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© 2017 Microsoft
© 2017 Microsoft
GLOBAL CHEMICAL MANUFACTURER STREAMLINES SALES PROCESSES WITH MICROSOFT POWER
PLATFORM AND AI BUILDER
CUSTOMER
Hexion
PRODUCTS AND SERVICES
Dynamics 365 Sales
Power Apps
Power Automate
INDUSTRY
Manufacturing
ORGANIZATION SIZE
Large (1,000 - 9,999 employees)
COUNTRY
United States
DOWNLOADS
Additional screenshots of the ScanIt mobile app
Customer survey flow
Hexion solution architecture
Screenshot of the Broadcaster app
Screenshot of SharePoint Dynamics business card tracking
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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GLOBAL CHEMICAL MANUFACTURER STREAMLINES SALES PROCESSES WITH MICROSOFT POWER
PLATFORM AND AI BUILDER
Print
May 5, 2020
Global chemical company Hexion has been manufacturing specialty chemicals and
performance materials for more than a century. The company is committed to safe
manufacturing, community involvement, and making the world better, safer, and
cleaner through “responsible chemistry.” Hexion uses Microsoft Power Platform to
streamline and automate core business processes while also helping solve today’s
most pressing issues to create a better future.
> Microsoft Power Platform and AI Builder components allowed us to quickly
> deliver an innovative and well-integrated solution within our Dynamics 365
> platform for our marketing and sales business partners. The platform is a
> game-changer in this new world of rapid app delivery.
>
> Jim Parker: Web and Collaboration Services Manager
>
> Hexion
Figure 1. Screenshots of the ScanIt mobile app Hexion built with Microsoft Power
Apps
Based in Columbus, Ohio, Hexion helps solve today’s most pressing issues to
shape the future in diverse ways, such as creating innovative materials for use
in the wind energy industry, making cars lighter, and reducing solvent emissions
with waterborne coatings. The company calls this approach responsible chemistry.
As an innovator in its industry, Hexion is also interested in improving its
business processes. The company’s IT team recently began using Microsoft Power
Platform to streamline and automate its core business processes. It built
several Microsoft Power Apps solutions within its Microsoft 365 environment and
recently extended its adoption of the Microsoft business applications product
portfolio with Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the newer capabilities in Microsoft
Power Platform, such as AI Builder. By using Power Apps and AI Builder, Hexion’s
sales staff can now easily scan business cards and capture detailed information
about prospective customers directly into Common Data Service. Additionally, the
company has been using canvas apps and more than 80 Microsoft Power Automate
flows for more than a year. “This initiative is a great example of leveraging
our existing technology investments in Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365, along
with the power of automation and AI, to find new ways to deliver high value to
our enterprise through lower-effort solutions,” says Dennis Ryan, Senior Vice
President and Chief Information Officer at Hexion.
THE JOURNEY TO AUTOMATION IN THE CLOUD
When IT manager Jim Parker, who oversees the Web and Collaboration Services team
at Hexion, started in 2017, his job was to manage the Office 365 deployment and
revamp Hexion’s intranet. Since then, Hexion has migrated from an on-premises
instance of Microsoft SharePoint Server to SharePoint Online, which is now fully
in the cloud. Parker’s team manages a custom application development portfolio
and collaboration technologies like Microsoft 365 components. The company also
transitioned from Salesforce to Dynamics 365 Sales.
Parker’s Microsoft Power Platform journey started in early 2018 when he adopted
Power Automate and Power Apps, and he pushed for his team to take ownership of
these tools to streamline various processes. His team now manages the entire
Microsoft Power Platform except for Power BI.
The team found quick success with using Power Automate and SharePoint Online for
several form processing scenarios. These included converting requests that were
once sent in emails to form submissions with automated flows that collect data
and drive downstream actions in back-end systems. Hexion has more than 80 flows
in production for scenarios such as contractor onboarding, user requests for a
Microsoft Teams channel or Microsoft 365 group, and user access to the Dynamics
365 platform. The company plans to move more workloads into Common Data Service
with Power Apps as the front end.
POWER APPS AND AI BUILDER SOLUTION: THE SCANIT APP
The Hexion sales and marketing teams consist of around 200 employees spread
across 14 countries, and these teams regularly attend conferences and meet with
potential leads and existing customers. After its adoption of Dynamics 365, the
sales team needed an efficient solution to get information from business cards
into the system. At a typical conference, salespeople might need to scan up to
100 business cards and save them online so they can follow up on these contacts.
The solution had to not only support storage of all the data from the business
cards, but it also had to support adding additional custom fields and notes,
with the data going directly into the company’s customer relationship management
(CRM) system. “Working quickly is essential for our marketing and sales teams to
remain competitive,” says Kristin Hulse, Senior Digital Marketing Communications
Lead at Hexion. “The flexibility and stability of this solution allow us to
iterate at speed to meet the ever-changing needs of our people in the field.”
Before Hexion adopted Dynamics 365, it used Salesforce and a third-party
solution called Zero Keyboard to upload business cards. Parker’s team saw an
opportunity to collaborate more fully with Microsoft by moving to Dynamics 365.
The team needed its new system to have efficient card-scanning capabilities, and
it needed the new end-to-end solution to be working within a short 60-day time
frame. Additionally, the new solution had to be affordable, easy to use,
customizable, and integrated directly with the data in Dynamics 365.
Parker and his team took advantage of the AI Builder capabilities in Power Apps
to accomplish this. The solution took less than six weeks to build, and in the
first week after it deployed, the sales team scanned more than 250 business
cards. When a sales or marketing employee must scan a new business card, they
run a mobile Power Apps canvas app called ScanIt. This app uses the AI Builder
business card scanner that’s built into Power Apps to scan business cards,
extract and recognize the text, and populate the relevant entities, such as
Contacts, in the Common Data Service instance that’s part of the company’s Sales
subscription.
Parker used custom-built canvas components such as the navigation bar at the
bottom of the screen to create a wizard-like form experience. These components
enable reuse of the same UI and logic across different screens in the app, and
potentially, across different apps that follow a similar pattern.
Salespeople scan the contact information from each card and then add structured
information. For example, they can choose if the customer is a business contact
or a lead. They can also select the appropriate business unit, the applicable
segment areas from a predefined list, and they can enter detailed notes about
the person they just met. They then review and confirm a summary of all the
information, which is neatly organized into two tabs: General Info and
Additional Info.
After reviewing contact details and submitting the scanned information, the data
is stored in a SharePoint Online list that acts as a centralized log and a
temporary flat data store from where items can be moved into the correct Common
Data Service structure. The IT team was already familiar with viewing and
navigating SharePoint lists, which made SharePoint Online an excellent choice to
use as a log and for troubleshooting. Parker also found that by using SharePoint
lists, users can save business card data to the back end almost instantly. The
solution uses a logic app to automatically and asynchronously copy data from the
SharePoint list into the Common Data Service instance that’s part of Hexion’s
Sales subscription so that contact information is centrally available within the
company’s sales system. The logic app also performs custom logic to extract data
from custom option sets, such as segment areas, driving specific follow-up
actions based on the values. For example, if the sales team tags customers with
a certain product segment, they will receive a customized follow-up email with
information on products in that specific segment.
SOLUTION ARCHITECTURE
Hexion uses a Power Apps canvas app with an AI Builder business card scanner to
capture customer information. The data is stored in a SharePoint Online list,
and Azure Logic Apps is used to copy the information to the Common Data Service
instance that’s part of the Dynamics 365 subscription. Customer details and
notes are centrally available within Sales.
Figure 2. Hexion's solution architecture; for a larger version, go to the
Downloads section of the left-hand sidebar
SOLUTION IMPACT AND BENEFITS
Some of the key benefits and impact of the solution are that it supports:
* An effective integrated solution for business card scanning in Dynamics 365
without relying on third-party solutions.
* Flexibility about where data is stored, such as in SharePoint Online lists
and Common Data Service.
* Quality and consistency of data. Leads and opportunities are classified
correctly with rich metadata and automation to drive actions after the data
is stored in Dynamics 365.
* Use on any device, such as phones or iPads, during trade shows.
* Using canvas components in Power Apps to reduce development efforts while
driving consistency in the user experience.
“With the early success we’ve had, our marketing and sales teams are already
brainstorming possible new solutions and new ways to solve problems in the field
and work more efficiently,” says Mike Montooth, Senior Manager of Marketing
Communications at Hexion.
AUTOMATING IT REQUESTS
In addition to creating solutions for business units such as the sales team,
Parker’s team also manages several requests for IT-governed processes, such as
external sharing of documents and setting up new Teams channels. Parker and his
team are heavy users of Microsoft Forms Pro to manage these requests. For some
processes, however, they needed additional capabilities, such as a people picker
to route requests on behalf of another employee other than the signed-in user.
So, they turned to Power Apps.
The IT team built a canvas app to manage requests where a user in the
organization is seeking permission to share Microsoft 365 documents or folders
with external parties. The app uses prebuilt canvas components for functionality
such as a consistent header and footer. It uses the Microsoft 365 connector to
implement a people picker that makes it possible to submit the request on behalf
of another user and to fill in the manager information for the employee
automatically.
Figure 3. Screenshots of the request-management canvas app that the IT team
built using Power Apps
A couple other examples of IT requests that Parker and his team automated with
Power Apps and Power Automate include:
* Managing user access requests to the CRM system.
* Managing approvals for employees to create a new team in Microsoft Teams and
automating provisioning of the teams.
AUTOMATING CUSTOMER SURVEYS
Hexion uses Power Automate flows to orchestrate core business processes across
almost every business unit in the company, such as customer service, IT, HR, and
procurement. One such process involves the customer surveys sent out by the
customer service team about twice a month, which targets various groups of
customers based on specific criteria. The customer service team gets a list of
emails from its SAP system that’s copied into a SharePoint list that the IT team
provides. This triggers a flow that generates a unique survey invitation link to
a Microsoft Forms Pro form. The solution generates a unique URL with a
customized template for each customer that includes information specific to that
customer localized in the customer’s language.
Figure 4. The flow confirms the customer has opted in for communications and
generates a unique survey link specific to that customer; for a larger
version, go to the Downloads section
After the customer fills out the survey, a SharePoint Online list populates with
the results, and metrics are generated on how the team performed and where it
can improve. The team also generates dashboards and Power BI reports against
this data.
MANAGING COMPANY-WIDE COMMUNICATIONS
Like many organizations, when managers and the communications department need to
send email widely throughout the company, they need consistent creation and
distribution. They also need to target predefined groups of people and require
approval of communications before they’re sent out.
The IT team used Power Apps to build a new Broadcaster app with richer
capabilities than its previous legacy tool and a lower support cost. The app is
now used by the communications lead to broadcast company-wide messages in email
and Teams, and it will roll out to all major project team leaders by April 2020.
The app’s key capabilities and benefits include:
* Authoring of emails with dynamic previews of the formatted versions.
* Authoring focuses on the content while the tool manages branding and layout.
* Ability to send a test email before sending the final communication.
* Targeting of predefined groups of users.
* Picking the author on whose behalf the email is sent and having their
signature automatically populate.
Figure 5. Screenshot of the Broadcaster app's dynamic email preview
functionality; for a larger version, go to the Downloads section
Find out more about Hexion on Facebook, LinkedIn, and YouTube.
> This initiative is a great example of leveraging our existing technology
> investments in Dynamics 365 and Microsoft 365, along with the power of
> automation and AI, to find new ways to deliver high value to our enterprise
> through lower-effort solutions.
>
> Dennis Ryan: Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer
>
> Hexion
> Working quickly is essential for our marketing and sales teams to remain
> competitive. The flexibility and stability of this solution allow us to
> iterate at speed to meet the ever-changing needs of our people in the field.
>
> Kristin Hulse: Senior Digital Marketing Communications Lead
>
> Hexion
> With the early success we’ve had, our marketing and sales teams are already
> brainstorming possible new solutions and new ways to solve problems in the
> field and work more efficiently.
>
> Mike Montooth: Senior Manager of Global Marketing Communications
>
> Hexion
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