Creating a process to request-gather-process-upload data from customer

[Isidrolj]

Hello, 

I wanted to seek some guidance from the community on examples that have been already implemented with a specific project that we are working on or apps that can take care of this process. 

We are a benchmarking company. We facilitate customers to share their data, we aggregate it and anonymize it, and then create reports that help them decision making. 

We have implemented Dynamics 365 in our company and we are looking to implement a process that allows us to request-gather-process-and upload data from the customer more efficiently. 

We see this process as similar to what procurement companies do. They create a bid offer, send it to bidders, receive hundreds of lines from different bidders, and are able to ingest that data into their system. 

We want to create a flow in which we use Microsoft 365 and Power Automate to create a template, share it with customers, they fill the template with their information, they upload it in our portal, the information is processed, and finally is loaded to Dynamics 365. 

Do you know about an application that can take care of a process like this, or do you have an example of a project that is already doing something similar? 

Thanks for the help!

[Syndicate_Admin · Accepted solution]

Hi, when you say "Dynamics 365" I'm going to assume you mean the CE product stream versus either F&O or BC. Following that assumption, I have never heard of a commercially offered RFQ/RFP addin for D365 CE. Which actually makes sense as the basic ethos of the product from a design perspective is from the 'selling' side rather than the 'procurement' side. There is, of course, a couple of ways to accomplish it for D365 F&O as F&O has an entire RFQ management module.

That said, I will propose 2 possible approaches that I can think of:

• Use SPO (SharePoint Online) for both the actual "data collection project" (your version of the RFQ/RFP procurement management process) documents (which can be bundled together using document sets if needed), and also for the "portal" aspect as well. Essentially you would create a SharePoint site collection in SPO that would allow external participants (you will need to upgrade your Azure AD to Azure AD B2B) to access and you create SPO lists that contain all the req lines for a given data collection project. I would suggest to design it using "master" lists and you can then use a simple PA Flow to create a copy of each master list for each customer to complete, thus allowing you to secure it to each customer separately. Once the data is in the SPO lists, you can stream the data to your D365 environment using a Dataflow (SharePoint Lists is one of the many data sources you can specify) in the Dataverse environment for your D365 instance:

One of the nice aspects of using a Dataflow is that Dataflows natively uses Power Query which provides some very powerful simple formula and click-based data transforms if you need to do so. And you create/control the data model (columns) in SharePoint and they can be pushed directly as created to Dataverse. Which provides some security separation between D365/Dataverse and the specific data collection project authors (if needed). This model eliminates the "upload" and the "processing". You can then use the data however you want/need including being able to connect it to Power BI, or even push it into an Azure Data Lake and start doing all kinds of funky AI analysis.

• Second option would be to go with a platform like ICertis Sourcing App (https://www.icertis.com/contract-management/business-applications/sourcing-app/) which provides all of the above and more (possibly more than you need/want, not sure).
• Third option would be a bit of a variant of option 1, where you replace the SPO site collection with a PowerApps Portal. However, this is QUITE a bit more work, both initially and ongoing.

[Isidrolj]

Thank you! That is superuseful

[Syndicate_Admin]

You're welcome. Would you be kind enough to mark it as verified? And perhaps add a like?