How Microsoft AI Builder Helped Pepsi Distributor Build an App

Everyone knows that to create sophisticated, workable workplace solutions, you need trained professionals, and a lot of code.

But someone forgot to tell that to the team behind Microsoft’s AI Builder.

AI Builder is a Microsoft Power Platform capability that allows businesses of any size to not only automate time-consuming and tedious processes like inventory control, but to also predict outcomes and launch steps to change those outcomes if necessary. It also provides pretty much anyone who can point and click the ability to build an app like a seasoned software engineer.

At G & J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers Inc., where 1,600 employees produce, bottle, sell and distribute Pepsi products across Ohio and Kentucky, they learned that lesson the easy way. Or, rather, two of their employees did.

As an audience at 2019 Microsoft Inspire learned recently, it took only two G & J employees to put together a system that helps the company track hundreds of products distributed to thousands of customers.

They built this process:

• Snap a picture of an item.
• Using a tool on program, draw a box around it.
• Tag it.

G & J’s program then presents the user with a “confidence” score. This allows you to decide whether additional information might be necessary to effectively identify and track the item and those like it. If so, you can easily add more imaging, and do more tagging – as much as necessary to assure you’ll get the information you need, and that it will be accurate.

Users can customize the App by filtering data and setting scheduling and alerts.

After that, all that’s left is submitting the model to the AI Builder to be published in an App. And that’s quick and easy too, because the program walks users through the steps to put that App onto a mobile device.

And as G & J Pepsi discovered, not only can AI Builder count bottles of soft drinks, it can help users forecast how likely the company is to be able to fill orders on time, based on capacity and past performance. What’s more, if the answer is no, users can trigger a process that will ramp up production to get that order completed on time.

All that, and not a single line of code.

Watch this video to see how G & J Pepsi did it: