Build a simple CRM with Power app canvas?

[Anonymous]

Hi,

Our company consist of sales reps, service technicians and helpdesk. Im looking on how we can integrate our systems more since we have one customer database in a CRM system and one customer database in the ERP-system. Between this we have started to use more of the Office 365 enviroment like having tenders, price contracts and vendor documents in Sharepoint/Teams.

Is building a simple CRM app in Power apps recommened? I know that our customer list is very large and because of delegation it could be a issue in the future. Listing documents could be solved be inputing a file path column..

[zmorek]

If my company came to me and suggested we do something like this, I would urge them not to do it. 

I suppose it could work just fine, but then you have to ask yourself if recreating the wheel is both worth the effort, and maintainable. I don't know how many/big is a "very large" customer list, but:

You'd be recreating your CRM and your ERP via O365 webapps; if that's not daunting enough for you, then I suppose you can do it. You can use Power Automate to take care of those repetitive tasks, Power Apps to add/update/delete things, Dataverse/SharePoint to store things... You'd consider next data standardization between the two existing systems, then possibly merging your two customer databases (unless there's a good reason to keep them apart, I suppose). From there, outline how your tables will be setup.

You'd probably need to work way harder than you want to just to get similar functionality of an existing system (not saying that you cannot get the same functionality, just that you'd definitely need to put effort into it).

Then what happens if you leave? Are there multiple people in your company developing this? If there's nobody to maintain it, you could/will cripple the company (e.g. you're out sick, you leave/retire, etc).

Sort of got on a rant, but in my opinion, yes you can do it, but no you probably shouldn't. If anything, consider Power Apps/Automate a supplement to your existing things.

[Anonymous]

Thanks, you make up some good points. The other option would be a new CRM that we are looking into since our current CRM might be difficult to integrate with the ERP. We are looking after a customer support system and that might be another system..Its better to get Dynamics than trying to create it.

[mazwhite]

You can certainly build a CRM with PowerApps, I've seen some basic ones done using just SharePoint as a backend and with some PowerBI reporting added on. But it probably best to go down the model-driven app route, which is basically what Dynamics is. Here is a example of one... i'm pretty sure you can get a logon to see a demo and play with it
https://www.purenetworking.net/powerapps-crm