One application is enough to revolutionize the way a company manages its warehouses, even when it comes to international hubs. This is the case of distribution centers, where any error in communicating accesses can result in delays or, worse, vulnerabilities. Relying on email to manage this complex system is not wise. A more reliable process is needed, able to track every movement with precision. And this is what a customer asked for, to manage access to his Global Distribution Center. Here's how it went.
One of our customers, a company with a network of stores around the world, manages a Global Distribution Center responsible for quality control and physical distribution of products.
Hundreds of people pass through here every day and ensuring access security is a priority. However, the method in use until recently had serious problems.
The old system for communicating access to transport, in fact, took place via e-mail to the guard of the Global Distribution Center. The procedure was poorly automated, unstructured and, as a result, insecure. In addition:
Information on arrivals was then communicated exclusively by email to the guard on duty, who then took care of the manual management of entries and exits.
A method as simple as it is risky.
In fact, this exposed the warehouse to obvious vulnerabilities, given the lack of precise traceability of operations and control to prevent any agreements between guards and external parties, which would have favored unauthorized access.
However, the problem was not only related to safety, but also to efficiency.
The management of appointments was free of automation, fragmented among the numerous emails received daily by the system, with a greater risk of involuntary errors.
Here the company turned to us to replace this antiquated process and implement a solution capable of:
Our challenge consisted both in creating a customized application, equipped with the necessary functionalities to satisfy customer requests, and in redefining the access management process, to make it automated, profiled and protected from internal manipulations. In this sense, an important requirement was to prevent the guards from abusing the new system for illegal purposes.
From the problem of our customer, the “Transport Security” application was born.
Designed to replace the old warehouse access management system, this custom application allows you to organize, track and verify the entries of transporters and visitors. All this, fully responding to the company's requests.
First, the app allows guards to see only today's schedule, so as to eliminate the possibility of agreements for unauthorized entry.
The guards are then left to record within the application the time of arrival and departure of the people who pass through the warehouse, including those who are in charge of transporting goods and those who wish to visit the company offices, verifying their identity.
In terms of efficiency, the new system is based on more modern e-mail technologies to facilitate the duties of guards and control by the company.
For example, we have integrated automations that simplify the tracking of recurring events: through the use of dedicated fields, the user can indicate that a specific person will show up on a given day for the duration of a specific period of time (week, month or year).
All this was possible thanks to the integration of:
We have already mentioned the type of automations implemented starting with Power Automate; so let's see the features of Power Apps and SharePoint that led to the creation of Transport Security.
With the term “Canvas App” we refer to one of the main development models offered by Microsoft Power Apps, together with the Model-Driven Apps.
In fact, when we talk about Canvas App, we mean a type of application that allows developers to freely design the user interface starting from a 'blank canvas' (hence, the term 'canvas').
This mode allows you to arrange controls, buttons, forms and fields to fill in in a completely personalized way, giving shape to an application that responds exactly to the flows and needs of your interest.
The approach is low-code, designed to accelerate development and allow even those with programming skills that are not too advanced to obtain a good result.
In our case, we chose a Canvas App as a starting point for a very specific reason: we needed maximum flexibility in designing the interface, in order to adapt it to the role of the operators in charge of accessing the warehouse. But not only that.
This flexibility has allowed us to make the user experience extremely intuitive, to support users in the meticulous tracking activity in a fast-paced work environment, such as an international distribution center.
A Canvas App then allows you to connect to different data sources, including:
SharePoint Online was used as the backend of our application, to store in a structured way the data relating to accesses, appointments and identities verified by the guards.
We chose SharePoint both for its capabilities for managing content and information and for the native integration that unites all Microsoft products.
From these integration possibilities, it was possible to implement centralized data management, as well as to automate activities starting from Power Automate.
In the development of our application, SharePoint Online was used as a central database to manage data related to warehouse accesses.
Although SharePoint Online is often associated with the creation of intranet sites, its functionalities make it an extremely valid platform also as a structured archiving system for business applications.
SharePoint lists, in particular, make it possible to organize information according to specific types of data (text, dates, users, attachments, etc.), leading to the creation of secure and intelligent archives, as well as easy to manage even for those who have no particular affinity with technology.
For our project, we used SharePoint lists to:
Another strong point is the granular management of permissions.
With SharePoint, it is in fact possible to define precisely who can view, modify or approve archived content. In this way, we were able to guarantee the guards access only to the information necessary to carry out their tasks, without the possibility of interfering with sensitive or historicized data.
A feature, therefore, that has made our system more robust from the point of view of internal security, one of the main objectives of the project.
Added to all this is the integration with Power Apps and Power Automate.
Being part of the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, SharePoint can communicate natively (i.e., without technical interventions) with the other technologies in the suite.
As a result, we were able to reduce development time, avoiding the integration or configuration of external connectors to automate access control within our application.
Finally, SharePoint Online is a cloud managed service by Microsoft.
What does it mean? In short:
It was thus possible to offer the customer a scalable, reliable and immediately operational solution, without introducing complexity in terms of infrastructure.
Transport Security is being adopted by the customer.
This section will therefore be updated as soon as the rollout phase is over and we have collected the first feedback on our solution.
However, we expect to achieve the following results:
The Modern Apps team responds swiftly to IT needs where software development is the core component, including solutions that integrate artificial intelligence. The technical staff is trained specifically in delivering software projects based on Microsoft technology stacks and has expertise in managing both agile and long-term projects.
