Bayer
Digitizing lab and order processes on the Power Platform
An intern and the only developer on a platform nobody in the area knew: I learned Power Apps in a few months and delivered three apps used by everyone from lab chemists to managers and executives.
In 30 seconds
- Intern and sole developer of the apps, on Power Apps, Power Automate and SharePoint.
- Three apps: validated lab data collection, step-by-step order tracking and a Gantt dashboard.
- The daily order update went from about 1 hour to a few minutes.
- When
- Jun 2024 — Jan 2025
- Role
- Power Platform Developer (intern) · solo
- Where
- São José dos Campos plant, where Roundup is made
- Stack
- Power Apps, Power Automate, SharePoint Lists
Context
The plant already had the Power Platform, maintained by an outsourced company, but nobody in the area built apps on it. The teams knew what they needed, not how to build it.
The problem
In the lab, data collection was manual and often wrong, and the data team received unstructured information.
At the same time, a high-cost chemical input went through several stages, from purchase to arrival to renewal, all tracked by hand. No one could say how long each stage took or where the bottleneck was.
My part
I did it all on my own: gathered requirements from the people who would use it, learned the platform and built the three apps.
- Lab data collection, used on the plant's tablets, with validation at input.
- Order tracking: each order moves stage by stage, recording state and dates.
- A dashboard with a Gantt chart showing how long each stage took.
Technical decisions
Validate at input, not later
The problem was bad data, so validation is the core of the collection app: the form on the tablet won't accept what's out of range, and the data team gets everything structured.
An order as a state machine
Every order has fixed stages and only moves from one to the next. Each transition records its date, and that history is what feeds the dashboard, with no extra work from anyone.
Inside the ecosystem that already existed
Data lives in SharePoint Lists and everything runs on Bayer's own Power Platform. No new infrastructure to approve, pay for or maintain.
Managing and viewing in one app
Tracking and the Gantt dashboard live in the same Power Apps app: whoever updates an order and whoever watches the deadlines use the same data.
Architecture
Outcome
Lab collection replaced a manual, error-prone process with a structured flow. Order tracking cut the daily update from about 1 hour to a few minutes, and the Gantt chart helped the team find bottlenecks, and save money as a result.