Food Manufacturer Migrates 40+ Automations to Power Platform

The Challenge

A Fortune 500 food manufacturer with nearly $9 billion in annual sales, 14,000 employees, and operations spanning a dozen manufacturing plants faced a critical decision about their automation infrastructure.

The company had invested heavily in a legacy automation platform that, while functional, presented growing challenges:

• High licensing costs that escalated annually
• Specialized expertise required for development and maintenance
• Limited visibility into automation performance across the enterprise
• Siloed automations that couldn't easily share data or logic
• Difficulty scaling automation to new use cases and departments
• Vendor lock-in limiting strategic flexibility

With over 40 production automations running critical business processes, the stakes for migration were high. Any disruption could impact manufacturing operations, supply chain, or customer fulfillment.

The Solution

The company undertook a comprehensive migration project to move their entire automation portfolio to Microsoft Power Platform. The project had two major components: migrating existing automations and building a Command Center for centralized management.

Migration Approach

Rather than a risky "big bang" migration, the team adopted a phased approach:

• Assessment: Cataloged all 40+ automations, documenting dependencies, schedules, and business criticality
• Prioritization: Ranked automations by complexity, risk, and business value
• Pilot: Migrated low-risk automations first to build team expertise
• Parallel Running: Ran legacy and new automations side-by-side during transition
• Cutover: Systematically retired legacy automations after validation

Command Center Application

A key innovation was the development of a Command Center application using Power Apps and Power BI. This provides operations teams with:

• Real-time status of all automations across the enterprise
• Centralized logging and error tracking
• Performance metrics and trend analysis
• Alerting for failures or anomalies
• Self-service troubleshooting for common issues

The Results

Democratizing Automation

One of the most significant outcomes has been the democratization of automation development. Previously, only a small team of specialists could build and maintain automations. Now, with Power Platform's low-code capabilities:

• Business analysts can build simple automations independently
• IT focuses on complex integrations and governance
• New automation ideas can be prototyped quickly
• The backlog of automation requests has decreased dramatically

Key Takeaways

• Plan for Visibility: Building the Command Center alongside migration paid dividends in operational efficiency
• Migrate Incrementally: Phased migration reduced risk and allowed the team to build expertise
• Document Everything: Comprehensive documentation of legacy automations was essential for successful migration
• Enable Self-Service: Low-code capabilities unlock value beyond just the migrated automations
• Measure and Monitor: Centralized metrics enable continuous optimization

Technology Stack

• Power Automate: Cloud flows for business process automation
• Power Apps: Command Center application for operations management
• Power BI: Dashboards and reporting for automation metrics
• Dataverse: Centralized logging and configuration storage
• Azure Services: Integration with existing enterprise systems