We all know we are here because we work on something that is related to Nintex Workflow or Forms, and the reason we use Nintex Workflow or Forms is because it makes our life easier. Things have changed a lot these days, trending towards the cloud, hybrid environment becoming very common that most of us are working on both on premise platform and at the same time on the cloud. Regardless of which platform you use, you will find Nintex helps.
Part 1 of GKK Compressor Industry blog series, I am going to share exactly how I use my hybrid environment to save the efforts for my recent investment - GKK Compressor Industry. GKK Compressor Industry is "Lean Manufacturing" produces world class compressors. Moving towards a Six Sigma company, Simplifying Processes and Reduced Errors falls in its Lean Six Sigma project mission to turn the company into highly effective and efficient company.
RFQ (i.e. Request for Quotation) is one of the key Sales and Marketing processes involving its customers. The figure of RFQ to Quotation shown above, demonstrates how Nintex Forms is use allowing customers or internal sales to fill up an RFQ form powered by Nintex Forms. The output of RFQs are Sales Forecast (i.e. use for Production Planning) and Quotations (i.e. issued to customers). The process is simplified at GKK Compressor Industry, Nintex Workflows automates the RFQ process by getting the unit price for the requested compressor models to provide the prices, and it auto generates an Quotation in Excel Format, and finally it updates the Sales Forecast with the quoted Compressor models. The RFQ process not just simplifies the process with reduced steps, it also eliminates potential human errors by auto generating the required quotations.
The quotation generation is done by simply calling a Nintex Workflow Cloud workflow from its RFQ process powered in its Sharepoint environment. It's worth taking a trip to Nintex Workflow Cloud for a quote generation, as we realized it supports OpenApi (i.e. Swagger) by its Xtensions framework. We make use of the Xtensions to include the Microsoft Graph API connectors in Nintex Workflow Cloud helping us to create quotation based on our pre-designed Excel Quotation template, as we only need some functions to create Excel quotation, we brought in only few Excel related end-points of the Microsoft Graph API.
Based on the connectors defined and shown under the Microsoft Graph API - Excel action group, you will notice there is no connector to create or copy excel file, this is because I have made use of Nintex Workflow Cloud's default Sharepoint conector to copy a Excel Quotation Template to a new quotation with the name I provided. The Sharepoint "Copy a file" connector's configuration is shown below.
Once the new file is created/copied from a pre-designed template, what I will need is basically
- "Add table rows" for quotation items
- "Delete table rows" for unwanted rows in the excel table
- "Update a nameditem" for its value
- And so on…
I have attached my swagger file for the Microsoft Graph API - Excel connectors. Few notes to take if you want to implement the Graph API for Excel using the swagger file shared in this blog:
- To enable the connector, you will need to create an Azure Active Directory application (i.e. here Is my previous blog on how to create one https://community.nintex.com/community/tech-blog/blog/2016/10/20/microsoft-graph-api-from-nwc)
- Excel related operation of Microsoft Graph API seems to work only with its "beta" version (i.e. not the "1.0" version) for files resides on Sharepoint library (i.e. I am not sure why and if this is correct, but I only managed to get it work with the "beta" version).
- There are two ways to create the Azure Active Directory app, one via the new Azure Portal, the other using the old portal (i.e. I only got it works with Active Directory app created by the old Azure portal)
