Automation Station

 I had 2 recent experiences which I am sure most of us have gone through. We are looking to buy a product, and the vendor is incredibly responsive and helpful during the sales process, and then once the sale is made, they ghost us. I am going to describe these 2 recent cases, and why service is so critical to long lasting relationships, and how Automation can help! Note I am excluding the names of the vendors as I don’t want to publicly call them out. First, I went through a car purchase process, which I think almost everyone would agree is antiquated and we all HATE! The dealer’s goal is to get us into the dealership, where they make us sit for hours so we get to the point where will sign almost anything just to get the heck out of there. This is a tactic that has been used by dealers forever, and sadly many still subscribe to this sales process. I sent emails to several dealers and stated upfront “I bought my last car online and I am NOT coming in there until we have a deal negot...

 This post is part 1 of a series I will be creating to demonstrate an "art of the possible" digital transformation for the used car purchase process. We have all gone through the pain of buying a car, the dealerships still want to get us to come sit in the showroom for hours while the salesperson runs back and forth with offers and counteroffers, the strategy is the longer we sit there, the more uncomfortable we are and more willing to sign a deal just to get out of there! I am going to implement a series of solutions using the  Microsoft Power Platform  to digitally transform this process into an automated series of steps that can be completed online. Here is the  PowerPoint step-by-step , and the  Video of the Automation for Part 1.

 This post will look at an application of using ML and AI to analyze images of Strawberry plants for disease. I live in Florida, and Strawberries, not Oranges, is our #1 crop! Right now this is a very labor intensive process, workers must walk up and down rows of plants looking for diseased or damaged plants. This solution will show how the One Microsoft platform can be used to analyze plant images in real time and determine if a plant is diseased. This could help increase crop yields by greatly decreasing the time and labor needed to analyze the plants, and allow workers to focus on plants they already know have an issue. So the idea for teh solution is that drones or wheeled robots could be used to automatically capture images of plants in the fields, and then those images would be uploaded to Microsoft Onedrive for Business. A scheduled Microsoft Power Automate automated worker would then run and use an Image Classification model to determine which plants need attention, and cou...

 Hello Automation Enthusiasts! My name is John Straumann and I am an Automation Specialist with the Mighty South region here at Microsoft. I used to operate a blog called “The MSCRM Guy” and I’ve been unable to get logged into that one, so I’ve started this new blog! Here is a link to my previous blog: http://mscrmguy.blogspot.com/ So for my first post, I am going to expand on the post I did a few weeks ago where we explored using LOBE, AI Builder, and Power Automate to process COVID vaccination cards sent in via Email: https://powerautomate.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/using-the-power-platform-to-automate-the-classification-and-validation-of-us-vaccination-record-cards/ In this post, we will expand the original automation in a practical example and connect to Microsoft’s Return to Workplace solution built on the Power Platform (note to follow along with the steps you will need to install the RTW solution): https://powerplatform.microsoft.com/en-us/return-to-the-workplace/ The Return t...