Marketing company, Avocados From Mexico, uses Power Platform to streamline its purchase order process

While you may not be familiar with the company, you might well recognize the brand. 

The company’s iconic TV commercials (like this one on their site) have appeared in Big Game football broadcasts for several years. But what a lot of people don’t realize is that the company driving the Avocados From Mexico brand is a non-profit organization with the same name that is comprised just over 30 people. This small team supports hundreds of importers and distributors for Mexican avocados across the US as well as over 30,000 growers in Mexico. Since its founding in 2013, Avocados From Mexico brand has doubled the volume of Mexican avocados imported to the U.S. 

“Our marketing team is fantastic,” says Miguel Molina, Chief Financial Offer at Avocados From Mexico. But Molina wasn’t as happy with his own financial systems which, he admits, were not keeping pace with the ambitious goals of the team. Molina identified one bottleneck in particular: the company’s purchase order (PO) process. 

To help support the company’s fast growth, the company had moved to SAP Business ByDesign. The problem was the front end. While ideal for purchasing specialists, the UI for entering purchase requests (PRs) was simply too complicated and time consuming for the company’s main users – who, in this case, were mostly marketers driven by tight execution schedules.   

Streamlining purchase requests with Power Platform 

Molina and his team turned to Power Platform to create a more efficient user experience. Already deeply invested in Microsoft cloud technologies, and always on the lookout for new innovations, Molina saw the low-code efficiency of the platform as ideal for driving for creating a more streamlined user experience. 

Working closely with Microsoft Partner, Lantern, the team began planning a custom app using Power Apps. The new app pares down the PR fields in SAP to only those fields essential to the company. And that has led to a much faster PO process overall. “By simplifying our purchase order process using Power Platform, every PO that used to take up to 15 minutes to process can now be done in less than a minute,” says Molina. The total time savings for the marketing team are even more significant, given that most projects require multiple POs. 

The simplified UI has also reduced errors. For example, at the beginning of a fiscal year, users would sometimes submit purchase requests to a contract for the previous year. Business rules applied to the app eliminate this and other input errors. 

Tight integration with SAP Business ByDesign

To open a new purchase request, the user starts by selecting one of the company’s suppliers inside the app. This initiates a live SAP ByD API call pulling up relevant supplier contract details from SAP such as the available balance on the contract. This data is displayed in real time inside the app using a custom connector. 

A Power Platform dataflow pulls in a separate set of master data from SAP (such as product IDs and other internal accounting information) which is stored in Dataverse. “With Power Platform dataflows, we’re able to prep SAP data and move it to Dataverse automatically while also maintaining one source of truth in SAP,” explains Geetha Sivasailam, Practice Lead at Lantern. 

Users select from this data using simple drop-down menus, then add new line items, attach supporting documents, and submit for approval. From there, a Power Automate cloud flow routes the PR to managers – and this is where Power Platform delivers another key advantage: 

Previously, managers could only review and approve PRs by logging into SAP on their laptops. Now, the same process can be done through an app on their mobile device or via a card on Teams or Outlook email. Push notifications enabled on the app alert managers about approval requests without having to open the app itself. “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,” says Quintin Rohrbaugh, Associate Manager at Avocados From Mexico.

Once a PR has been approved, another Power Automate flow kicks in which automatically assembles a record of the PR for auditing purposes. (This is particularly important for the company as it is overseen by the USDA which conducts regular audits). Power Automate is used to consolidate PR header details and approval history into a Word template and then a separate PDF service merges the Word file with other supporting documents. From there, the documentation is forwarded automatically to SAP where a flow kicks off PO creation and returns a PO number back into Dataverse. A custom connector for the SAP Rest API is used to connect SAP with Power Automate.*