Procurement on Power Platform for a Global Food Retail Group

The client ranks among the largest food retail groups in the world. It is headquartered in the Netherlands and runs centres around the globe. Group-wide, procurement requests went through a model-driven Power App built on Microsoft Dataverse. The app did its job, but it had grown past what it was designed for.

Its users fell into two very different groups. The procurement team lives in the system every day. Everyone else in the business raises a request only occasionally. Yet both sat in the same model-driven app, and both required the same premium licence.

The cost of the old set-up

• Licence spend tied to headcount. Dataverse charges a premium licence for every person using a model-driven app. With many people who only request things occasionally, the bill followed the number of users rather than the value each of them got.
• Worldwide, yet not centralised. Centres across the globe had to work to a single operating model, and the existing set-up could not provide one.
• Controls not enforced. Procurement with no enforced approval chain and no segregation of duties is a weak point in control.
• Management had no clear view. Leaders wanted procurement reports every quarter, half-year and year, filtered to what each level of the organisation may see. No one could produce them cleanly.

Every procurement request in scope now goes through a single system. Centres worldwide share one approval chain and one reporting model.

• One streamlined system with an approval chain for all procurement in scope.
• Segregation of duties applied to approvals and to report access.
• Lower licence costs across Microsoft products. Occasional users go through SharePoint and Power Automate, and premium Dataverse licences are kept for people who need the full app.
• Reports for management every quarter, half-year and year, split by organisational level.
• The client gave positive feedback.
• This page describes scope, not savings. We did not measure time or licence savings. The figures here describe what was built.

A risk that often goes unnoticed

Power Platform projects tend to be designed around function, and the cost only becomes clear later. A model-driven app on Dataverse suits the procurement team well, but it is the wrong licence for a person who files two requests a year. Choosing early which users go into Dataverse and which use forms and flows keeps a global rollout affordable. That choice must be made together with the security model. Otherwise segregation of duties breaks where the two meet.