Avocados From Mexico revolutionized purchasing workflows for marketing efficiency

Avocados From Mexico (AFM), a non-profit with more than 30 employees in the food sector, was experiencing bottlenecks and inefficiencies in its purchase requisition process, particularly for the marketing team working under tight deadlines. In 2017, AFM adopted SAP Business ByDesign but found the system complex and time-consuming for purchasing specialists. AFM needed a scalable solution to streamline this workflow and provide better visibility and process automation. Lantern, acting as an ad-hoc CIO, implemented Microsoft Power Platform, integrating with SAP for seamless requisition approval and data reconciliation. Dataverse was leveraged for the approvals process while Power BI and Microsoft Fabric were used for analytics and data-driven insights. The transformation enabled faster, mobile, and user-friendly approvals, drastically reducing errors and the workload for purchasing staff. The process time dropped from 15 minutes to less than 1 minute, resulting in monthly savings of 34.5 hours, enhanced visibility, and greater operational efficiency. Teams and Outlook integrations are planned to further improve the workflow. Lantern continues to support AFM with further projects in automation, data analytics, invoice processing, and AI-driven automation initiatives.