T-Mobile uses RPA in Power Automate to integrate systems during Sprint merger

Technology integration between merging companies can be daunting, particularly with large, well-established firms. In April 2020, T-Mobile—a United States telecommunications company, delivering 4G LTE and 5G networks—completed its $26 billion merger with Sprint, another major United States telecommunications company. Together, the two became the country’s third-largest wireless communications firm.  

Before the merger, T-Mobile had developed an app named Orbit to run a steady stream of overlapping customer initiatives such as device promotions, service offers, new product launches, and other workflows. Each initiative requires a complex, months-long process that involves up to 15 project members, team leads, and executives. The Orbit app, developed with Microsoft Power Platform by Brian Hodel, Principal Developer, Power Platform at T-Mobile, has been instrumental in helping the company stay competitive.  

The Sprint side of the business was using Quickbase for detailed project management aspects such as tracking tasks and timelines. When the merger was finalized and the companies began to integrate their business operations and IT systems, Hodel and his team started designing a way to integrate the Orbit app with Sprint’s legacy system.  

Helping two companies operate as one

Building a complicated integration across two legacy IT systems was no small task. “At first, this was a very manual process,” says Hodel. “We would pull reports, see what's changed, and then go in and either create or update the records of the legacy system. There were data-entry errors and a large time commitment. Unlike most processes that are repetitive, things ended up being batch-inserted. Eventually, updates were only happening once a week. There was a latency of the data, which is really challenging when you have to work on things that are moving as fast as they do in this world.”   

To connect the two systems and eliminate some of the manual steps, Hodel and his team members first attempted to integrate into the APIs of Sprint’s legacy customer initiative and promotion system, Quickbase. There was no technical API documentation available, and the process became overwhelmingly complex. Hodel and his team started looking at other options.  

They had a long history of using Power Automate cloud flows, including within the existing Orbit app, so they decided to try the robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities within Power Automate Desktop. The UI-based approach in RPA turns manual tasks into automated workflows by recording and playing back human-driven interaction with software systems that don’t support API-based automation. “Robotic process automation has solved a ton of problems with our integration with Sprint because we don't have to develop custom APIs. We can use the RPA process to just go right into the system and quickly ramp up a solution without having to worry about the complexities of APIs and authentication,” Hodel says. “Within a very short period, we were able to get the RPA solution working without any training. Using the RPA capabilities in Power Automate was a very natural process.”