One of my best friends, Pat Underwood, is a winemaker. We went to school together in Castlemaine, lived together for several years in Melbourne in our early 20s, and still catch up most months. He has been making wine for about 10 years now, and I am super proud of him. As his friend and ex-housemate, I have been spoiled by his generosity and knowledge, always getting tastes of special bottles and freebies of the wine he makes.

He was complaining that with his current product volume, he didn’t have a solution for managing his inventory and stock movements in and out of his warehouses. He looked at off-the-shelf software, but it was overpriced and feature-bloated. This appears to be a common conundrum for small and medium enterprises that have grown to a size where day-to-day processes can no longer be managed manually, but there isn’t an immediate software product available at an affordable price point.

Little Reddie Warehouse

We helped Pat by quickly developing a responsive, mobile-based, and web-compatible application using the Microsoft Power Apps platform. The app features easy-to-follow controls for stock management and includes only the functionality he needs. It supports administration functions like defining new wines, new locations, and new spaces within those locations to store wines, as well as ledger functions that track stock movements. Plus, since it’s part of the Microsoft ecosystem, it integrates smoothly with his existing business tools and doesn’t cost him any licensing fees.

On the backend, the app uses a STAR data model to organize information. Pat can query the data in these tables in Excel and use it for all his reporting needs, including informing distributors of stock availability, responding to personal sales requests, tracking how much wine he gives as gifts, tracking stock loss, and handling tax time obligations. He now has an accurate understanding of current stock levels and locations and a mechanism to quickly record all stock movements.

Stock on Hand Screen

Microsoft Power Apps is an amazing platform for rapidly deploying ‘lite’ web and mobile applications. While the platform does have some limitations, if you keep your functional scope and data model complexity reasonable, you can develop custom software quickly that is perfectly suited to your requirements. Additionally, depending on your Microsoft business or enterprise plan, it can likely be developed and used by all your employees with no additional licensing costs.

Home Screen and Ledger Screen

We spent one week developing this application for Pat, including the initial specification, development, and integration into his Microsoft tenant. He has since used the application almost every day to track 50,000+ stock items and hundreds of ledger records. The app will technically last him forever from a data volume capacity perspective.

Check out Pat’s wines at Little Reddie Wine Central Victoria and Patrick Underwood Wines or reach out to us if you need help developing web or mobile apps for your business.

Cheers,

Charlie