Client Stories

Dowa Metals & Mining America purchases used auto parts from customers as raw, unprocessed recyclable materials, then processes precious metals like platinum, palladium, and rhodium from them for recycling and reuse. Each lot of materials must be sampled and analyzed, the precious metal content calculated, and the purchase price then determined.

Purchase price varies depending on the precious metal content. Content varies depending on the make and age of the vehicle, so the company provides catalogs to assist in the collecting of recycled materials that they regularly manage and update.

The company wanted a solution that solved four challenges:

• Transactions and information-sharing with customers is done over email, making it time-consuming.
• Customer-provided information is often incomplete, necessitating fact checking, which takes more time.
• Internal information sharing with customers had to be secure.
• The company needed to be able to respond to fluctuating prices of financial products.

The client already had Microsoft 365, so from an installation cost and maintenance perspective, Power Pages’s compatibility with Microsoft 365 made it the most ideal choice.

Power Pages’s ability to create portal pages for sharing data between Microsoft’s cloud-based database, Dataverse, and external parties made it the ideal choice for this project. It also offers vital data sharing controls, restricting sharing destinations and data upload/download permissions to specific users.

Considering the company’s existing Microsoft 365 environment, the short developmental timeframe, and sharing restrictions that kept the client in control, Power Pages was the obvious decision.

There were two known issues that needed to be resolved prior to implementation:

• Price and values of submitted metal materials needed to be displayed according to each customer’s contract
• Time needed to check lots delivered by customers had to be reduced

First, we created a catalog for customers to check data and a portal site to check hedging balances. These values are specific to each customer’s contract, so each had to be able to display figures accordingly. A mechanism for dynamically updating those catalog figures based on the user account logged in was implemented.

Next, we prepared two types of pages for customers. One, to issue a shipping label to be attached to packages of raw materials, and the other to manage the transaction and processing status of the raw materials.

The initial plan was to have the app available for use by the end of 2022. However, we found it unfeasible to complete the entire project with multiple features within this timeframe, so we split the development into two phases to ensure the client’s stated high priority features could be finished in time.

In the first development phase, we focused on building the site to enable catalog browsing and verifying the hedge inventory by the end of the year. In the second phase focused on the QR generator, we developed and installed applications to ensure the publicly available catalog wasn’t affected.

We worked hand in hand with the client in an agile framework, where their feedback was requested and implemented as it was received during development, keeping the entire project moving toward a full launch.

Automating the labeling process, something that used to require email communication with customers, has eliminated this part of the workflow and sped up the workflow.

Reducing the number of processes has also reduced the potential for human error, which has in turn significantly reduced time spent recovering from human error.