Automating Supply Chain Workflows: A Dev's Guide

Low-stock reorder alerts sound simple until you try to build them properly — you need real-time inventory visibility, an approval step a human can actually act on, and an audit trail linking the alert back to the eventual purchase order. Here's the pattern we've landed on.

Business Central's API v2.0 exposes the inventory and item endpoints we need with proper OData filtering, so a scheduled Power Automate flow can query for items crossing their reorder point without pulling the entire item table every run.

Credentials for that flow live in Azure Key Vault, referenced by the Power Automate connection rather than hardcoded — a small detail that matters a lot the first time someone needs to rotate a secret without redeploying every flow that used it.

The actual alert lands as a Teams Adaptive Card with Approve/Reject buttons wired back into the flow, so a purchasing manager can action a reorder from their phone, and the resulting purchase order in Business Central carries a note referencing exactly which automated alert triggered it.