PlannerBucketOrdersPoc

A proof of concept using a planner board to track order fulfillment by moving tasks through buckets. Currently you can only get notifications in Power Automate on Create and Assigned tasks. We need to notify people as a task changes bucket. Can we use the Graph API to poll the status of the plan (e.g. every 10 mins) and post a message to the team as an order moves state and the next set of people need to act to fulfil the order?

Currently it can be run as a scheduled task on a computer to post a message to the Teams channel when a task changes bucket.

Idea

• Team of people are working on order fulfillment
• Each stage the order moves bucket
  • Open (An order has been placed but cannot be fulfilled. Need to make or acquire more stock)
  • Allocated (Order is ready to be packed)
  • Picked (It is boxed and ready to go. Book courier weights and dimensions)
  • In Transit (Courier has collected goods, record tracking number - microsoft list?)
  • Delivered (Arrived at destination)

Why Planner

• Count of items per bucket and calendar views give good summary of order status (specify due dates, labels)
• Attach an Excel or PDF version of the pick list, packing note, photos of items being packed devilvered collected (attachments all in one place
• Could do with a function to tidy task attachments created with planner UI into an attachments folder, possibly with sub folders
• Planner mobile app can move task between buckets and attach photos / documents and update task
• Can surface the plan in teams for everyone to monitor on the go (e.g. managers) without another app to install

Planned Extensions

• Notify on bucket change
• Different team members are responsible for each bucket. As a task appears in their bucket a teams message appears in their channel as an action
  • Need to identify when a task changes bucket
  • Can use incoming webhook but would prefer bot
• Tidy up attachments
  • Currently attachments are root of document library can we move them to an attachments folder to keep root tidy

Where we have got to

Setup

• Create sandabox instance to play with
• Register an (native) app and get client ID
• Create a team and note the Config.GroupName
• Create a Planner plan for the team and note the Config.PlanName
• Create a channel for the team and register an Incoming Web Hook
• Create an ISecrets implementatoion with app registered ClientID and WebHookURL (not checked in)

What Happens

• Each time the console app is run the plan tasks are captured to a json file as a snapshot
• If there is a previous file the snapshot is compared to the previous file
• If the bucket ID of a task does not match the previous bucket ID a message is posted to
  • the console
  • the webhook (and into Teams!)

ToDo

• Store the snapshot file to the team drive not locally
• Convert the whole thing to a Web API project or Azure function
• Report the changes with an incrementing ID
• Using a polling Power Automate Custom Trigger to spot the new Change ID and trigger a flow
• The flow can be used to
  • Post the teams message
  • Assign to a team member
  • whatever we like
• Tidy attachments to a folder rather than the root of the team (when added via the planner app)

Benefits

• The whole team can see the status of the shipments to send for the week
  • Planner Web. in the scheduled view
  • Planner Web. in the percent complete view
  • Plaaner app on mobile
  • Add the plan to teams
  • Get teams notification on phone when an order changes state!
  • No need to instal another app on phone
  • Managers can monitor shipments