Global chemical manufacturer streamlines sales processes with Microsoft Power Platform and AI Builder

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.

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.

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.

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.

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