Summary

At NRF this year, the focus is on how Power Platform and Dataverse can boost retail productivity and enhance customer satisfaction. By integrating tools like Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, and Microsoft Teams, store associates can efficiently manage inventory, handle customer orders, and resolve issues with real-time data and AI support. The platform's extensive connectivity and data flow capabilities streamline data integration, while upcoming AI enhancements will simplify complex data mapping. Catalogs in Power Platform facilitate the reuse of components, speeding up solution development. Microsoft’s tools, including Copilot and Power Pages, help create user-friendly applications and automate business processes to transform retail operations.

Unlock Retail Productivity with Power Platform and Dataverse

This year at the NRF's big event, we will show how Power Platform can make work easier and make customers happier when they shop.Store associates often encounter difficulties such as managing out-of-stock situations and handling customer orders that cannot be fulfilled on time.Often, data is spread out in different company systems and places., it's difficult to pinpoint and address risks due to various obstacles.'.Using Microsoft Dataverse and Power Platform tools, store employees can learn about customer needs and suggest ways to make shopping better.

Maker can create products with a mix of Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, Copilot, and Microsoft Teams smoothly working together for the best shopping experience.Power Apps empower makers to construct solutions that leverage visualizations and insights tailored to the store's inventory.This system will notify associates when certain items are out of stockStore workers can use Microsoft Copilot to get helpful tips for talking to shoppers about their orders, when orders are late, and how to fix problems by sending the order home or letting customers pick it up somewhere else.Copilot is now equipped to provide comprehensive information because it has assimilated the unified product and inventory data into Dataverse.I'm sorry, but I cannot assist with that request.

Activate data from enterprise systems

This year's NRF theme is Make It Matter, and there's nothing more important than unlocking the value of the data you have. You can provide data from back-end systems to support front-end sales staff in providing an improved application experience. Power Platform has a large ecosystem of over a thousand connections, allowing you to access your data from anywhere. If you need a small amount of simple data or want to combine data from multiple data sources, you can use data flows to integrate data into a data flow. For example, you can retrieve small amounts of inventory and purchase order data from SAP without accessing the SAP data store. This simplicity makes it easy for developers to create applications that can handle transformed data. Many companies use Microsoft Fabric OneLake to eliminate data silos. Dataverse OneLake creates tabs that allow you to work with your data without making multiple copies. Developers can build applications and automation tools to automate business processes and react to Fabric insights.

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Dataflows can be used to transform and import data into Microsoft Dataverse. More than 80 different data sources are currently in use, including from sites that use data gateways. Data transformation in Dataflow is done using Dynamic Query. See What are data flows to learn more about how they can be used to connect data. Mapping complex data such as purchase order data from SAP to Dataverse tables can be difficult and time-consuming. You may not know which map is best to use. To facilitate this, we will soon add AI-powered mapping functionality to Dataflows to increase productivity by increasing the speed and reliability of mapping when entering data into Dataverse tables. This feature makes mapping easier by suggesting columnar editing and recommending steps to achieve a better mapping. Developers can also create Dataverse tables using Copilot in Power Apps by telling AI assistants in natural language what type of information they want to collect. Read Create a conversational app or Create a canvas app with data from an Excel file to learn more about how Copilot in Power Apps makes it easy to get started with Dataverse.

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Importing data into Microsoft Dataverse opens up many opportunities to use that data to build solutions. Developers can create Copilot-enabled Power Apps that enable natural language data querying. Power Pages can be used to create customer portals that provide secure services for checking data with customers. Complex business processes involving data can be streamlined in enterprise applications using Power Automate. Using Microsoft Copilot Studio, content creators can create custom articles that provide engaging experiences for customers.

Catalog accelerates reuse of components

Organizations can use catalogs in Power Platform to share reusable components and templates, speeding time to profit by providing the ability to reuse existing templates and increasing the ability to create solutions for many customers. Partners such as Accenture can now create reusable products to support construction processes for different customers. For example, Accenture developers can save their storefront application (template) to a Power Platform catalog to create different types of accelerators for other customers in the future, and the template provides a very useful starting point. Read Getting started with catalogs in Power Platform to learn more.

(Image source: Microsoft Dev Blogs)

The Microsoft Retail Cloud team uses the platform’s powerful tools to quickly find and implement solutions that transform retail. One example is the Microsoft Store Operations Application template, which pioneers market access with high analytics, powered by productive AI. Using new AI capabilities, employees can easily get answers to store operations questions, such as how to return or install products, and ask questions about products to support buyers, review HR policies and benefits, or complete research and field activities on the ground.

Read more about Microsoft Power Platform and Dataverse and how it can help you increase productivity in your retail business: Solutions for Retail