Overview
Power App Inventory & Warehouse is a warehouse and inventory management application built on Microsoft Power Apps for a building materials distributor with 4 large warehouses across southern Vietnam. The app runs on tablets and smartphones carried by warehouse staff, integrating barcode and QR code scanning to carry out goods receiving and dispatch operations quickly and accurately.
Before deployment, the company managed warehouse operations with manual record books and Excel files — resulting in inaccurate stock counts, undetected missing goods, and no ability to know real-time stock levels at any specific warehouse location.
The Challenge
Warehouse staff are not technology-savvy — the app had to be extremely simple, intuitive, and work reliably even with poor network connectivity inside warehouses where thick walls and dense metal shelving block WiFi signals.
The business challenge: building materials have complex unit-of-measure combinations (sheets, sets, kg, m², m³), many products have similar codes that are easy to confuse, and batch tracking is required to trace items back to their source delivery in case of quality complaints.
Our Solution
Ventra Rocket built the Power Apps application with an offline-first architecture: all goods receiving and dispatch operations function completely offline and sync to Dataverse when connectivity is available — staff are never interrupted regardless of network stability.
Native barcode scanner integration within Power Apps allows scanning EAN/QR codes directly through the phone camera without specialist scanning hardware — a significant cost saving compared to traditional warehouse management systems.
Power BI connected directly to Dataverse provides a real-time management dashboard: inventory by location, incoming/outgoing velocity by product, low-stock alerts, and slow-moving inventory reports.
Key Features
- Barcode-driven Receiving: Scanning a barcode on arrival auto-fills all product information; quantities are entered via a large numeric keypad optimized for touchscreen use.
- Pick & Pack Workflow: Guides warehouse staff along the optimal picking route through the warehouse, requiring a barcode scan confirmation for each item before packing.
- Batch & Serial Tracking: Tracks goods by inbound batch and serial number, enabling full traceability from customer complaint back to the original inbound delivery.
- Inventory Alerts: Automatic alerts when stock falls below minimum levels, items approach expiry dates, or a discrepancy is detected between system count and physical count.
- Real-time Power BI Dashboard: Live inventory dashboard for management: inventory value by warehouse and category, stock turnover rate, and warehouse performance KPIs.
Impact & Results
Inventory accuracy improved from 82% to 95% within 3 months of deployment. Quarterly stock-take time dropped from 3 days to 1 day because system records stay current. The system detected 15 cases of stock discrepancy in the first month — total value exceeding 200 million VND — that would never have been identified under the previous manual process.
Warehouse staff achieved full working proficiency after a single training session — validation of the successful UX design.
Tech Stack Details
Power Apps canvas apps allow fully custom UI tailored to the specific business workflow, unconstrained by pre-built templates. Dataverse as the backend database provides business rules, calculated fields, and rollup fields that automatically maintain running stock totals. Power BI with DirectQuery mode displays real-time data from Dataverse without manual refresh. Power Automate integration sends automated low-stock alerts via Teams and email whenever threshold conditions are triggered.