Our aging content management system needed to be replaced, so we—the Inside Track team in Microsoft Digital (MSD), the company’s IT organization—turned to the company’s citizen developer platform for help.

What did we do?

We moved our content management system for managing this website away from an older version of SharePoint to a more powerful and flexible Microsoft Power App built on a Microsoft Azure SQL back end. The new system relies on Microsoft Power Automate for workflows and Microsoft Power BI for reporting.

Our decision to overhaul the legacy system was prompted by performance issues and the need for scalability and compliance.

“As the previous content management system got used more, it just couldn’t scale—it got slow, very slow,” says Tracey Peyton, a director of technical development who supports the Inside Track team. “It was really a no-brainer to go to SQL for the back end and use Power Apps for the UI with Power Automate as the workflow because the scalability and interoperability is there.”

Running legacy systems can come with a host of challenges, including performance and compliance issues. As business needs evolved, the capabilities of Microsoft Power Platform unlocked a new way to efficiently manage the content publishing system.

“After issues with the previous platform reached a peak, it became abundantly clear that it wasn’t performing how the content experience managers needed it to,” Peyton says. “The Inside Track team decided to make the leap, and the results did not disappoint.”

The Inside Track team creates content that shows IT leaders and practitioners how Microsoft uses its own technology and services to support its employees and internal business groups.

Peyton, who is on the team, has been doing web development since 1993 as a pro developer. He says that the move to Microsoft Power Platform (which includes Microsoft Power Apps, Microsoft Power Automate, and Microsoft Power BI) and Microsoft Azure SQL had numerous benefits that couldn’t be ignored.

The best of both worlds

On top of Microsoft Power Platform’s increased capability to scale, it’s a system that both professional and citizen developers can collaborate within because of its flexibility and capabilities.

Citizen development uses in-house talent and expertise, accelerates solution delivery, and fosters innovation. It allows organizations to respond swiftly to changing demands and customize solutions to fit each team’s needs.

By automating repetitive tasks and streamlining workflows, low-code and no-code environments like Microsoft Power Platform can significantly enhance productivity for developers and customers alike. Employees can focus on higher-value tasks while routine, time-consuming activities are streamlined.

Peyton led the vanguard for the migration to Microsoft Power Platform. He credits Microsoft Power Platform for its short ramp-up time and extensive ability to connect with other platforms. As of the writing of this blog post, premium subscriptions can connect to over 350 connectors⁠—and the list continues to grow.

“Almost out of the box, anyone can start building a customized app—with the wide variety of connectors available and the ability to leverage data and functionality from other systems, it’s straightforward,” Peyton says. “It gives you ease of access for citizen developers.”

Compliance is also an aspect that can easily outrun the abilities of a legacy system.

“Policies change much quicker than tech requirements—our move to Microsoft Power Platform allowed us to respond to policy needs much more quickly,” says Lukas Velush, a senior business program manager on the Inside Track team.

The migration from the old system to the new included:

• SharePoint data to Microsoft Azure SQL: We took the opportunity to move our data from SharePoint and Microsoft Excel to a SQL database. Most of the static data moved easily, but because the team wanted to keep the new environment in sync while tested, it used Microsoft Power Automate to sync changes with the legacy system and transform any data that needed extra attention on the new platform.
• Custom SharePoint UI to Microsoft Power Apps: To ease user transition, the team kept a similar interface with the new UI, but some controls (like multi-select combo boxes and the ability to search for multiple people across the org) didn’t work the same in Microsoft Power Apps. In these cases, the team built alternatives where needed using a customized view and low code solutions.
• Microsoft Power Automate for workflow: Because Microsoft Power Automate seamlessly integrates with the platforms the team was using, Peyton and the rest of the team had already been moving their workflows to Microsoft Power Automate. With the ability to invoke stored procedures in SQL, the team has even more options and flexibility to meet its automation needs.
• Microsoft Power BI for dashboards: This was the heaviest lift of the migration. With plenty of deprecated data in the old system, it was time to rebuild these from scratch. The team moved to shared data sources, making it easy to create multiple reports without rebuilding its datasets each time.

Flipping the switch

The development of the new system took six months.

Peyton and the team embarked on the migration first in an exploratory sense. There was much back and forth about how Microsoft Power Platform could meet the business needs without any functional loss—and with the exploration, a lot of prototyping was involved.

Months later, when it came time to complete the migration, the system only had to go offline for a few hours.

“When it was time to flip the switch, it was scary, and we were a little nervous at first,” Peyton says, explaining that they need not have worried—everything worked seamlessly. “I was really pleased with the increased performance—things were loading much quicker.”

Microsoft Power Platform enables professional developers like Peyton to accelerate their solutions. Using Adobe Analytics and Microsoft Azure SQL with Microsoft Power Platform meant that Peyton could hook up a SQL database with workflow, reporting, and a powerful front end without writing code. Professional developers have shifted to avoid building more code than necessary to reduce performance errors.

“Whereas before we had to do some wild data transformations on the previous system (the older SharePoint), we were able to step back and say that we can do this with SQL,” Peyton says. “Because of the interoperability of the Power Platform, we can move to managing data in native environments where you can get much more efficient processing.”

But, he says, there were pain points.

With Microsoft Power Platform, they did initially give up some functionality. One of those, Peyton says, was related to data sheet views.

“We lasted only a week before the people who used data sheet views said nope,” Peyton says.

The data sheet view offered the ability to make changes to multiple fields across several records directly to the underlying data without using the main form. It was only really for experienced power users. But, within hours, the team was able to build a separate Power App that provided the necessary access to the desired fields without compromising the data.

While building the UI, it was easy to keep accessibility standards in mind with the new platform capabilities.

“Having an agile or low-code environment can make it easy to push out new changes, which means your product can be in tune and responsive to updated compliance and policy updates,” Peyton says.

“There’s such a breadth of interoperability,” Peyton says. “The system allows you to focus on what you need and offload what you don’t.”

Problem-solving without the burden of technical problems

Velush says, Microsoft Power Platform “allows the people who know the business to solve business problems and not have to worry too much about technical problems.”

From being faster, easily customizable, scalable, fully compliant, and having capabilities that charm both citizen and pro developers, Microsoft Power Platform has become the answer to a legacy system that Inside Track had outgrown.

“We have the agility and flexibility to take this system wherever we want from here,” Velush says.

Creating customized views in the Power Platform, whether it’s in Power Apps, Power Automate, or Power BI, offers several significant benefits to the Inside Track team and leadership teams. These customized views enhance visibility, decision-making, and overall efficiency with the use of tailored insights, efficient data access, personalization to fit each user’s needs and role-based access to support the pillars of Microsoft’s Zero Trust security efforts.

In the early phases of development, the new system was only shared with the team via direct access, this meant members of the team had to request permission and wait for approval from the tool owner. After the system was established, it shifted to Entra ID (formerly Azure Active Directory) to allow collaboration across Microsoft Digital.

Integrating new programs

The team sought out solutions with Power Platform to address evolving business needs. By adjusting the views of the new Power App and related dashboards, the team is able to quickly respond with custom views and tools that can handle the scale of our content portfolio.

We needed to efficiently manage content promotions across various social media platforms and ensure older stories were assessed by the subject matter experts to ensure we’re providing modern solutions to customers and employees.

The custom views based off the new system created a unified place for end-to-end promotion management. This allowed collaborators in Microsoft Digital to jump into the application with little to no experience. Collaborators could quickly see all the information needed to promote stories and track when and where a story was featured.

Auditing the content portfolio on Inside Track’s internal and external sites was a manual process for the team and took up valuable time. There are rapid changes around Microsoft and establishing a program that reviewed and worked to update stories was almost a full-time job by itself.

“We were able to rapidly build a solution that helped with a specific business problem,” says Jenny Neill, a project manager on the developer team for Inside Track. “We needed to get our arms around a large set of content that hasn’t been looked at in a long time. We needed a different lens, and it was possible to develop the requirements in a new Power App and bolt it onto the existing data structure.”

The Power Platform provided a needed solution at the right time.

“After hearing the challenges from one of the content experience managers, it was clear we needed to create a system to efficiently support the program,” Velush says. “Tracey and the developer team responded with a prototype that was already functional within the week.”

Peyton and the developer team created custom views in Power BI and a new Power App to support Inside Track in six weeks. “It was a radical improvement, our CXM was able to scale up the program and it was easy to check-in on the program with the familiar interface,” Velush says.

The success of Microsoft Power Platform, Peyton says, can ultimately be traced to the system being able to flawlessly integrate—and Microsoft’s willingness to cater to the “next level” of integration.

“Over the last few years, Microsoft has made a great effort to refocus, ensuring they provide tools to developers so that they can interoperate with any environment; it doesn’t matter what you want to integrate with, regardless of platform,” Peyton says. “They’re giving developers the tools that they need to do what they need to do.”

• Consider scalability and interoperability: When modernizing a legacy system, prioritize scalability and interoperability. Ensure that the chosen technology stack can handle increased usage over time and seamlessly integrate with other platforms and systems.
• Empower citizen and pro developers: Utilize no-code or low-code platforms like Microsoft Power Platform to empower both citizen and professional developers within your organization. These platforms allow individuals with varying levels of technical expertise to collaborate efficiently.
• Prioritize compliance and policy responsiveness: Recognize that policies can change quickly in a business environment. Choose a modernization approach that allows you to respond rapidly to policy needs while maintaining compliance with data security and regulatory requirements.
• Customize and adapt: Be prepared to customize solutions to match the specific needs of different departments or teams within your organization. Modernization efforts should offer flexibility and the ability to adapt to unique requirements.

Build professional solutions with Power Apps.

• Experience SQL innovation on Azure.
• Create a data-driven culture with BI for all.
• Discover how citizen developers use Microsoft Power Apps to build an intelligent launch assistant.

Want more information? Email us and include a link to this story and we’ll get back to you.

Please share your feedback with us—take our survey and let us know what kind of content is most useful to you.

The post Revamping a content management system at Microsoft with the Microsoft Power Platform appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

Keeping tabs on the millions of annual transactions is no small task—just ask Shashi Lanka Venkata and Mark Anderson, two company employees who are leading a bid to automate what historically has been a painstakingly manual revenue transaction process.

“We support close to 50 million platform actions per day,” says Venkata, a principal group engineering manager in Microsoft Digital. “For a quarter-end or a month-end, it can double. At June-end, we’re getting well more than 100 million transactions per day.”

That’s a lot, especially when there cannot be any mistakes and every transaction must be processed in 24 hours.

To wrangle that high-stakes volume, Venkata and Anderson, a director on Microsoft’s Business Operations team, teamed up to expand the capabilities of Customer Obsessed Solution Management and Incident Care (COSMIC), a Dynamics 365 application built to help automate Microsoft’s revenue transactions.

[Learn more about COSMIC including where to find the code here: Microsoft Dynamics 365 and AI automate complex business processes and transactions.]

First tested in 2017 on a small line of business, the solution expanded quickly and was handling the full $100 billion-plus workload within one year.

That said, the team didn’t try to automate everything at once—it has been automating the many steps it takes to process a financial transaction one by one.

“We’re now about 75 percent automated,” Anderson says. “Now we’re much faster, and the quality of our data has gone way up.”

COSMIC is saving Microsoft $25 million to $30 million over the next two to three years in revenue processing cost. It also automates the rote copy-and-paste kind of work that the company’s team of 3,800 revenue processing agents used to get bogged down on, freeing them up to do higher value work.

The transformation that Anderson, Venkata, and team have been driving is part of a larger digital transformation that spans all Microsoft Digital. Its success has led to a kudos from CEO Satya Nadella, a well-received presentation to the entire Microsoft Digital organization, and lots of interest from Microsoft customers.

“It’s been a fantastic journey,” Anderson says. “It’s quite amazing how cutting edge this work is.”

Unpacking how COSMIC works

Partners transact, purchase, and engage with Microsoft in over 13 different lines of businesses, each with its own set of requirements and rules for processing revenue transactions (many of which change from country to country).

To cope with all that complexity, case management and work have historically been handled separately to make it easier for human agents to stay on top of things.

That had to change if COSMIC was going to be effective. “When we started, we knew we needed to bring them together into one experience,” Venkata says.

Doing so would make transactions more accurate and faster, but there was more to it.

“The biggest reason we wanted to bring them together is so we could get better telemetry,” he says. “Connecting all the underlying data gives us better insights, and we can use that to get the AI and machine learning we need to automate more and more of the operation.”

Giving automation its due

The first thing the team decided to automate was email submissions, one of the most common ways transactions get submitted to the company.

“We are using machine learning to read the email and to automatically put it in the right queue,” Venkata says. “The machine learning pulls the relevant information out of the email and enters it into the right places in COSMIC.”

The team also has automated sentiment analysis and language translation.

What’s next?

Using a bot to start mimicking the work an agent does, like automatic data entry or answering basic questions. “This is something that is currently being tested and will soon be rolled out to all our partners using COSMIC,” he says.

How does it work?

When a partner submits a transactional package to Microsoft, an Optical Character Recognition bot scans it, opens it, checks to see if everything looks correct, and makes sure business roles are applied correctly. “If all looks good, it automatically gets routed to the next step in the process,” Venkata says.

The Dynamics workflow engine also is taking on some of the check-and-balance steps that agents used to own, like testing to see if forms have been filled out correctly and if information extracted out of those forms is correct.

“Azure services handle whatever has to be done in triage or validation,” he says. “It can check to see if a submission has the right version of the document, or if a document is the correct one for a particular country. It validates various rules at each step.”

All of this is possible, Venkata says, because the data was automatically abstracted. “If, at any point the automation doesn’t work, the transaction gets kicked back for manual routing,” he says.

As for the agents? They are getting to shift to more valuable, strategic work.

“The system is telling them what the right next action is going to be,” Venkata says. “Before this, the agent had to remember what to do next for each step. Now the system is guiding them to the next best action—each time a step is completed, the automation kicks in and walks the agent through the next action they should take.”

Eventually the entire end-to-end process will be automated, and the agents will spend their time doing quality control checks and looking for ways to improve the experience. “We want to get to the point where we only need them to do higher level work,” he says.

Choosing Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Azure

There was lots of technology to choose from, but after a deep assessment of the options, the team chose Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Azure.

“We know many people thought Dynamics couldn’t scale to an enterprise the size of Microsoft, but that’s not the case anymore,” Venkata says. “It has worked very well for us. Based on our experience, we can definitively say it can cover Microsoft’s needs.”

The team also used Azure to build COSMIC—Azure Blob Storage for attachments, Azure Cosmos DB for data archival and retention, SQL Azure for reporting on data bases, and Microsoft Power BI for data reporting.

Anderson says it’s a major leap forward to be using COSMIC’s automation to seamlessly route customers to the right place, handing them off from experience to experience without disrupting them.

Another major improvement is how the team has gained an end-to-end view of customers (which means the company no longer must ask customers what else they’re buying from Microsoft).

“It’s been a journey,” Anderson says. “It isn’t something we’ve done overnight. At times it’s been frustrating, and at times it’s been amazing. It’s almost hard to imagine how far we’ve come.”

• Learn more about COSMIC including where to find the code here: Microsoft Dynamics 365 and AI automate complex business processes and transactions.

The post How automation is transforming revenue processing at Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.

The existing Microsoft Invoice platform allowed only manual invoice submission. External suppliers and internal users in Microsoft’s Accounts Payable (AP) Operations team could either email a scanned invoice or PDF, manually enter information into a web portal, or use that portal to bulk-upload invoices using a formatted Microsoft Excel template.

In some countries or regions with complex requirements, the AP Operations team is required to manually enter paper invoices directly into SAP, Microsoft’s financial system of record. The system worked, but it was inefficient.

Compared to the wider digital transformation at Microsoft, the inefficiency was glaring. Across the company, manual processes are being replaced with automated processes so that employees can focus on more impactful work. The Invoice Service team, which sits in the Microsoft Digital organization, saw an opportunity in the invoice processing system to modernize.

The goal was to trigger the creation of invoices using simple signals, like when purchased goods were received.

“We started with a question,” says James Bolling, principal group engineering manager for the Microsoft Invoice Service team. “How do we trigger invoices so that a supplier can just call our API and generate the invoice in a system-to-system call? How do we automate approval based on purchase order and invoice and receipting information?”

[Read about how we are digitizing contract management. Learn how we are using anomaly detection to automate royalty payments. Microsoft has built a modern service architecture for its Procure-to-Pay systems—read about it here.]

Lower costs, increased speed, and improved compliance

The Invoice Service team is responsible for the entirety of invoicing at Microsoft, Bolling says. The system it maintains integrates tightly with purchase orders related to goods and services from all Microsoft suppliers. The AP Operations team is tasked with ensuring that every payment adheres to relevant payment terms and service-level agreements.

The team also must maintain airtight compliance for the more than 120 countries and regions in which Microsoft conducts business, which accounts for about 1.8 million invoices per year and some USD60 billion in spend, according to Bolling.

The opportunity to lower operating costs by increasing speed and reducing the possibility of human error was enticing, but it wasn’t until the team began tackling a separate project that the scope of what it was about to undertake was clear.

Rewriting a 20-year-old legacy system

While working on a tax project, Shweta Udhoji and Guru Balasubramanian, both of them program managers on the Invoice Service team, spoke to customers and partners who used the legacy system regularly. Those conversations revealed the scale of the problem. Roughly 35,000 invoices were being submitted via email every month, with several thousand more coming in through the web portal.

Because validation paths are required for each intake method, they were present in duplicate or triplicate, creating redundancy that made it difficult to add a simple modification. Each change had to be applied to each method individually.

“The processes are more than 20 years old, and any extensions due to changing global compliance requirements or any other business needs that come in from our partner teams were very difficult to accommodate,” Udhoji says. “We wanted to simplify that.”

To make matters worse, the team couldn’t rely on documentation for a 20-year-old architecture as they looked for temporary fixes to get the time-sensitive tax updates out the door.

“We didn’t have any documentation to look at, so we had to test extensively, and once we started testing, we started seeing a lot of problems,” Udhoji says.

The road to the Modern Invoice API

Quick fixes wouldn’t solve the underlying problems of the legacy architecture. The team realized that it would need to be completely rewritten to adhere to modern standards.

The Modern Invoice API became a critical component of the broader effort to automate invoice creation and submission where possible. For partners and suppliers for whom manual intake methods are sufficient (or where paper invoices are required by law), those methods would largely remain intact, with some process optimizations added for efficiency. For Microsoft’s largest partners and suppliers, the API would automate the invoice creation and submission process.

“We knew we could make a huge impact on processing time and the manual effort required to process an invoice. We just needed to automate the process,” Udhoji says.

Because business needs change so much faster today than they did 20 years ago, the API was a business decision as well as a technical one. Modifications and extensions would need to be easy to add to keep up.

“What we were building with the Modern API was a framework for better automation, quicker changes, easier automation,” says Bryan Wilhelm, senior software engineer on the Modern Invoice API project.

Bridging legacy and modern systems

The challenge that the team faced was daunting and delicate. Because all invoice processing ran through the legacy architecture, there could be no interruptions in service—business must continue as usual, all over the world. The team also needed to be responsive to constantly shifting local compliance laws, too, adding modifications without downtime.

“We had to first understand the domain, the business requirements, and the technical side of it, while at the same time maintaining the legacy tool and thinking about how to re-imagine the invoice experience,” Balasubramanian says.

The team started by building a hybrid architecture model (as illustrated in the following diagram) on top of the legacy system; initially, the API would simply call the legacy invoice creation pipeline. By integrating with the existing process and building a wrapper on top of it, the legacy system would continue to function without interruption. With so many business rules and validation processes to consider, it would’ve taken a considerable amount of time to write an end-to-end process from scratch.

The iterative approach meant that the team could ship a working API, complete with integration with the legacy system, in just eight weeks. That left more time to gather and integrate early feedback from partners and suppliers while at the same time modernizing the underlying invoice processing pipeline.

Using Microsoft Azure and cXML for interoperability

The legacy system runs on Windows Server 2016 and SQL Server on-premises in Azure Infrastructure as a Service Virtual Machines, so the team leveraged SQL Datasync for synchronization between Azure SQL and on-premises SQL Server, and Azure Service Bus messaging for communication between the two systems. The API microservice was built as an Azure function.

For two reasons, the team chose to adopt the commerce eXtensible Markup Language (cXML) protocol to enable communication between documents. First, cXML is compliant with existing Microsoft business rules out of the box. “All the gaps we saw that were missing in the legacy system were accounted for in cXML,” Wilhelm says.

Second, cXML has a robust community; thus, extensive documentation and support already existed, including around the business rules inherent to the cXML protocol.

Automation’s immediate impact

The Modern Invoice API went live globally to internal partners in August, and to date USD85 million worth of invoices have been sent using the API. As the API project evolves to encompass a greater share of all invoice processing, that touchless invoice submission and approval will lower operating costs and eliminate inefficiencies both for internal teams and for Microsoft vendors and partners across the globe.

Prior to the API, the Microsoft Corporate, External, and Legal Affairs (CELA) team used the web portal in conjunction with an internal tool that tracks US work visa workflows. Microsoft sponsors a significant number of employees who are in the United States on work visas, and the CELA team tracks the status of those visas and submits payment to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

The old process involved running a report with the team’s internal tool to find out which visas required payment. They then used that information to populate an Excel template and submit the invoice in the web portal. Because the team processes tens of thousands of checks per year, the time wasted in this process added up.

CELA became one of the first groups to fully implement integration with the API, modifying its internal tool to call the API and automatically submit checks to file USCIS cases. By managing the process end to end within the same system, the team has seen a reduction in the resources required to order daily checks and gained complete visibility into what checks are being ordered and why.

Modernizing for today and tomorrow

Like CELA, business partners and suppliers who submit thousands of invoices per year to Microsoft had to build and manually upload formatted Excel files to a web portal. In creating the foundation for the Modern Invoice API, the team also laid the groundwork for other automated invoice submission and creation methods such as the SAP Evaluated Receipt Settlement (ERS) process. In addition to adding support for 20 countries/regions that the legacy system simply didn’t (or couldn’t) support, these combined automation efforts mean that as much as 70 percent of the 1.8 million invoices submitted to Microsoft every year will be generated via automated, system-to-system calls.

New capabilities are in the pipeline, too. Supporting documentation can be attached to invoices using the new API, which wasn’t possible before. The team is also working on integrating Microsoft’s financial systems with those of GitHub, a recent Microsoft acquisition, to increase the speed of integration of future acquisitions. The API provides a simpler way to migrate the GitHub invoice system to Microsoft systems and components. “It would’ve been a crazy modification in the classic system,” Udhoji notes. Future acquisitions and integrations will be similarly affected as the API standardizes the process of invoice system migration.

In addition to the four tenants already using the Modern Invoice API, six more tenant groups are slated to be added by the end of the fiscal year, with an external rollout to Microsoft’s biggest external suppliers not far behind.

Creating, submitting, and approving more than 1.8 million invoice transactions every year required significant manual efforts for Microsoft and its payees. All told, the manual processes added up to 300,000 hours of work, according to Luciana Siciliano, Finance Operations director and global process owner.

“Our internal business groups no longer have to manually touch these invoices to get them into our enterprise invoice system and move them forward to complete the payout,” she says. “Through automated intake, receipting, and approval solutions, we can drive quick-turnaround solutions that are centered on our users.”

• Read about how we are digitizing contract management.
• Learn how we are using anomaly detection to automate royalty payments.
• Read about how Microsoft has built a modern service architecture for its Procure-to-Pay systems.

The post How retooling invoice processing is fueling transformation inside Microsoft appeared first on Inside Track Blog.