Situation

Institute of Sales Activity Statistics is a market research agency with 17 offices in the regions of Kazakhstan. The customer needed to urgently minimize the human error related to data processing and collection from sales outlets from all over Kazakhstan, accelerate the data workflows, improve the quality of reports, and, as a result, speed up the research covering many offices in Kazakhstan.

ISAS chose the Softline team to implement the project.

Solution

After benchmarking products from various vendors before the implementation, the customer's executives chose ISAS Pro 2.0, a system based on Azure and Power Platform services, as the optimal solution. As a result, ISAS has integrated the solution into the workflows of all its offices and projects, taking up 80% of all workloads. The project involved Softline's team of consultants, as well as the customer's own auditors and managers. In the future, the company plans to cover 100% of in-house projects, reduce the associated costs, improve the report and data quality, and increase the turnover in 2021 by 2 times compared to 2020.

Results

Alexander Romanov, ISAS CEO, says: "Softline Kazakhstan employees and specialists have implemented the ISAS Pro 2.0 solution based on Microsoft Azure and Power Platform, which enables us to collect information about the condition of on-shelf goods in retail outlets from all over Kazakhstan. When our field workers visit the points of sale, they take photos of products on the shelves, and then Custom Vision leverages AI to recognize and classify them. The data is then collected in SharePoint Online lists, from where it is further processed by our specialists.

To implement this solution, we did a lot of work to train the model in Custom Vision. Softline used the tools from PowerApps to develop a mobile app that will be used by field workers to collect information. Softline engineers used the Microsoft Power Automate service to streamline the business processes, connecting it to Azure services (e.g., the Custom Vision module mentioned above for image recognition and classification, Azure Blob Storage for image storage, Azure Functions for image processing) and M365 (SharePoint Online) services.

The best thing about this project for us is that we can customize existing apps, create new ones, and integrate them with our services on our own, without involving expensive programmers. It accelerates our processes, makes the business flexible and future-ready."