Revolutionizing Operations at Avocados From Mexico: Optimizing Supply Chain Efficiency with Power Platform
In the dynamic landscape of promoting Mexican avocados in the United States, Avocados From Mexico (AFM) faced a pivotal challenge – streamlining their operational processes for enhanced efficiency. With a fast-growing team and the adoption of SAP Business ByDesign in 2017, AFM encountered a bottleneck in their purchase requisition process, which was challenging for marketers working under tight schedules.
The Challenge
AFM, represented by a non-profit organization of just over 30 individuals, needed a solution to scale up their management of purchase requisitions. The existing purchase request experience was complex and inefficient for the purchasing specialists. AFM’s goals were clear: leverage a transformative solution to streamline processes, enhance visibility into approvals, and enable efficient data discovery.
The Power Platform Solution
AFM engaged Lantern as their company’s ad-hoc CIO, becoming the catalyst to unlock transformative change. Recognizing the limitations of their existing setup, our team proposed an implementation of Microsoft’s Power Platform.
The proposed Power Platform solution addressed AFM’s immediate challenges and set the stage for long-term extensibility and scalability. While SAP remains the central repository for their data, Dataverse drives the purchase requisition approvals process – reconciling the data back into SAP. This streamlined the Purchase Ordering process and established a robust foundation for upcoming applications, notably in Invoicing and Credit Memo processing. Power BI and Microsoft Fabric were also integrated to extract additional value from data through advanced analytics.
Our approach stands out in its seamless integration with the core tools essential to AFM’s daily operations, including a future integration with Teams and Outlook.
Significance for Users
For AFM’s marketing team the impact was profound, with results that:
- Simplified purchase ordering processes
- Teams, Outlook, and Mobile-friendly approvals experience
- Enhanced visibility into critical data
- Provided substantial time savings through intuitive UI and automated business rules
- Drastically reduced errors through new, streamlined processes
The most notable success, however, was in the time savings captured with the adoption of Power Platform. Avocados From Mexico’s time saving went from a 15-minute requisition generating process to a solution that provided results in less than a minute. This translates into 34.5 hours saved per month!
“We’ve been able to create more convenient channels to approve purchase requests which has led to faster approvals and greater efficiency across our entire procure-to-pay process,”
– Quintin Rohrbaugh, Associate Manager at Avocados From Mexico.
Lantern: The Strategic Partner
AFM placed their trust in Lantern as a strategic partner, relying on their expertise to navigate the evolving landscape of technology. Our role went beyond a mere solution provider – we became architects of transformation, ensuring AFM maximized the potential of their investment in Microsoft Cloud technologies.
Achieving Transformative Goals
Lantern’s visionary solution design centered around the Power Platform, harnessing its capabilities to not only meet immediate needs but also to lay the foundation for future innovations. The implementation was transformative, improving operational efficiency and setting the stage for additional applications, such as Invoicing and Credit Memo processing.
Our Purchase Request solution is the first step in our enterprise strategy and innovation roadmap to unlock the potential of the Microsoft Platform.”
– Miguel Molina, Chief Financial Officer at Avocados From Mexico
Ongoing Success and Future Collaborations
The success of this transformative journey has spawned multiple projects across Data Analytics and Business Applications at Avocados From Mexico. Lantern is actively engaged in modernizing and automating AFM’s Invoice and Credit Memo reconciliation process with SAP ByDesign. Additionally, a Microsoft Fabric and Power BI Center of Excellence engagement is underway, ensuring continuous improvement and innovation. AFM is looking to leverage AI to automate data extraction from invoices to speed up the user experience, as well as harnessing Process Mining and hyper automation to streamline their business process.
As the live application evolves, we remain committed to supporting and enhancing the solution based on user feedback. The collaborative partnership with AFM continues to be a success, with Lantern leading the way in shaping Avocados From Mexico’s technological landscape.
For a detailed account of this transformative journey with Power Platform and Dataverse, explore Microsoft’s AFM case story here.