Plan- Identify your business problem

If you are thinking of building an app but do not know what business problem you would like to solve, start thinking of any manual process that requires paper, email communications, gaps and inefficiencies that you face at work.

Here is a list of potential business problems for you to brainstorm to see if it applies to your organization

  1. Workflow Management (Email routing, helpdesk, employee onboarding)
  2. Inspection/Audit
  3. Approval (Permissions, Overtime request)
  4. Project Management
  5. Booking Management (Book office, inventory, asset)
  6. Event Management

For this course, we would like you to play the role of Fred, a logistics manager at Adventure Works. Adventure Works is a retail company that sells bicycles and accessories to consumers via its retail stores. As the logistics manager, you will be responsible for warehouse fulfilment and transport deliveries from the warehouse to retail stores around the region. As such, you will receive feedback from different retail store managers on the delivery failures.  

Current Communication Flow

The feedback is usually in the form of a phone call, chat messages, email or any mode of communication that is preferred by the retail store managers. This makes it hard to manage as you can't assign the task or have a consolidated view of the delivery issues and it is also challenging to measure the quality of your delivery.

This is an ideal problem for PowerPlatform to solve as the feedback can be created in a form, and notifications are set up in Power Automate. Quality of delivery performance can be tracked in Power BI.

What is the business problem?

Delivery Exceptions: Develop a process that is efficient for Logistics and Retail Stores to send and receive feedback that allows the team to measure the quality of deliveries.

Now that we have identified our business problem, let's detail the current process and identify all our stakeholders who will be using the app

Who are our stakeholders for the process?

As we map out our current process earlier on,  we need to think through all the stakeholders for the process. This includes everyone who works together on this problem. In this example, the two main stakeholders for this process would be the retail store team and the logistics team.

Identify the stakeholders for our app

Now we are done identifying our business problem and stakeholders for the process, we will move to the next section where we will document the business process