization.
You can connect directly with process actors. We have a great example of that in the demo and approval scenario. Intelligent bots can be infused either as a robotic process automation. Or as a Power Virtual Agents in your business scenarios. And last but not least, we can’t forget the importance of analytics and insights. You need to provide people with the ability to understand where a process is at. How many invoices have we processed? How many are outstanding? You need to be able to let people see into processes. Analytics and insights are a major part of your modern process automation solution.

And we’re going to move on at this point and Sean Henderson is going to take over with a demonstration of a great scenario here.

Sean Henderson (00:32:20):
Awesome. Thanks Sean. Paul, I’m just going to steal the screen from you there. Hopefully you guys can all see my screen.

So yeah, it’s – what I’m going to show pretty similar to what Sean Panter laid out. Pretty similar scenario. You’ve got invoices coming in, they end up in an email inbox and then you know, who knows what’s going to happen with them there after that. I will actually just kick that off now. Let that process start running.

All I did was create a pretty simple just SharePoint library, in progress invoices, processed invoices. If I was doing this in production, I would probably even lock the in-progress invoices while they’re in here so people can’t really start moving them around and things like that.

So right now, in the background I’ve sent the email, it’s arrived .and it is – kicking off AI builder. Rather than people having to manually go into the invoice and extract all the details and then upload them here or there and try to figure out what they want to do with those, that’s all just being handled by AI Builder in the background.

So, you can see, there we go. Invoice showed up into the in-progress invoices box. And it’s going to sit there while this thing runs. In the background AI Builder extracts the details and then it’s going to send an approval to Teams. So, there we go, I just got a Teams message. Haul that up here. So, no wondering, like, OK. This invoice came in, went into somebody’s inbox, eventually got posted. Nobody knows who handle that or you know, maybe there’s some discrepancies in it and people are going, well why didn’t somebody take a look at these discrepancies and contact the vendor?

I’ve got details in my invoice, or in my approval here in Teams, pulled right out of the invoice using the app builder including the total. Got a link to it as well. You know, the approval ones actually take a closer look at the invoice. Click the link, pops up in SharePoint and they can take a look at it there. The ability to add things like picking posting dates. You know, what day do we want to post this? It’s due on the 28th, let’s say we’ll post it on the 24th. And add the ability to put in additional comments.

None of this is set-in stone. These are all just things that I customized for this particular card. I’m going to say something like, “Please review the sales tax on this,” if I can spell tax. There we go. And then submit it. There we go. It’s been looked over by a reviewer. And now it’s going to go back to the RP system.

The Power Automate flow actually sit and wait and see, like, OK, waiting for this approval or waiting to get a response back, and then once it’s gotten the response it will kick off the rest of it. Which is for this demo it’s going to be writing that to Power Automate or writing that to Business Central.

I’ve got – there we go, the email that just came in. There are the details. This will go to your ERP user, to your Business Central user. You know, purchase invoice came in, here’s the invoice number. I actually added a process. I noticed that this invoice that I’m demoing has a little discrepancy. I even added a little process that checks, OK, here’s what we recorded in Business Central. I added a little check that says, OK, what actually got recorded to Business Central? What did the invoice have? This one shows a little discrepancy of 27 cents. Maybe take a look at that. And the email included those approver comments. That say, you know, please review the sales tax.

So back over in Business Central I took all those details of that invoice and if I switch over to our purchase invoices, you can see it added that invoice directly here into – right here into Business Central for – the ERPs or the Business Central user review. There was a request to check out the tax on it. I think I’ll set the tax for it. And then set it as tax liable.

There we go. Now I’ve got my invoice centred with – there was a little discrepancy, it’s been corrected now and entered into here into Business Central.

Go ahead and post this if I want. Then when it’s posted in Business Central it should show up in the chart of accounts. I could actually post this directly from Power Automates. I mean Business Central has a ton of background connectors. And if I wanted to, I could post this directly from there but honestly probably don’t want invoices automatically being posted without the accountant taking a look at them first.

So, there we go. It shows up here in my chart of accounts and this has now been updated with that invoice. Pretty similar to what Sean Panter was talking about. Quick and easy to spin off.

Sean Panter (00:37:26):
That was such an excellent demo Sean Henderson. Thank you so much for putting that together. And it really does show a lot of the capabilities in the platform that we talked about. Being able to infuse AI into a process, leverage digital automation to extract emails out of an inbox, bring approvals into your business process leveraging digital automation and Cloud Flows and then actually integrating into other systems, like Business Central.

A couple of things we want to cover off. Some takeaways for you. Number 1, replace your traditional workloads with modern alternatives. Use live data. Stop trading emails and forwarding Excel spreadsheets around. You have the ability to modernize your processes very rapidly using this amazing platform. You can provide insights into business processes in real time. Think about how you can inform people so they can make better decisions out there in their day-to-day work leveraging Power BI and some of the other amazing visualization capability throughout the stack.

And finally leverage AI and automation to create more efficient processes – you want your team to be able to focus on the areas that they’re most value. Take away some of the tedious activities that they’re faced with by leveraging automation and infusing this into your business processes as well.

I will move on to the next slide. And we do have just a couple of minutes here if anyone has any questions, we’d be happy to take them right now. I know we covered a lot of material. If there is a moment anyone would like to add a question here, we can wait to hear that, but I think that we’ve provided you with a pretty good overview of the platform. Hopefully, you feel like you’ve learned more about some of the amazing things that the platform can do. The vision that Microsoft has for the platform, Ahmed, thank you so much for collaborating on that.

At this point we don’t have any questions that have been submitted so what we’d like to do is provide you with a bit of an invitation here. We’d like to continue the conversation with you. We have some amazing value packs that we’re offering currently. They have a base of workflow modernization just like we’ve talked about here today, and then you can decide if you’d like to add anything on. You can stack in other services. We provide many enablement services to help them efficiently and effectively begin or continue their journey with the Power Platform. Things like envisioning a business value assessment, a centre of excellence or a current state assessment are all things that are part of our value pack. We’d be happy to share more with you about the value packs. You can email us at Power Platform at MNP.ca for more information there.

We also would like to offer everyone in attendance a free 45-minute consulting session. We’ll connect someone from your team with someone from our team. We have experts who would be happy to talk to you about aspects of the platform, things that you saw out here today or a live question and answer period.

So that covers our call to action for you. We’re very thankful that you joined us today, and Paul, I’ll turn it back to you at this point.

Paul Duffy (00:40:24):
Thanks Sean. And great work. We’ve just finished our extended Business Central using Power Platform to connect your data. We’ll be hosting another session regarding CDAP and funding opportunities on March 1st, so two weeks from now. So hopefully you can join us then. I just want to thank all of you for your time for hopping on with us today and learning a little bit more about the Power Platform. And how you can leverage it for your business. My contact for information is below as well if you want to reach out direct. Or if you have any questions post-webinar, we’ll happily reply back to you. Looking forward to chatting with you then. Have a great day.