Fortune Brands Innovations streamlines their customer experience across brands with Power Pages

Fortune Brands Innovations (FBIN) is a manufacturer of home and security products with over 11,000 employees globally. The company’s growing portfolio of brands includes Moen, House of Rohl, Emtek, Schaub, Aqualisa, Therma-Tru, Larson, Fiberon, Master Lock, SentrySafe, Yale residential and August.

Nilesh Kulkarni works as Vice President, Enterprise Architecture at FBIN. Four years ago, Kulkarni launched a low-code strategy for FBIN on a competitive platform. “Low-code platforms enable rapid application development by allowing developers to use visual interfaces and pre-built components, significantly reducing the time it takes to bring applications to market,” says Kulkarni. He adds, “Pairing low-code and PaaS platforms offers a scalable environment and a flexibility ensuring that applications can grow in line with business demands without requiring significant changes to the underlying infrastructure.”

In mid-2023, the business aimed to deploy an enterprise-wide customer engagement platform, the "Customer Portal," to provide a consistent digital interface across FBIN businesses. Kulkarni’s strategy, centered on low-code and PaaS solutions, was instrumental in guiding the company’s transition to the Power Platform, including the adoption of Dynamics 365 Customer Service.

"What truly attracted us to Power Platform over other low-code solutions was its unified ecosystem. For instance, by utilizing a single database for both our portal and CRM system, we have eliminated the need to duplicate processes across multiple data stores, leading to streamlined operations and enhanced efficiency," says Saurav Bansal, Director, IT at FBIN, who leads execution of FBIN’s low-code development. The tight integration with Power Platform and Azure was another plus, including multiple options to align with other back-end systems.

The integration ecosystem of Power Platform aligned perfectly with the overall objective of the project: to bring together all brands under one portal for a more streamlined customer experience. Many of the company’s wholesale dealers, for example, interacted with multiple FBIN brands—but had to work through a separate portal for each. Similarly, each brand was supported with a separate customer service team.

The unified portal would help solve this problem. What’s more, it would also become a cornerstone of the company’s “One FBIN” strategy, including a shared services model across the many brands in FBIN’s network.

Integrating multiple systems under one portal

The project began with the company’s newly acquired Emtek and Schaub brands. A vendor partner was selected to help with project planning and implementation.

Kulkarni states, "Designing a portal for the entire enterprise that integrates multiple underlaying systems demands a focus on composable design, reusability, scalability and domain driven design. By leveraging software design patterns such as microservices, modular design, and event-driven architecture, we can create a system that not only meets current business needs but is also flexible enough to evolve with future demands, enabling rapid innovation and seamless scaling as the enterprise grows."

First, customer data for multiple order records was migrated to the new Dynamics 365 Customer Service platform using Azure native tools. A new portal was then built on Power platform. Together with Dynamics 365 Customer Service, this portal enables customers to check real-time order status, raise tickets in the CRM system, and view account statements. Integration with the ERP system enables both orders and returns from the portal—which also trigger a case in Dynamics 365 Customer Service that is assigned to a customer service representative (CSR).

The system not only benefits customers but provides CSRs with a more complete, 360-degree view of customers across all brands. On the development side, modular features can be easily composed as needed. Cloud-native architecture provides scalability, reliability, and modern cloud benefits.

The first phase of the project involving the Emtek and Schaub brands took approximately five months to go live. This fast outcome was especially critical as FBIN needed to quickly complete the project to fulfill a transition service agreement as part of the acquisition of the brands. Power Platform was a key driver in meeting this deadline. “Using Power Platform to build out our integrated portal solution helped us go live in less than half the time it would have taken using traditional code,” says Bansal.

Expanding the scope of the portal across brands

Based on the success of the project, work is underway to integrate Yale residential—another brand in the FBIN network—into the portal later this year. With all three brands, it’s expected that over 3,000+ customers will use the portal annually.

Two other brands are set for integration into the portal in 2025 with the goal to add all brands within the FBIN portfolio. As the number of brands in the portal grows, the architecture for integrating the ERP systems behind these brands will prove particularly important. That’s because many of the brands run their own, distinct ERP systems. This includes systems from SAP, PeopleSoft, even custom systems. Using a SQL staging server to structure and move data into Dataverse, the unified portal system operates independently of specific ERP systems, offering greater flexibility for development.

“Our vision for the enterprise is to create a unified, seamless digital experience across all our brands, and the new customer portal is a cornerstone of that strategy. By leveraging the Power Platform, we’ve been able to integrate diverse systems and deliver a scalable, agile solution that not only enhances customer engagement but also supports our broader goals of operational efficiency and innovation. This exemplifies how we can rapidly adapt to changing business needs while ensuring consistency and excellence across our entire organization,” says Samir Shah, Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Fortune Brands Innovations.

Extending the benefits of Power Platform

As FBIN looks to the future, there are plans to add multiple new modules to the system, including product training for customers, easy access to product catalogs and promotions, and a new claim submission system.

The company is also interested in leveraging the AI capabilities of Power Platform. The CSR team is already using the copilot within Dynamics 365 Customer Service to summarize customer cases. Now they want to go further. “We really want to leverage custom AI-driven chatbots for both internal and external self-service and we see the capabilities of Microsoft Copilot Studio as an ideal platform for quickly meeting those needs,” says Bansal.

There are also plans for a customer-facing B2C portal, which will be built using Power Pages with additional integration into other purchasing systems. Meanwhile, FBIN is planning to leverage its success with Power Platform in other areas of the business. To help drive these initiatives, Bansal and his team are planning a Power Platform Center of Excellence to empower both developers and citizen developers.

To learn more about FBIN, follow the company on LinkedIn.