Worten automates sales reports with Power Automate
Joel Monteiro
- Client Worten
- Role Power Platform
- Year 2024
The client:
Founded in 1996, Worten is the consumer electronics and entertainment branch of the Portuguese retail giant Sonae, operating a network of close to 240 stores spread across all regions of Portugal, but also Spain and Angola. Worten is the retail market leader in Portugal for home appliances, IT products, telecommunications, sound & image, and entertainment, and operates the largest e-commerce website in Portugal – worten.pt – online since 2001. Over 4.000 people work at Worten, spread across several multidisciplinary teams.
The challenge:
Through a series of envisioning sessions, the team at Worten identified some use cases that could potentially be addressed with a low-code solution, and at the top of the list was the company’s sales report method. Worten’s Analytics team worked with Power BI and sent hundreds of emails weekly to stores and to the Director of Operations containing reports with KPIs. A junior employee had to manually customize these reports according to results and devoted around 45 minutes to each report. In fact, 70% of this employee’s time was allocated to this task, alongside sending the same reports to store groups with personalized messages. Worten contacted us looking for a way to automate this task and free the employee to do a more meaningful and fulfilling job.
The solution:
Our team quickly realized that Worten’s request could be easily achieved with Power Automate, Microsoft’s SaaS for automating recurrent tasks. Through Power Automate, Worten connected Power BI to their email service to automate the sharing of their sales KPIs as paginated reports.
Since Worten didn’t have anyone who could help with Power Automate , and Power BI Paginated Reports, our team provided training for the employee handling the Power BI report sharing, to help them accomplish their goal.
The Analytics employee was in a junior position and only had a very slight idea about what Power Automate was and what it could do, so our team had to instill some comfort and confidence in these first steps. Over the years, we’ve found that empowering the client to handle relatively simple tasks accomplishes more since employees often put that knowledge to good internal use. Worten was a bit apprehensive, but, in the end, the company realized that it was the best approach.
“The employee had doubts since it was his first time, but the truth is that he succeeded and now he is already replicating it for other needs.”
– Paula Paulino, Digital Transformation Manager, Worten
Results:
As expected, the results were astonishing and the employee responsible for Power BI barely spends any time on this task nowadays, allocating himself to more important tasks. He’s also applying Power Automate to other processes at Worten and saving his colleagues precious amounts of time.
“It was a drastic reduction. Now we just check if the email went out and if everything is ok.”
– Paula Paulino, Digital Transformation Manager, Worten
Technologies used:
