Jump to: Popular categories | Org name (A-Z) | Videos

Featured stories

Accenture Power Platform for 50k newly skilled makers	Pacific Gas and Electric 300+ solutions generate ~$75M in savings annually
Epiq AI-driven employee onboarding automation saves $500k/year	Nsure.com AI & Power Automate cut manual processing time by 60%

Makers in action

Jacqui Peck Audiologist builds apps for HAPEE program	Foyin Olajide-Bello IT Pro creates a community of citizen developers	Rebecca Sackett Citizen developer digitizes manufacturing processes
Lauren Taylor Principal uses Power Apps for reading fluency	Brian Hodel Code-first developer automates complex processes	Martin Lee Dispatcher builds over forty apps

See also

• Champions driving change with Power Platform
• Professional developers using Power Platform

Popular categories

• Generative AI and Copilot – Accelerating development and streamlining processes with generative AI.
• Scale and governance – Organizations with a center of excellence and enterprise-wide adoption.
• SAP + Power Platform – Customers who have built Power Platform solutions integrated with SAP systems.
• Fusion teams – Cross-functional teams collaborating to build impactful solutions.
• By industry – Education, Financial Services, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Media & Communications, Retail, Government, Non-profit, and more.
• By company size – small, medium, and large businesses.
• By scenario category – Assets, Customers, Employees, Products/Services, Supply.
• By maker persona – Citizen development, Pro-devs, IT-Pros, Partners.
• By technologies used – Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Pages, Copilot Studio, Dataverse.

Stories by organization name (A-Z)

Accenture Accenture, a global professional services company, uses Microsoft Power Platform to enable over 700,000 employees to work anytime, anywhere. customer story | case study on Accenture.com | interview on Power CAT Live
ADH Clinic A small business owner went digital, staying open during COVID-19. The solution uses Microsoft Bookings, Forms, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Dataverse. customer story
Ardent Mills Ardent Mills, with over 40 locations specializing in flour, quinoa, and organic & gluten-free products, uses Power Apps solutions daily. They adopted Dataverse to build a paperless, modern mill. customer story
Arm Arm, a leading semiconductor and software design company in Cambridge, England, used the CoE Starter Kit to manage the platform and build a thriving maker community. customer story
Armanino Armanino used Power Apps connected to Azure SQL to build a workspace scheduling solution that helps manage office space for its agile workforce. customer story
Balfour Beatty Balfour Beatty, a leading UK construction contractor, used Power Platform, Dataverse, and Azure services to streamline over 70 legacy documents in their processes for new businesses, bid management, and project delivery. customer story Blackmores A team of full stack developers used Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, along with Microsoft Dataverse, to consolidate and unify several systems. Includes apps for coaching sales staff, managing vendors, and more. customer presentation
Brown-Forman Brown-Forman, with over 150 years of history and brands like Jack Daniel’s, Herradura, and Korbel, used Power Automate’s RPA and connectors to integrate systems like Salesforce, Workday, and Google Workspace, saving thousands of hours in 7 months. customer story
Call2Recycle Call2Recycle, a non-profit, partnered with EFOQUS to digitize sales, finance, and operations using Dynamics 365. They used Power Pages, Power Automate, and Power BI to create an external portal for e-bike retailer enrollment and training. customer story | video
Centrica Centrica, an international energy services company serving millions in the UK, expanded their Power Platform success by investing in Microsoft Dataverse and establishing a Center of Excellence for scalable adoption. customer story
Chevron Chevron has built a scaled up Center of Excellence with robust governance processes enabling hundreds of makers to build thousands of apps. blog | customer presentation | Center of Excellence deep dive
Choice Aviation Choice Aviation Services, a US-based international airline cargo company, used Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI to create a unique logistics system, setting new efficiency standards for the industry. customer story
City of Kobe Built multiple solutions using the entire Power Platform to respond to COVID, providing status on special cash payments and information via chatbots and dashboards. customer story
City of Ottawa City of Ottawa IT used a fusion development approach to deploy chatbots for citizens and employees. Built with Power Virtual Agents, these chatbots integrate with various systems using Power Automate and custom code. customer story | MBAS presentation
Coca-Cola Bottling Company United Power Automate desktop flows were used to automate complex back-end processes for managing vending machines cartridge replacements. customer story | video | MBAS presentation
Custom Air Products and Services A Power Platform solution by citizen developer Rebecca Sackett tracks the entire lifecycle of HVAC units from “cradle to crate” through the manufacturing process. customer story | video | presentation | demo
Cancer Research UK Power Platform, SharePoint Online, and Teams were adopted to accelerate fundraising and advance cancer research. Apps were built for procurement, connecting research teams, and helping patients find matching trials. customer story
Degrees of Change Using Microsoft Power Platform, Dataverse, and generative AI, Degrees of Change, which provides equitable access to education for underrepresented youth, built apps to go paperless, improve application scoring, and serve more students. customer story | video
Ecolab Ecolab leveraged Power Platform integrated with Dynamics 365, Azure, and Microsoft 365 to build “The Hub” – a unified app for managing core sales and service processes. customer story | MBAS presentation
ECS Using Power Automate and AI Builder, a team member at ECS, a professional services organization, automated the extraction of performance data from PDFs and generated Power BI reports, saving the company hundreds of hours of manual labor while delivering innovative solutions to government agencies. customer story
Electrolock Using Power Apps, Power Automate, and Microsoft Dataverse, Electrolock, a premiere provider of insulation products and solutions for the manufacturing industry, partnered with Confluent to build an inventory management solution. customer story
EY Using Power Platform, Dataverse, and Azure, code-first professional developers working in fusion teams built digital solutions that integrate with third-party services. Scenarios include processing emergency loans, managing global employee mobility, transforming an annual salary reviews, and managing quality and risks. story – SAP integration | story – loan processing | story – employee mobility | story – EarnEY | story – customer onboarding | presentation – Assurance Management Tool
FortisAlberta FortisAlberta won a Canadian Safety Technology Award for this Microsoft Power Platform solution. To more efficiently document Injury Prevention Plans (IPPs), they transitioned away from paper forms to using Power Apps and Power BI. Solution built by Fidelity Factory. customer story
G&J Pepsi G&J Pepsi has digitally transformed their organization with Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI, equipping nearly 900 field personnel with mobile apps that have saved the organization over $1.5 million. customer story | video
Giant Eagle Giant Eagle is one of the nation’s largest food, fuel, and pharmacy retailers and distributors. With Microsoft Power Platform, the company has harnessed its innovative spirit to produce solutions that have increased productivity, reduced costs, and made for more engaged team members. customer story
Hanover Insurance Business and IT leaders at Hanover Insurance have partnered closely to automate time consuming manual tasks during the underwriting process. They successfully adopted Power Automate for desktop RPA capabilities and built custom apps using Power Apps to drive rapid automation. customer story | MBAS presentation
Hearing Australia A citizen developer at Hearing Australia, in partnership with the IT team, used Power Apps and Dataverse to streamline how Community Engagement Officers, audiologists, and the operations team collect and track critical program information. customer story | video – fusion team
Hexion Sales staff use a Power Apps canvas app with AI Builder capabilities to scan business cards at events. Data is integrated into Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Dataverse. In addition, 80+ Power Automate flows are used to automate several business processes. customer story
IKEA France The Power Community at IKEA France, with around 1,500 users, has developed 430 apps to meet the needs of its 34 stores and 4 national warehouses. The People & Culture app, accessible to 12,000 employees in France, has replaced paper forms for requests like submitting receipts or changing addresses. customer story (English) | customer story (French)
IKEA Sweden Power Apps apps are used to manage in-store kitchen sales appointments, B2B sales pipeline, and speed up customer support requests. Built by Microsoft Gold Partner Capgemini. customer story
John Cockerill A team of professional developers leveraged the speed of low code development with the rigor of Azure DevOps to develop high quality, enterprise-wide apps. Over 30 Power Platform solutions are used by more than 2,000 daily users. They range from desk space reservation to a time tracking solution with integration into the company’s SAP system. customer story
Johnson Controls Serving four million customers in 150 countries, more than 100,000 Johnson Controls employees create and deploy systems and digital solutions that optimize building performance, safety, sustainability, and comfort. Utilizing Microsoft Power Platform, Johnson Controls is building a new class of training deployment and tracking solutions. customer story
Kao Corporation Kao Corporation used Microsoft Power Platform to create digital solutions for frontline workers across their factories in Japan. A single citizen developer project resulted in an efficiency increase of 480 hours per month. This is one of the 250+ apps in use across ten facilities in Japan. customer story
Kelly Roofing Power Apps mobile app used to capture photos and status updates at job sites. Integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365, Dataverse, SharePoint and Teams. Built by PowerObjects. customer story
Komatsu Australia Komatsu is an industry-leading equipment manufacturer and supplier. They used Power Automate (RPA) and AI Builder to automate a manual invoice fixing process for 52K+ invoices a year. They went from purchasing licenses to deploying the solution in production within a short span of four weeks. They’ve also built an Automation Center of Excellence and a Citizen Developer Program. customer story
Leonard Cheshire Care workers use Power Apps canvas apps and model-driven apps, along with Dynamics 365, to manage health care for people with disabilities. Built by QUANTIQ. customer story | blog series | news article | MBAS presentation
Lerøy Seafood Group Lerøy Seafood Group, the third largest salmon and trout producer globally, purchased 4,000 Premium Power Apps licenses as part of their digitization strategy. Leveraging an automated Center of Excellence, they developed new enterprise applications, saving millions annually in operational costs. customer story
London Heathrow Airport From security guard to IT User Adoption Specialist, Samit Saini has built apps that improve the passenger experience at Heathrow airport. He has trained a community of super users who are now building apps and digitizing business processes at Heathrow. video | customer story
London’s Air Ambulance Charity The life-saving charity treats an average of five patients every day. They partnered with Intelogy to build a suite of checklist apps that have replaced the existing paper-based processes. The solutions use Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI and Dataverse. customer story | video
Mars Mars, Incorporated, is a global manufacturer of confectionery, pet food and food products, and provides animal care services. They automated multiple enterprise IT use cases using Power Automate, such as managing extension approvals, SharePoint site requests and migration of network files. They have over 10K cloud flows and 4K Power Apps solutions. customer story
Metro Bank A Power Apps tablet app connected to Dynamics 365 is used to welcome customers and manage the appointment experience when the visit the bank. Ignite presentation with demo | Forbes article | customer story
Miami Dolphins The Miami Dolphins, well known for football, also own Hard Rock Stadium, which hosts a wide range of sports and entertainment events. To free its service agents from repeatedly answering routine questions, the organization used Power Virtual Agents to build a chatbot that’s now available 24×7 on their web properties. customer story | video
Microsoft Account Planning Global sales and marketing organization digitally transforms the account planning process for thousands of enterprise accounts by using a Power Apps canvas app, Power Automate and Power BI connected to Dataverse. customer story
Microsoft Global Demand Center The Global Demand Center (GDC) is the connected sales and marketing engine that runs all commercial marketing campaigns for the company. In partnership with Accenture and Avanade, they used Power Automate, Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents and Power BI to reinvent operations and recover 25% of capacity and budget. customer story
Microsoft HR Mobile suite of apps deployed to all Microsoft employees for viewing employee news, people profiles, global holidays, reporting vacation time, sending kudos and more. customer story | MBAS presentation | Demos
Microsoft Operations Citizen developers within Microsoft built an “Intelligent Launch Assistant” that lets release managers quickly define the scope of a launch, document change requests, track issues and risks, and more. Intelligent launch assistant
The National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) The National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) transitioned from a time-consuming, Excel-based process to the Patient Access Management System (PAMS) developed by Spanish Point Technologies using Power Platform. Since its 2019 launch, PAMS has managed patient numbers growing from 30,000 to over 160,000, significantly reducing waiting times. customer story
Novo Nordisk The Global Clinical Development department at Novo Nordisk started their Power Platform journey in Dec 2019 with access to premium licenses and the full capabilities of the platform, including Portals. They accelerated adoption during COVID-19, built several applications, and are expanding to other parts of the organization. MBAS presentation
NSure Nsure.com is a proprietary online insurance shopping platform that enables consumers to transparently compare home and auto insurance quotes from more than 50 top-rated insurers and purchase a policy within minutes. A back-end system driven by Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and Azure services automates much of the process. customer story
Office Depot Office depot saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by rapidly creating multiple Power Apps solutions that run embedded in Teams. An example is the Payroll Action Form app that replaced a fax process and resulted in faster and more accurate payments to associates. video
Oslo Agency for Health Oslo Agency for Health is the organization responsible for providing digital services to Oslo’s healthcare sector. Using Power Apps, Dataverse, Power Automate and Power BI, they built 25 apps to support patient-doctor communications, contact tracing, covid-19 test booking, vaccinations and more. In just four months, the number of users went from 30 to 3,000. customer story
Pacific Gas & Electric In less than a year, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) launched its Center of Excellence, scaled it across nine business units, and delivered 132 solutions including an app for tracking equipment shipped to emergency sites, an FAQ chatbot for service desk requests, and unattended bots to help reconcile billing data. customer story
Partners In Health Gift officers use Power Apps to review donations and drive follow up actions. Power BI dashboards are used to gain insights on the donation process. customer story | customer story – Power Automate | MBAS presentation
PayPal PayPal uses Microsoft Teams for employees to collaborate. They’re creating a Power Apps and Power BI solution to manage the list of all portfolios and programs which will be deeply integrated with Teams. customer story
Pinnacle Group Citizen developers built 14+ Power Apps connected to SharePoint to conduct safety audits, centralize profit center listings, manage innovation ideas, and more. customer story | slide deck
Progressive Insurance Professional developers used Power Virtual Agents and fusion development to quickly create the ‘Cloudie’ chatbot. Cloudie is available for use to anyone at the 50,000-plus-employee enterprise to get quick answers for cloud-related queries. This work spurred other teams to create their own intelligent conversation chatbots using a no-code approach. customer story
PwC PwC, a global network of professional services firms, wanted to offer its teams a more convenient way to search for needed content, like strategy presentations and client-related documents, across its repositories. Using Microsoft Power Virtual Agents and Bot Framework Composer, PwC gives even its non-technical team members the ability to easily interact with chatbots that automate the content searching process, improving the speed and accuracy of their results. customer story – PVA | customer story – Power Pages
QuoteWizard QuoteWizard used Microsoft Power Platform and Power Automate to build an automated, AI-powered ticket routing system to match tickets with the right talent at the right time. This has helped the company improve efficiency, hone its competitive edge, and deliver a better employee experience. customer story
R3 Retail Development Family-owned small business now runs their business on Power Platform, offering a customized app for complex project management tasks in retail installation projects. Built by Confluent. customer story | Ignite presentation
Rabobank Rabobank is the second-largest bank in the Netherlands, with more than 40,000 employees in 38 countries. As part of a broad digitization strategy, Rabobank adopted Power Platform to streamline internal processes and today runs more than 2,500 Power Apps and Power Automate solutions. Additionally, they use Power Virtual Agents for a personalized customer support experience, automating 40-50% of customer calls – equivalent to 60,000 to 80,000 calls per month. customer story | customer story – Power Virtual Agents
Reliable Electric Digitization of complex work order estimation process for custom electrical projects in high-end homes. customer story | blog post
Rockwell Automation Rockwell Automation is a world leader in industrial automation and information. Using Power BI and Azure, and the Microsoft modern data warehouse architecture, they created a unified platform for analytics. Their world class BI Center of Excellence with training events and a thriving community has enabled serve-serve BI across the company. customer story
Sandvik Sandvik is a Stockholm-based engineering company that specializes in the development and production of stainless steel and alloys and tools for a wide range of industries. Solutions based on Microsoft Power Platform have been deployed across the company, including an app that has streamlined operations in its Materials Technology division. customer story
Schlumberger Schlumberger has a robust Center of Excellence with hundreds of apps, flows and dashboards built across several business units. The apps are used for managing the response to COVID, tracking fitness activities, managing promotion evaluations, executive feedback, and more. customer story | customer presentation | MBAS presentation | PDF
Seattle Visiting Nurses Association (SVNA) Seattle Visiting Nurses Association transformed their vaccine delivery process so that patients, nursing staff and admin staff could safely deliver flu vaccinations using Microsoft Dataverse, Power Apps, and Power Automate. Built by Signetic. customer story | blog post | Ignite presentation
Shell Shell Global has enabled over 4000 citizen developers through a Center of Expertise and hundreds of distributed DIY coaches, generating business value and culture improvements. Their success can be attributed to governance for use cases, local community cultivation, and committed leadership. Estimated annual savings generated by each app ranges from 35K to 3M USD. customer story | Forrester case study
SNCF SNCF started with a grassroots app development effort and now have hundreds of Power Apps in production. They’ve built a company-wide center of excellence to enable thousands on the Power Platform. customer story | video
Sonae Sonae MC, a company in the Sonae portfolio, is a leader in the food retail sector based in Portugal. Their Workplace Design team used Power Automate to build a solution to enhance their Sonae Contacto Traineeship Programme for attracting, retaining, and onboarding selected candidates. customer story | MBAS presentation
Standard Bank Standard Bank has created a center of excellence focused on Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft 365. Their driving principle –“apps built by business for business”. customer story | MBAS presentation | Ignite demo
Tacoma Public Schools Lauren Taylor, Principal at Manitou Public Elementary used Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI to create solutions for managing student reading assessments, return to school approvals, and more. Apps and dashboards run embedded in Microsoft Teams. Ignite keynote | video | demo
Team Rubicon Team Rubicon uses Power Apps to manage complex operations from reconnaissance of disaster sites to execution of support efforts. They also use Power Apps Portals to recruit and train volunteers. blog post | mechanics demo
Telstra Field technicians and managers use 70+ tools for daily operations. Includes Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI. The Power Platform solutions are led by a citizen developer who is now project owner for the PowerFactory Center of Excellence initiative. customer story | video | MBAS presentation & demo |
T-Mobile Teams and executives track use Power Platform with Microsoft Dataverse to track approvals for all company-wide initiatives. T-Mobile has also setup a community of champions building Power Platform solutions across multiple business units. customer story | customer story – RPA | technical case study | MBAS presentation video
Toyota Toyota has a robust Power Apps center of excellence to enable makers across the organization to build solutions. This includes field engineers using Power Apps and Power Automate to manage approvals. customer story
US Acute Care Solutions The DevOps team at Alteon Health (recently acquired by US Acute Care Solutions (USACS)) used Power Automate for desktop (RPA) to automatically take 20 million medical records each year from a wide variety of providers and process them into a coherent medical history for each patient that can be used for both care history and billing purposes. customer story
University of Oxford The world-renowned university, which teaches 25,000 students every year, has created a range of easy-to-use Power Apps solutions. These includes apps that handle course fees, funding applications, assigning colleges, childcare services for staff, and more. customer story
Virgin Atlantic The IT Lite Team delivers quick wins for business units –apps for managing VIP customers, compliance audits, cargo delivery, and more. Plus, an admin app built in Power Apps to manage the Power Apps footprint in the organization. customer story | video and case study
Western States Caterpillar Western States Caterpillar Equipment Company is an authorized Caterpillar dealer for five mountain states in the United States. Pro-developers in the IT team built mobile Power Apps in collaboration with business teams. The apps are used to manage equipment rentals, sales activities, and more. customer story | MBAS presentation
Westpac Westpac, Australia’s first bank and one of the largest banks in New Zealand, has been using Microsoft Power Platform to help streamline business operations, solve IT issues, and formally support its “citizen developers”. In under two years, they have built about 1,000 apps, which are used by 15,000 people, and IT is building in-house solutions faster with low-code tools than with traditional software development. customer story
ZF Group Hundreds of makers at ZF Group are digitizing excel and paper-based processes with Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI and Dataverse for Teams. Solutions include – performance reviews, turnover tracking, improving teamwork, and more. customer story
Zurich Insurance Zurich Insurance Group (Zurich) is an insurance company based in Zurich, Switzerland. To accelerate digital transformation, drive innovation, and streamline operations across the global enterprise, citizen and pro developers at Zurich have turned to Microsoft Power Platform for business app development, process automation, and more. customer story

Story index

Explore this representative set of curated stories organized by popular categories.

Generative AI and Copilot

Organizations have accelerated their development, streamlined processes and reduced costs using Power Platform’s generative AI capabilities such as Copilot in Power Apps, Copilot in cloud flows, Microsoft Copilot Studio, AI Builder text generation models, and more.

Generative AI and Copilot stories: ABN AMRO | Degrees of Change | ECS | Holland America | Nsure.com | Pacific Gas & Electric | Sentreseau

Scale and governance

Several organizations have built centers of excellence for Power Platform, with hundreds of makers creating apps, flows, dashboards and copilots across the organization. These organizations have used the Center of Excellence Starter Kit along with Managed Environments capabilities in the Power Platform Admin Center to setup robust governance processes and cultivate a thriving community of makers.

CoE stories: Accenture | Arm | Balfour Beatty | Centrica | Chevron | H&M | IKEA France | John Cockerill | Komatsu Australia | Leroy Seafood Group | London Heathrow Airport | Lumen Technologies | Pacific Gas & Electric | Rabobank | Schlumberger | Shell | SNCF | Standard Bank | Telstra | Toyota | Westpac | Woodside | ZF Group | Zurich Insurance

SAP + Power Platform

Organizations are taking advantage of the rich extensibility and connectivity capabilities in Power Platform to build solutions that integrate with their SAP systems.

SAP integration stories: Avocados from Mexico | Coca-Cola Beverages Vietnam | EY – Power Post | EY – Customer onboarding | John Cockerill

Fusion teams

Fusion development teams are defined as “cross-functional teams that use data and technology to achieve business outcomes.” To support organizations that want to deliver low-code apps, automations, and bots faster and more effectively, Microsoft Power Platform offers several capabilities for fusion teams. The following are examples where individuals from a diverse set of backgrounds and roles have collaborated to rapidly build impactful digital solutions for their business.

Fusion team stories: Accenture | Balfour Beatty | City of Ottawa | Coca-Cola Bottling Company United | EY-EarnEY | Hearing Australia  | John Cockerill | Novo Nordisk | Nsure | Oslo Agency for Health Progressive Insurance | Rabobank | Toyota Motor North America | T-Mobile | Western States Caterpillar | Zurich Insurance

Related link: Meet the developers combining Power Platform and Azure to go faster

By industry

By maker persona

Note: “Partner” refers to an implementation partner, systems integrator, or ISV, i.e. a third-party vendor.

By technologies used

Note: Power Apps and Power Automate cloud flows are included in almost all stories in the All Stories section. The ones mentioned below are a curated subset.

Related content

Watch Power Platform customer story videos
Read stories about Power Platform Champions
Read stories about RPA and Power Automate for desktop

The post Microsoft Power Platform Stories appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Let’s meet a few of these developers and look at solutions built using Power Platform along with Azure services.

Quick links: Meet the developers | Meet the organizations | Architecture Examples | Get Involved

Meet the developers

Featured developer: Gini Brandon

Gini Brandon is a Power Platform developer at Nuclear Promise X. “I didn’t really plan to go into or stay with Power Platform when I started,” was her initial sentiment when introduced to low-code. As she learned more and built impactful solutions, she eventually fell in love with what Power Platform enables for everyone, including professional developers like herself. In this video, Gini talks about her journey graduating with a computer science degree, how she’s been able to increase efficiency using Power Platform, why she believes low code is the future of development, and how you can get started.

There are thousands of developers like Gini who have used Microsoft Power Platform in conjunction with code-first development tools and services to build enterprise grade digital solutions. Let’s meet a few of them and get a deep look into some of the solutions.

	Chris Jaques At Western States Caterpillar, Chris used Power Apps with custom connectors to equip field staff with mobile apps that integrate with internal and external systems. Chris has added Power Platform skills to his 20+ years of experience building .NET apps and full stack solutions. “We love where Microsoft is going with ‘low code meets pro dev’.” customer story | MBAS presentation
	Diane Fligiel With a background in software development, Diane has several years of IT experience and is now enabling others in her organization to adopt low-code. “I am interested in finding the best solution to the problem, and using low-code or no-code options can help me find and create solutions quicker. It’s about finding the most efficient solution, and empowering others in the company to do the same.”
	Emil Hovgaard Since 2019, Emil has been the Product Management Leader managing 30+ pro-developers where his team at the EY Nordic Tech Hub created solutions using Power Platform, Azure, and SAP. His team built the solution “PowerPost” which integrates Power Platform with SAP that has led to 30% cost reduction and 95% lead time reduction. customer story | Microsoft Ignite 2022 presentation
	Jeffery Kozera As a Senior Automation Developer at the City of Ottawa IT team, Jeffery has built Power Virtual Agents chatbots, trained citizen developers, and integrated Power Platform solutions with Azure DevOps and external APIs. “We integrated Power Platform with Azure DevOps, which allowed us to do source control, automated pipelines, and release approvals.” customer story | MBAS presentation
	Brian Hodel As a Principal Developer at T-Mobile, Brian has utilized his solution architecture, business analyst, and Lean/Six Sigma skills to develop business critical applications using the entire spectrum of Microsoft Power Platform products. “Microsoft Power Platform gives you access to a set of tools to solve an array of challenges in a variety of ways. It is accessible to everyone, from beginners to pro developers.” customer story | video | MBAS – Power Platform | MBAS – RPA
	Geetha Sivasailam At Artis Consulting, Geetha is a Power Platform Lead with 16+ years of experience delivering cutting-edge business solutions leveraging Custom App Dev implementations, Microsoft Business Applications and various emerging technologies such as Azure services, AI & Analytics. “Microsoft Power Platform offers a rich spectrum of extensibility and integration capabilities that enable organizations to realize ROI faster. It empowers both pro developers and citizen developers to rapidly build applications and deliver solutions to meet business demands.”

Meet the organizations

Organizations around the globe have adopted Microsoft Power Platform along with Azure and Dynamics 365 to build flagship applications and establish centers of excellence to scale adoption and impact of low-code solutions.

	Blackmores A team of full stack developers used Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, along with Microsoft Dataverse, to consolidate and unify several systems. Includes apps for coaching sales staff, managing vendors, and more. customer presentation
	City of Ottawa City of Ottawa IT used a fusion development approach to deploy an external facing chatbot for citizens and an internal chatbot for employees. The chatbot built using Power Virtual Agents uses Power Automate and custom code to integrate with multiple internal and external systems. customer story | MBAS presentation
	Coca-Cola Bottling Company United Power Automate desktop flows were used to automate complex back-end processes for managing vending machines cartridge replacements. customer story | video | MBAS presentation
	Ecolab Ecolab leveraged Power Platform integrated with Dynamics 365, Azure, and Microsoft 365 to build “The Hub” – a unified app for managing core sales and service processes. customer story | MBAS presentation
	EY Complex digital solutions built by code-first professional developers working in fusion teams. They use Power Platform (including Dataverse) along with Azure and integrate with several third-party services. Scenarios include – processing emergency loans for small businesses, managing global employee mobility, transforming an annual salary review process, helping executives manage quality and risks, and more story – SAP integration | story – loan processing | story – employee mobility | story – EarnEY | story – customer onboarding | presentation – Assurance Management Tool
	FortisAlberta FortisAlberta won a Canadian Safety Technology Award for this Microsoft Power Platform solution. To more efficiently document Injury Prevention Plans (IPPs), they transitioned away from paper forms to using Power Apps and Power BI. Solution built by Fidelity Factory. customer story
	G&J Pepsi G&J Pepsi has digitally transformed their organization with Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI, equipping nearly 900 field personnel with mobile apps that have saved the organization over $1.5 million. customer story | video
	IKEA Sweden Power Apps apps are used to manage in-store kitchen sales appointments, B2B sales pipeline, and speed up customer support requests. Built by Microsoft Gold Partner Capgemini. customer story
	NSure Nsure.com is a proprietary online insurance shopping platform that enables consumers to transparently compare home and auto insurance quotes from more than 50 top-rated insurers and purchase a policy within minutes. A back-end system driven by Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and Azure services automates much of the process. The automation has resulted in over 50% of their customers completing their insurance purchasing without having to speak to an agent. customer story
	Rabobank Rabobank is the second-largest bank in the Netherlands, with more than 40,000 employees in 38 countries. As part of a broad digitization strategy, Rabobank adopted Power Platform to streamline internal processes and today runs more than 2,500 Power Apps and Power Automate solutions, built in partnership between code-first and citizen developers. Over 55% of the entire organization uses Power Platform solutions. As one example, a “Reorganization App” built to assist HR and managers has reduced an analysis that used to take three weeks down to three minutes. blog post | customer story | customer story – Power Virtual Agents
	Toyota Toyota has established a center of excellence to enable makers across the organization to build solutions. They’ve extended Power Apps development with Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services and Azure Machine Learning to create an accessory installation app that uses computer vision to look at vehicles and determine whether they are equipped with the appropriate equipment and whether that equipment is in the desired condition. customer story
	Western States Caterpillar Western States Caterpillar Equipment Company is an authorized Caterpillar dealer with seventeen branches in the United States. Pro-developers in the IT team built mobile Power Apps solutions in collaboration with business teams. The apps connect with multiple internal and external systems and are used to manage equipment rentals, sales activities, and more. As a result, rental returns across their $140M fleet of equipment can now be processed and equipment made ready to rent again within a single day. customer story | MBAS presentation

Solution Architecture Examples

These are a few real-world solution architecture examples that show how low-code capabilities in Power Platform are used in conjunction with code-first programming patterns and capabilities in Microsoft Azure.

Rabobank – Scaling adoption across the organization 

Rabobank is the second-largest bank in the Netherlands, with more than 40,000 employees in 38 countries. As part of a broad digitization strategy, Rabobank adopted Power Platform to streamline internal processes and today runs more than 2,500 Power Apps and Power Automate solutions. Power Platform was recently chosen as the default platform for all internal application and business process automation development.

They built a solution called R@app (Reorganization App) that uses Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, SharePoint, Bing Maps, Azure SQL, and Azure Data Factory. It integrates with Workday, the bank’s HR system, and leverages customized Python algorithms.

The solution was delivered right on schedule and performance was even better than expected. To quote the customer, “With our reorganization app (R@pp) built with Power Platform, analysis that used to take three weeks can now be done in three minutes. Better yet, we have achieved a placement accuracy of 99.1%, which is far higher than what we could manage previously.”

For more details: Read the Rabobank story

The business process flow for the bank’s reorganization app called R@pp. 

EY – Loan forgiveness portal

When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States, the government passed the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which included financial support for small businesses. This support was provided under the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP), and it included loans as well as forgiveness on qualified expenses. The scope was huge, and banks had to rapidly respond to manage tens of thousands of applications.

A team of professional developers in the Low Code Services area within the Client Technology division at EY turned to Microsoft Power Platform and Azure and were able to successfully stand up a solution within weeks as opposed to months. The solution that EY created consists primarily of two different applications: a borrower portal using Power Pages, and the lender application using a Power Apps model-driven app. Both interact with the same data that is stored within Dataverse. The solution works seamlessly with multiple third-party services using both prebuilt and custom connectors. This ability was one of the most important aspects of the solution. It’s what enabled the tool to cover the entire application process and submit a complete loan forgiveness application—something other competitors couldn’t match.

For more details: Read the EY-PPP customer story | Watch the EY-PPP presentation | Watch the EY-PPP video

Diagram showing the complete solution architecture, including connectors to multiple services covering user authentication, data verification, and submission.

Blackmores Group – Enabling rapid development of new products

Blackmores Group is a highly regarded Australian health supplement maker. In a field where new product development plays a key role in maintaining market share, time is critical. Blackmores wanted to uncover the insights it needed to hasten product development and costly off-the-shelf options didn’t quite fit the company’s requirements.

The fusion development team at Blackmores designed “Project Lucky” as a central platform that brings together data scattered among 10 siloed business systems. It uses Dataverse as the data repository and incorporates a broad spectrum of Azure services, including Azure Functions to easily connect data sources for easier processing and faster reaction to events. The team uses Azure Data Lake Storage to scale and secure its data lake with encryption at rest and for advanced threat protection. With the Application Insights feature in Azure Monitor, the team gains a rich outlook across applications that accelerates proactive remediation. Blackmores relies on Azure Event Hubs, a fully managed, real-time data ingestion service. A future version will incorporate Azure Machine Learning and other AI capabilities in Azure.

“Our team treats Power Apps and Azure as one platform that we use to build our solutions… Our ability to extend Microsoft Power Platform with Azure gives us the confidence to use it for complex projects like Project Lucky.”

– Tijn Tacke, Head of Business Applications, Blackmores Group

For more details: Read the Blackmores customer story | Watch the Blackmores presentation

Solution architecture diagram for Project Lucky

IKEA Sweden – Reimagining the customer experience

IKEA Sweden partnered with Capgemini, a Microsoft Gold Partner, to build a Dynamics 365 and Power Platform solution for its sales staff to improve the kitchen buying experience for individual customers (B2C) and businesses (B2B). This project enabled tracking of the sales process from the first meeting with the customer to the installation of the kitchen and contributed toward IKEA realizing the vision of having a holistic single view of the customer over the lifetime of their relationship.

The solution architecture includes Dynamics 365 Sales and Power Apps model-driven apps as the front-end experience. Dynamics 365 Field Service is used for scheduling and distributing appointments. Power Automate is used for automatic updates of status fields and sending notifications. All data is stored in Dataverse. Azure Logic Apps is used to email customer meeting summary notes and quotes. Azure functions are used for complex and time-consuming custom business logic. Azure blob storage is used for secure storage of information. Azure Key Vault is used for managing credentials and storing access and security related data in the cloud.

For more details: Read the IKEA Sweden technical case study on the Power Apps blog

Solution architecture diagram for the IKEA Kitchen Tool solution

Western States Caterpillar: Mobile apps for the field

With a thriving rental business across several stores in the United States, Western States Caterpillar turned to Microsoft Power Platform to modernize and transform two critical business processes that were fundamental to their growth:

• Managing the rental return process in a way that reduced turnaround time – “Return to Ready” app
• Enabling sales teams in the field to better understand their prospects and customer spend – “Client Connect” app.

The Strategy & BI Solutions team followed a ‘low-code plus code-first’ development pattern for both their Return to Ready and Client Connect apps. Both apps read equipment and customer spend data from a SQL Server database which is a replication of their Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 ERP data. The retrieve and write of data and events are performed through a Power Platform custom connector which interacts with custom web APIs developed in ASP .NET Core. The two apps have been developed with Power Apps. All pictures taken from the Return to Ready app is handled by an Azure hosted web API that leverages Azure Blob storage. The AI Builder Business Card scanner is used by the Client Connect app to create prospects and contacts easily across all their stores. All information of their rentals and sales created and updated in the apps are surfaced into Power BI reports.

For more details: Read the Western States Caterpillar technical case study on the Power Apps blog

Screenshot of swagger definition file for the custom connector

High level solution architecture that combines low-code and code-first development patterns

Get involved

1. Sign up for the free Power Apps Developer Plan.
2. Enroll in the Cloud Skills Challenge to learn more about low code and fusion team fundamentals and start climbing that leaderboard!
3. Save the #LowCode February page to start your learning on Feb 1, and Subscribe to the blog in your favorite feed reader for updates.

Resources

• Microsoft Power Platform is the best way for teams to build together – blog post with resources
• Pro-dev features and learning paths – E-book | learning path | Build conference session | webinar
• Power Apps developer plan – get started | documentation
• Microsoft Mechanics episode on pro-dev adoption of Power Platform – blog | video
• Low code application development on Azure – landing page | YouTube video playlist | tours
• Power Apps and Microsoft Azure better together – landing page | TEI report | ROI calculator
• POWERful Devs virtual conference and ongoing videos – video series

Watch developers from around world share their perspective on adopting Power Platform to go faster

Related links

100+ Power Platform customer stories

70+ Power Platform customer story videos

The post Meet the developers combining Power Platform and Azure to go faster appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

T-Mobile has seen widespread adoption of Microsoft Power Platform with hundreds of makers building apps and flows across several departments. In this post we’ll take a deep dive look at the “Orbit App” that has saved the company over $4M USD and 97,000 hours. The solution was built by Brian Hodel, a Senior Systems Analyst with a pro-dev background, who has embraced low code and the Power Platform to build complex flagship solutions. Orbit is used by team members, projects leads and executives to approve all new initiatives across the company, such as device promotions, service offers, and more. It uses Power Apps (canvas and model-driven apps), Power Automate, Power BI, Dataverse, and integrates with Microsoft Teams. The app has been running in production since February 2020. The team has been able to support a growth of 150% each year and a total 800% increase in go-to-market initiatives without needing to add additional resources.

In 2021, with the acquisition of Sprint, T-Mobile needed to integrate Orbit with Sprint’s legacy back-end systems. They turned to the robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities in Power Automate to help the two systems operate as one. As a result, they’ve been able to process 11x more requests in real time, improve the overall processing time by 12x and reduce errors from 7% to 0%.
Read the case study here for more details on T-Mobile’s usage of Power Automate, AI Builder and Power Virtual Agents.

3 min video – Orbit app and internal community of makers

Interview with Brian Hodel – expanding Orbit to use Power Automate for desktop, AI Builder, Power Virtual Agents and Process Advisor

Orbit App

Business scenario

For T-Mobile to be competitive and a leader in the telecommunications industry, there are a myriad of customer initiatives that are constantly being run, such as device promotions, service offers, technical initiatives, etc. The complex customer initiatives process, from initial input to final approval takes months to complete and involves anywhere from 5 to 15 employees at every stage. This includes project members, team leads, and executives. The process is owned by the marketing team, but it involves inputs and approvals from almost all business functions such as legal, finance, sales, IT, etc.

Before Microsoft Power Platform

Prior to the Power Platform solution, the initiatives process was not centralized. There was no cohesive way that intakes were inputted or reviewed, and mainly Excel was used to run the process. It was time and labor intensive and cumbersome to review.

Power Platform Solution

After an initial Power Apps pilot using a canvas app connected to SQL, the team decided to rebuild the app using Dataverse. They built a reconstructed Orbit app that had many new features and far surpassed the capabilities of the original SQL-based app. The rebuilt version took advantage of several out of box capabilities Dataverse such as generating declarative UI based on a data model (model-driven app), configuring business process flows, and easily configuring role-based security permissions. The solution has been in production since February 2020 with thousands of customer initiatives being managed in the app, 700 of which were created within the first two months of going live. The solution is available to ~40k users at T-Mobile and has over 250 active users every day. In a single month, there are approximately 400k API calls and 600+ unique active users performing ~150k CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations on production records.

Power Apps canvas app for tracking initiatives and managing multi-stage approval process

So how is Orbit used by project team members? When a project member needs to create a new initiative, such as a promotion for a new device, they go into the app, input the details, and attach all relevant documentation for their team leader to review. The app is also used by T-Mobile executives to review and approve initiatives. The various tabs in the app are used in specific ways by different members of the team. For example, an executive may use the ‘summary’ view to read the comprehensive notes and key stakeholders on the initiative, whereas a project member will use the ‘detail’ tab to input all the details of the initiative. Once the initiative is entered, a series of follow-up actions are triggered based on the type of promotion – e.g. service offers, device promotions, etc. Some of the key functional features of the solution is as follows:

• Managing initiative details: The input forms have built-in smarts, such as dynamically showing fields based on the type of promotion selected and performing input validations for each field.
• Approvals: Once the initiative details are added to Orbit, an approval flow runs and sends an email to the appropriate executive to approve. Executives can view all their pending approvals within the app.
• Viewing and filtering initiatives: All team members can view the full list of initiatives. The list can be filtered based on several fields, such as pending approval, date, project type, etc., as well as free text queries.
• Executive summary: This view is used by executives to get a summary view on the initiative, including the key stakeholders. The page has a toggle that allows executives to make changes depending on their permissions.
• Attachments and document storage: Project members can upload multiple documents as attachments for each initiative. There is built-in logic, so depending on the initiative type, there are placeholders for the appropriate required documents.
• Note taking: During meetings, project members take notes related to specific initiatives – all this information is kept up to date in real-time in a single central location.
• Managing security and team permissions: There is a complex hierarchical permission structure in the back end. Levels of permission vary for different teams, sorted by line of business, role of the individual on the team, etc. For example, most people won’t have access to “dark” records, or some individuals will only have view rights versus edit rights.

Impact and benefits

A summary of the key benefits and impact of the Power Platform solution are as follows:

• One source of truth – a single system where all the data is centralized
• Easy to scale app with data-driven approach – easy to add a new ‘type’ of initiative based on business requirements
• A complex system that is built on low code with a lot of flexibility to make changes
• Permissions are managed at a granular level with the ability to add and remove users as roles are predefined
• Administrators have flexibility to do a lot of custom activities – like custom Power BI reporting, audit logs etc.
• Teams Adaptive cards brings together a news feed and task list into a single place for project members to act on.

Overall, the Orbit app has been a powerful example that brings together the capabilities and extensibility available in the Power Platform to implement a business critical solution, which is used to manage the pipeline for new initiatives and approvals across several departments at T-Mobile. Next, let’s take a deeper look at the technical details of this solution.

Solution architecture and implementation patterns

Orbit has complex capabilities with extensive amounts of data that needed to be entered, reviewed, and analyzed. The team made several architecture and implementation choices to utilize the full spectrum of capabilities of what the Power Platform has to offer.

High level solution architecture of the Orbit solution

Choosing to build Orbit as a canvas app

The executives at T-Mobile were particular about the look and feel of the app – they wanted a T-Mobile branded experience and were particular about various UI elements on the screen – layout, size, etc. For this reason, they chose to build it as a canvas app and put in the extra effort to get pixel perfect control over the UI. At the same time, there are several benefits that come with model-driven apps such as auto-generation of the user interface based on the underlying data model and using business process flows. The subsequent sections below describe how these were incorporated into the holistic solution.

Using Business Process Flows (BPF) in a canvas app

Dataverse provides rich capabilities for managing complex business process flows. This is typically exposed to makers and users within model-driven apps. Since this solution was a canvas app, the team implemented a custom connector to directly interface with the underlying CDS business process flow engine using the CDS APIs. To use render a BPF within Canvas App, T-Mobile tapped into the rich APIs available with CDS. To accomplish that, they created a “codeless” custom connector in which they only defined the Open API spec that lines-up with the underlying CDS API service without building the service itself.
Depending on the type of the initiative and the approvals needed, the appropriate flow path is assigned. For more details, including a downloadable sample template, see this article on using BPF in canvas apps.

Canvas app user interface for the business process flow

Business Process Flow – creating and updating process stages in a no-code editor

Using canvas components

There are shared Power Apps canvas components used throughout the app. This made it easier to repurpose common elements, reducing the overall development time and improving the maintainability of the app. Some examples of components are as follows:

• Top navigation bar with menu options
• Left navigation bar that allows the team members to input and view specifics
• Interface for selecting filters in the main list view
• Form components with built in validation logic

Screenshot showing usage of canvas components

Using Dataverse for attachments

The documents associated with initiative that are tracked in the system are stored in Dataverse. T-Mobile chose Dataverse over other document management solutions because it scales to accommodate large files, and the team wanted to keep everything in one environment. There is also a version control feature – the history of each document is stored, along with the latest version.

Screen used to manage attachments associated with an initiative

Managing user permissions

Dataverse provides a security model that protects data integrity and privacy, and supports efficient data access while providing users with the access only to the appropriate levels of information that is required to do their work. In the case of T-Mobile, the app was used by executives, project managers, and team members, each needing different views over the data given their role. There is a complex hierarchical permission structure in the back end, which makes it easy to add someone because the permissions are pre-defined. They have also leveraged the Teams Channel permissions to manage certain groups of users.

Robust role-based security access – configurable in canvas app using CDS User Security Management APIs

Model-driven app

A model driven app is used by back-end administrators to perform a wide range of additional activities that are not built into the canvas app. This includes – advanced search capabilities, exporting data to Excel, and more. For this target audience, the user interface did not need a high level of branding and layout customization and the model-driven approach worked well to rapidly generate an application with responsive UI.

Power Apps model-driven app used by backend administrators to manage initiatives

Teams integration

The Orbit app is embedded in a Teams tab, along with the associated Power BI reports. A news feed of high visibility changes, such as new submissions or intakes, shows up on the Posts tab. Utilizing Teams allows project members to have a single place to access Orbit related tools and information.

Power Apps and Power BI run embedded within tabs in Microsoft Teams

Teams Adaptive Cards

Utilizing the Adaptive Cards feature in Teams allows project members to have customized news feeds that let them easily find out what is going on with initiatives in a single place. The Adaptive Cards has allowed the business to design custom, interactive cards that can display and gather information related to initiatives in a variety of ways so users can easily identify and interact with initiatives from directly within Teams.

Screenshot of an adaptive card posted in a Teams channel using Power Automate

Power Automate

Power Automate was not only used to send approval notifications but also as a “low code” mechanism to process data on the server-side and return an appropriately formatted data response to Power Apps. In effect, a substitute to building a full fledge API service. In the case of the Business Process Flows, Power Automate was used to orchestrate Approval requests creation and process stage advancement as can be seen in the following flow.

Power BI

Dashboards and reports built using Power BI are used to get detailed analytics and visualization on the progress of initiatives as they progress through the approval pipeline. These reports are also embedded as tabs within Teams.

Power BI dashboard for tracking approvals

Building a community of makers

The sections above provided a deep dive look into one solution. Across T-Mobile, there are several other app makers in different departments that have discovered the Power Platform and are using it to solve business problems. Let’s look at the efforts of one individual, Arturo Silis, who is bringing these individuals together as a community of Power Platform makers.

Arturo Silis has spent twelve years at T-Mobile. His roles have varied from a sim card hardware engineer to a software engineer. He is currently a Principal Systems Architect. The focus of his job is to be the interface between the business and core networks – to gather business requirements from various team members and build a network offer. The first Power Platform solution that Arturo built was used to optimize an old manual process of collecting offer requirements. He used Power Apps to digitize the intake of offer requirements, Power Automate for reviewing offers, and Power BI for progress reports.

This was just the beginning of Arturo’s Power Platform journey. In 2018 he was invited to join the Power Apps Champions community managed by Microsoft, which inspired him to build a similar community within T-Mobile. He was driven by the productivity that could be found when manual processes were automated using Power Apps. Instead of answering one-on-one questions, he decided to build a community and host ongoing monthly learning sessions. There is now a community of 230+ members within T-Mobile that regularly collaborate and share learnings and best practices using SharePoint and Teams. While this is not Arturo’s day job, it is his passion to build this community, that in turn teaches others to use the right tools for the right solutions. Hear more about Arturo’s experience in this Microsoft Business Applications Summit 2020 interview with Dona Sarkar.

Conversation with Brian Hodel on pro-developers adopting low-code

For over 10 years, Brian has worked in process improvement in industries ranging from manufacturing to healthcare. During that time, he realized that the two biggest barriers to change across all industries is people and technology. He says, “people don’t like change and technology is expensive and slow to change.” To address these challenges, he began leveraging the Microsoft 365 suite and built live dashboards and reports to share real-time information with employees and management. This changed their perspective from reactive to proactive, preventing problems before they happened. When he came across Power Apps, he immediately saw the potential to further build on the existing tools, without the large investment that is typically involved with building custom applications.

Skip forward a couple of years, and many custom applications later – Brian has successfully built and deployed a comprehensive project management platform that leverages all of the great features and capabilities that those tools offer. He has also been working with other makers in the organization through one to one sessions, workshops, and demonstrations to build their skillsets and implement best practices. He is currently working with the platform team and T-Mobile IT to deploy the Center of Excellence Starter Kit to give better guidance and resources to makers in the organization.

Here’s Brian’s perspective, in his own words, on building partnerships between pro devs and citizen devs:

What scenarios do you see where citizen developers are likely to call in a pro dev?
“I definitely think a pro-dev should be called, at least for consulting on a build strategy and architecture review, anytime there is an expectation of a large amount of data or a complex data structure. I have seen many times where apps are built on SharePoint where it works fine until they start running into delegation issues and suddenly find out that the whole things needs to be moved into a another platform.”
Do you have any examples of where pro devs call in citizen devs to collaborate on a solution?
“There are times where I just hand off a project to a citizen dev because I feel it is a learning opportunity and/or simple enough that the citizen dev will be able to handle it. Often, especially on teams that are used to building on other tools, they tend to overestimate the complexity of the solution at hand. My background is in process improvement, so I am used to the Six Sigma structure of mentorship and growth. I think that same model applies to this situation as well, where you can have, ideally, defined skill levels that help you to optimize your developer resources, have a structure for learning and growth, and have an established path to find answers to questions.”
How do you see pro dev and citizen dev working together?
On larger projects, I like to separate administrative functions out into other apps, especially if they are stopgap issues, until the new tool can be up and running. I like to use these opportunities to have a citizen dev work alongside me to both have a concept of how the new tool is built, but also to build the smaller solutions that I need for various roles. The nice part of this is that it helps with my bandwidth and gives them an opportunity to have coaching along the way to learn best practices and new methods.

Related links

• T-Mobile’s end to end platform usage – MBAS 2021 session
• T-Mobile usage of Power Automate Desktop (RPA) and Process Advisor
• T-Mobile case study on customers.microsoft.com
• T-Mobile video – Brian Hodel, T-Mobile video – Arturo Silis
• T-Mobile demo in MBAS 2020 session 
• Interview with Arturo Silis in MBAS 2020 session
• Wall Street Journal article on adoption of low code for back to work solutions
• Microsoft Power Platform – Real World Stories

The post T-Mobile saves thousands of hours with Power Platform solution to manage customer initiatives appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We see a champion as someone who has embraced low-code to create change and impact within their organization using Microsoft Power Platform. Below are representative examples of champions from diverse backgrounds, locations, skillsets, and stories. We hope these serve as inspiration in your own journey adopting low-code and Power Platform along with Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365 and Azure.

Bookmark this page, aka.ms/PowerChamps, to stay updated on new champion stories.

For a set of 100+ curated organizational stories, visit our Microsoft Power Platform stories blog post.

Rebecca Sackett

Rebecca is a citizen developer at Custom Air Products & Services (CAPS), an HVAC solutions company based in Houston, Texas. With no prior app development experience, Rebecca taught herself Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI, and digitized the end-to-end quality check (QC) process for HVAC units as they progress through the manufacturing line from ‘cradle to crate’. This process along with several additional processes that were paper based are 100% digital thanks to the 40+ apps and flows developed by Rebecca. “It took about three days and I had my first app. I’m really happy with the end result because within minute of a unit being tested the report is completed and available for all to see without any extra work or steps.” story | video | presentation and demo

Rebecca Sackett, citizen developer at Custom Air Products & Services (CAPS)

Foyin Olajide-Bello

Foyin was an IT Manager at Sterling Bank. With no app development experience, she taught herself how to build apps, flows and dashboards using Microsoft Power Platform. She automated a monthly ATM collation process which previously required complex manual tasks involving several spreadsheets. To enable the wider community to build tech skills for the future, she started a Citizen Developer Academy at the bank, a local user group in Lagos, and an online women-in-tech group called TechStylers. She continues her journey with low-code and digital transformation as a consultant at Avanade. “For me the Power Platform is not just another tool, it is actually a transformational agent.” presentation | video | article on Silicon Republic

Foyin Olajide-Bello, IT Manager at Sterling Bank

Brian Hodel

Brian Hodel is a Senior Systems Analyst with a pro-dev background who embraced low code and the Power Platform to rapidly build complex solutions at T-Mobile. With over 10 years of experience in multiple industries, Brian has steadily widened his adoption of the Power Platform at T-Mobile, where he now builds solutions using the entire breadth of capabilities including Power Apps, Dataverse, RPA capabilities in Power Automate for automating legacy systems, Power Virtual Agents and the newly release Process Advisor. “You can turn your ideas into reality in a surprisingly short amount of time. The platform helps you grow very naturally from simple tasks to more complex concepts. And as you figure out new capabilities, your applications become more sophisticated and advanced. It’s a tremendous learning tool in addition to being a great programming environment.” story | presentation | case study

Brian Hodel, Senior Systems Analyst at T-Mobile

Alan Chai

Alan is a self-taught Power Platform maker who built over hundred apps at Schlumberger and is now leading digital transformation and innovation across Schlumberger with the Power Platform. He’s trained a set of ‘Special Agents’ across the company, initiated an annual global hackathon that draws 2,000+ participants, and brought fun and creativity into scaling up a low-code innovation movement throughout Schlumberger. “Success to enterprise adoption of low code platform is to ignite a culture change and at the same time keep it structured, measurable and data driven.” #LessCodeMorePower episode | story | webinar

Alan Chai

Alan, self-taught Power Platform maker at Schlumberger

Jacqui Peck

Jacqui was a Senior Audiologist who is now working in Hearing Australia’s IT team as a Low-Code Developer and Analyst. She discovered Power Apps while solving problems for Hearing Australia’s ongoing “Hearing Assessment Program—Early Ears” or HAPEE. With the help of Umar Farooq, a code-first developer, she combined her knowledge of the business with Umar’s knowledge of IT systems as part of a fusion team. Both relied on each other’s strengths to build an application on Microsoft Dataverse to support HAPEE. “I really feel businesses using Microsoft Power Platform can leverage the knowledge of the workers and the people who are on the ground. The benefit of this is that we are providing Hearing Australia with a functioning mature product that we know is going to work.” video | case study

Jacqui Peck, Senior Audiologist and member Hearing Australia’s IT team

Lauren Taylor

As an elementary school principal, Lauren wanted to help improve literacy skills for students. Without any formal IT background, she used Microsoft Power Platform to build apps, cloud flows and dashboards for educators to capture and analyze detailed information on student reading levels and manage classroom activities. “My work is hard but being able to get creative, think outside the box, and provide solutions for others for some reason brings me peace!” story | video | Ignite keynote highlight

Lauren Taylor, elementary school principal

Nashwin Kiewitz

Nashwin started his career as a geospatial technician at Eskom, South Africa. He fell in love with Power Platform and used it to build cost-efficient automated solutions for granting building access, fleet management, inspection, managing legal cases, and more. He is proud of the performance app he built that is used by executives to track progress against the company’s vision and goals. Nashwin’s success resulted in him being considered for multiple awards, and his role has progressed from the provincial level to now being an Information Systems Officer at the head office. “Where there’s an opportunity to digitize something, that’s where I come in. I want to be able to solve problems across many divisions, helping improve business processes in HR or finance or engineering, or anywhere else the company needs me.” presentation

Nashwin Kiewitz

Nashwin Kiewitz, geospatial technician at Eskom, South Africa.

Asuka Otani

Asuka Otani started her RPA journey in the HR team for a manufacturing company in Japan, where she found herself spending countless hours performing manual repetitive tasks. Without any prior IT background, she taught herself Power Automate for desktop and automated sending PDF documents to hundreds of customers, retrieving and aggregating data from legacy systems, and more. As her interest and skills advanced, so did her career. After sixteen years in HR, she is now a Technical Evangelist for an IT company, ASAHI Accounting Robot Research Institute, where she works with the customer success team, teaches people how to build RPA automation, and leads webinars. “I was actually surprised myself that I could learn all these RPA techniques in three months . I could transform the company through Power Automate for desktop. Not only did I change that, but it also changed my career journey.” story | interview

Asuka Otani, HR team member for a manufacturing company in Japan

Derek Lichtenwalner

Derek was a brick layer for ten years before joining Nestle Waters as a production operator and then moved to line supervisor. He noticed all the different ways in which employees from line operators to managers were spending time completing paper-based processes and felt there ought to be a better way. He attended an App in a Day training where he learned about the Power Platform tools and went on to become a self-taught Power Apps expert. He has since built over fifteen digital solutions that are used daily at the manufacturing facilities to tag safety issues, conduct daily operational reviews, check-in visitors to the facility, enable leadership to perform shop floor checks, and more. His job title is now Digital Transformation Specialist at BlueTriton. “I see Power Apps as an enabler, that gives us the possibility to create apps and use technology in a way we had never thought possible before.” presentation

Derek Lichtenwalner, Line Supervisor, Nestle Waters

Chris Jaques

Chris is a pro-dev at Western States Caterpillar Equipment Company who has truly embraced low-code as a core component of his software development toolkit. With over twenty years of experience building full stack software solutions, Chris now uses “low-code with pro-dev extensibility” to build mobile Power Apps solutions. He works in close partnership as a ‘fusion team’ with his end users – sales and support staff in the field – to rapidly create and iterate on these solutions. The apps connect to their internal systems and third-party APIs, and are used every day by field staff to manage rental returns, connect with customers, and more. “We love where Microsoft is going with ‘low code meets pro dev’.” story | presentation and demo

Chris Jaques, pro-dev at Western States Caterpillar Equipment Company

Samit Saini

Samit Saini was a security guard at London Heathrow Airport who enjoyed tinkering with technology like Excel and VBA. When he got access to Power Apps, he used it to digitize paper-based processes at Heathrow such as providing translations for common questions asked by international passengers, performing customer experience audits, and supporting passengers with reduced mobility. He transitioned into a permanent role on the IT team, established a CoE, and has been training others and building a community of citizen developers across a wide set of departments. “With Power Apps, it doesn’t matter what your skill levels are. It doesn’t matter what your background is. This will help you open up your mind to new things. It gives you that sense of belief that you can learn anything.” story | video

Samit Saini, security guard at London Heathrow Airport

Bella Chih-Ning

Bella Chih-Ning is an Senior Information Systems and Analytics Manager at a non-profit, Partners in Health (PIH), based in Boston. She was familiar with SQL and analytics tools but had no experience with application development. After attending a local Power Platform App in a Day training, she learned how to build apps and flows and digitized their gift review process. The app is used by gift officers to manage the donation process and Power BI reports to gain rich insights. Bella and her team also use Power Automate to automate travel approvals, manage COVID-19 tracing, and export audit data for wider use. “With Power Automate, we can streamline processes and make data actionable to ultimately enhance decision making and advance PIH’s effort to serve patients and support our community.” story (Power Apps) | story (Power Automate) | presentation

Jim Parker

Jim is a Web and Collaboration Services Manager at Hexion, a global manufacturer of specialty chemicals and performance materials. His team adopted Power Automate and Power Apps starting in 2018. They have over eighty flows running in production for scenarios such as contractor onboarding, user requests for a Microsoft Teams or Office 365 Group, user access to the Dynamics platform, and more. They continue to move additional workloads into Dataverse with Power Apps as the front-end. “Microsoft Power Platform and AI Builder components allowed us to quickly deliver an innovative and well-integrated solution within our Dynamics 365 platform for our marketing and sales business partners. The platform is a game-changer in this new world of rapid app delivery.” story

Tijn Tacke

Tijn leads a fusion team of seasoned code-first developers and business specialists at Blackmores Group. They’ve built elegant and sophisticated Dynamics 365 and Power Platform solutions that are used to run core business processes for sales, operations, vendor management, employee coaching, and more. Their solutions integrate various technologies, such as embedding Power BI and PCF controls into model-driven apps to enrich the user experience and integration with Azure services. Tijn has truly embraced the breadth of pro dev capabilities in Power Platform. “The great thing about Microsoft Power Platform is the wide variety of tools we can use—from no code to pro code.” story | presentation

Jeff Dominick

Jeff is a Manager of Process and Operations Improvement at Patterson Companies. He pioneered the use of Power BI to track and highlight sales statistics, order requests, and more. From here his usage of the Power Platform evolved into developing four core Power Apps that provide access to 22 of the most common internal approval processes. These apps are used by sales and customer service roles to reduce time consuming tasks – they’ve helped save an hour a day of a CSR’s time and enabled 20% increase in sales without requiring additional staffing. “When we started these apps, all of these things were tribal or siloed knowledge on how to do it properly. We now have 200-plus daily logins across the four primary apps. We’ve got almost 800 users, and a tremendous amount of activity—61,000 transactions in the last 18 months. We just tracked our one hundred thousandth login.” story

Sancho Harker

In 2018, Sancho Harker worked as a helpdesk analyst at Pinnacle Group. He was passionate about finding creative ways to optimize processes with a belief that there was always a better way to do something. Inspired by champions who came before him, Sancho used online documentation to learn Power Platform and soon became a one-man app making machine. He built over twenty digital solutions that span health and safety audits, centralizing profit center listings, managing innovation ideas from employees, and more. He is now a consultant at ANS Group in the UK. “With the Power Platform, every day I face a new exciting challenge. I enjoy going to work and solving problems. It’s given me an opportunity to a different career trajectory that I would have never been able to have before.” story | presentation at Scottish Summit

Keith Whatling

Keith went from multimedia geek to bus operator to Power Apps developer to full-time consultant on the Power Platform. At Arriva UK he used Power Apps, Power Automate and Dataverse to automate management of quality processes and respond to issues. Management and staff could stay more connected and continually improve the quality of their operations thanks to the apps and flows built by Keith. Keith’s passion for digital inclusion and helping others led him, along with a few members of the community, to start the #PowerAddicts movement with the motto – ‘We rise by uplifting others’. Keith is now a Solutions Specialist at HSO and continues to play an active role in the Power Platform community. “Power Apps is a tool that democratizes technology, one where the cost of quality apps, processes, and data are in the hands of those that need it, not just those who can afford it.”  video | story | presentation

Ludovic Malondra

Ludovic is a digital transformation leader at SNCF who has been leading the efforts to adopt rapid digital transformation with low-code and expand Power Platform adoption to all 165,000 employees. Under his leadership, SNCF has put in place robust governance processes, a community of thousands of makers from various business units, and a well-structured internal training program, which collectively has resulted in hundreds of Power Platform solutions at the company. “We want to create synergy among groups—including our IT, Digital School, and business units—to let them work in a different way. The fact that we are a large organization meant that we needed to put in place governance and monitoring, giving us a broad view of the adoption of the Microsoft Power Platform.” story | video | case study

Martin Lee

Martin Lee, who got nicknamed the “App Man” by his colleagues, was a dispatcher who learned Power Apps and built over 50 apps within the span of a year for a variety of use cases involving field technicians, call center agents and executive conferences. He won innovation awards while in his role at Autoglass and now continues to build solutions as a full-time Microsoft certified Power Platform consultant at itelligent-i. “What I like about Power Apps is the depth of functionality, and how really easy it is to use. I can build simple apps in less than a day, and it also connects seamlessly with Microsoft infrastructure.” story | Inspire keynote video | case study video

Vanessa Welgemoed

At Standard Bank, Africa’s largest bank in terms of assets, Vanessa Welgemoed was on the team that modified the company’s app-building process. They put in a process to elicit ideas from departments that needed apps. Those who shared these ideas were also invited to learn how to build the apps themselves, so there weren’t reliant on central IT teams for all automation. With this implementation in place, Standard Bank collectively created over 400 Power Apps solutions spread across almost every department in the company. “We sat with the business and within 24 hours we were able to produce the first app and we deployed it within the first week. This truly shows Power Apps can transform the way we do business.” story | presentation | case study

Eric McKinney

At G&J Pepsi, the largest family-owned bottler for Pepsi-Cola products, Eric McKinney was on the IT team managing the company’s migration to the cloud and rolling out services such as Office 365 and Skype. He substituted a paper-based store audit process with Power Apps. With real-time reporting, the company was able to respond much more quickly to issues and reduce errors. On top of that, he used rich Power BI reports to derive insights over the aggregated data such as their top in-store competitors on a per-region basis. Eric went on to build several more solutions and taught others how to build apps and automation. He is now Enterprise Infrastructure Director with a team that leads innovation, cloud platforms, support and cybersecurity and G&J Pepsi’s adoption of Dynamics 365. “When you build these raw, fresh ideas, without the need to manage an underlying core infrastructure, that’s incredible. That’s really empowering as an IT person.” story | video | presentation

The post Meet Power Platform Champions appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Call2Recycle is a non-profit organization operating for over 25 years in the United States with a mission to recycle a range of batteries. By directly serving consumers and more than 200 battery and battery-powered product companies, they help ensure batteries stay out of landfills. The battery world was steady for many years until several years ago when electrification became a focal point for the economy such as electric vehicles, electric bikes etc. Call2Recycle’s previous platform could not keep up with the change in pace for recycling of these newer batteries and to meet the challenges of the present and the future, they invested in a new platform that could grow and manage the challenges at scale.

Call2Recycle worked with EFOQUS, an expert in deploying Dynamics 365 solutions. They initially went live by combining Dynamics 365 Business Central as the ERP solution to manage and automate customer billing, and Dynamics 365 Sales to manage its end-to-end sales processes. All employees now use Dynamics 365 across operations, finance, services and sales, and more. These staff include customer support who track customer history, operations management who oversee fulfillment and materials collection, regional program managers who oversee their leads, and senior leadership who monitors dashboards for organizational health.

Read the Call2Recycle Business Central case study

The next step was for Call2Recycle to enable electric bicycle (e-bike) retailers across the United States by working with the bicycle industry to launch the first industrywide e-bike battery collection and recycling program in the U.S. In this article we look at how EFOQUS helped them extend their existing Dynamics 365 solution architecture by implementing Power Pages to facilitate the enrollment and training of e-bike retailers.

Watch a short video of Call2Recycle’s story

Business scenario and challenge

The increased popularity of e-bikes in the United States introduced a new challenge of how to safely and responsibly recycle e-bike batteries. In an effort to prevent e-bike batteries from ending up in landfills, PeopleForBikes and Call2Recycle created an industry-wide e-bike battery recycling program that was announced towards the end of 2021. Call2Recycle administers the program by providing recycling kits, transportation and logistics, safety materials and rider education. To keep up with this new initiative and accommodate constantly evolving needs of the program, Call2Recycle knew that they needed a system that can scale overtime.

“We needed to invest in a whole new platform, something that could actually grow with us and allow us to meet these challenges at scale.”

– Leo Raudys, CEO, Call2Recycle

How the program works

Overview of the e-bike battery recycling program.

When an e-bike owner’s battery reaches its end-of life, they can visit a participating e-bike retailer who will assess, package, and ship the e-bike battery to recycling facilities. The e-bike battery is sorted and processed to recover usable materials which are used to manufacture new products. Recycling e-bike batteries helps keep the environment, people, and property safe by ensuring those batteries are properly handled and returned to the proper recycling stream rather than ending up in landfills.

Program requirements

Call2Recycle needed a system in place for the program that could handle the following requirements

1. Enrollment of participating e-bike retailers
2. Manage online safety training of the e-bike retailers to identify end-of-life and damaged/defective batteries
3. Provide continuous benefits for the e-bike retailers such as battery collection kits, education materials, and dedicated program support with their e-bike customer success team

Power Pages Solution – E-bike battery recycling program

Call2Recycle continued their partnership with EFOQUS to build an external site using Power Pages. This approach provided built-in integration with Dynamics 365 Sales and allowed them to extend their order and shipment processes within Dynamics 365 Business Central. They also utilized the built-in Power Pages features such as external identity authentication with Azure. The integrated low-code approach enabled them to go from an idea to a live working external site in under four months. This would have taken a lot longer if they had built it as a custom website. The low-code approach has enabled them to rapidly add and change capabilities as the needs of the e-bike battery recycling program continue to evolve. This ability to adapt to the changing needs of battery recycling was important to Call2Recycle’s CEO, Leo Raudys.

“We could be presented with an opportunity to do something new in the battery recycling space that we did not anticipate. Microsoft allows us to pivot seamlessly because it seems like the technology opportunities are endless. This is extremely important because we don’t always know what we’re going to need tomorrow.”

– Leo Raudys, CEO, Call2Recycle

E-bike retailers use Power Pages to invite additional staff to take online training on how to safely pack and ship e-bike batteries, schedule collection of their e-bike batteries, and receive program support. The process works as follows:

1. Enroll online into Call2Recycle’s e-bike battery recycling program.
2. After enrollment, required online training is to be completed by e-bike retailers to determine when a battery reaches end-of-life packaging or damaged/defective packaging.
3. Upon completion of their online training, Call2Recycle automatically ships an end-of-life recycling kit to the e-bike retailers.
4. E-bike retailers can order additional collection kits, schedule shipments of e-bike batteries, and order promotional materials to help educate riders at the time of purchase.

e-bike retailers enroll into e-bike battery recycling program using Power Pages.

Training progress of e-bike retailers are monitored through a Power BI dashboard which surfaces the training history data from Dynamics 365 Sales.

Summary of benefits and impact

With the addition of Power Pages to their existing Dynamics 365 implementation, Call2Recycle now has visibility and management of the participating e-bike retailers. A summary of benefits is as follows:

• Enabled a secure and scalable portal that can be rapidly expanded as requirements for external facing business processes continue to evolve
• Enrollment into the program is available 24/7
• E-bike retailers can monitor their own online training progress
• Over 1,500 e-bike retailers have been enrolled to date with 75% having completed the online training
• Rich insights into the site collection of the participating e-bike retailers

“We entered into this e-bike battery initiative with the bicycle industry in late 2021 and here we are in early 2022 and we’re already rolling out collection sites at thousands of independent bike shops.”

– Leo Raudys, CEO, Call2Recycle

 Solution architecture

Summary of the solution architecture as follows

• Power Pages is the front-end platform for the e-bike retailers to enroll and complete online training for the program, request for recycling kits and receive program support. The built-in Azure Active Directory authentication is used by external e-bike retailers to sign into the portal.
• Power BI dashboard provides greater visibility of the reach of their program across the participating e-bike retailers and performance insights on training progress.
• Power Automate cloud flows manage the record creation and update of e-bike retailers in Dynamics 365 Sales and Dynamics 365 Business Central for their program participation and training.
• Azure Functions is used to retrieve the training data from the online training platform to update Dynamics 365 Sales training history of the e-bike retailers.
• Dynamics 365 Sales is the end-to-end system which manages the enrolment, onboarding, and training history of the e-bike retailers.
• Dynamics 365 Business Central is the end-to-end system which handles the shipping of recycling kits on completion of the online training.

High-level solution architecture of the battery recycling portal with direct integration to Dynamics 365.

How e-bike retailers can enroll into the program to complete online training followed by receiving their first end-of-life recycling kit and dedicated support from Call2Recycle.

This low-code development solution has resulted in Call2Recycle to extend their existing business critical systems by utilizing Power Pages. With the flexibility in adjusting the portal as changes in the program evolve, Call2Recycle can adapt and scale in response to the changes and continue to be leaders in consumer recycling.

“One of the important things for us and for Call2Recycle was making sure that not only did we come up with this solution that fit today, but also something that they could grow with.”

– Lars Agger, Managing Partner, EFOQUS

Looking ahead

With battery technology driving increased demand for diverse battery management solutions, Call2Recycle plans to evolve its online capabilities to support a wide range of industry sectors and customers.

“The Microsoft platform allows us to quickly adapt as we need it – which is critical for our long-term success.”

– Leo Raudys, CEO, Call2Recycle

About the partner

EFOQUS is a Microsoft Partner based in Canada and are experts in deploying Dynamics 365 solutions. They have delivered to customers all over the world and have years of experience in building Dynamics 365 Business Central apps. They have expanded beyond their traditional mindset of building in Dynamics 365 by integrating the Power Platform to offer holistic solutions to their customers. They have recognised that by designing solutions using low-code development with the Power Platform, it amplifies the technological capabilities beyond the internal boundaries of Dynamics 365.

“We have discovered that we can’t just live inside the bubble of Dynamics 365 Business Central, we have the entire big bubble of Microsoft available. We now utilize a lot of the Power Platform components which truly shows the depth and width of the ecosystem.”

– Erik Hougaard, Managing Partner, EFOQUS

Related links

• Case study – Call2Recycle increases organizational efficiency, powers more data-driven operations with Business Central
• Small businesses and nonprofits using Microsoft Power Platform
• Learn more about Power Pages 

The post Call2Recycle manages industrywide e-bike battery recycling program with Power Pages appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

1. Provide training and support to local primary health care professionals and early childhood educators to help detect and prevent avoidable hearing loss.
2. Provide awareness raising activities so that families can identify hearing loss and ear disease early on in their young children and learn practical ways to support their children’s hearing health.
3. Provide diagnostic assessment and clinical services to communities.

These three key objectives help Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities assess and manage ear disease themselves.

Jacqui Peck, an audiologist at Hearing Australia, recognized they needed a system to help Community Engagement Officers and Audiologists collect the information gathered from their community visits for HAPEE. However, the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) team did not have sufficient capacity to build the system, Jacqui took the initiative to find a low-code platform that she could easily learn and self-build the solution. She loved the ease of building Power Apps solutions with Dataverse. By partnering with code-first developers in the ICT team, development best practices were applied. From the development guidance received, Jacqui built two Power Apps model-driven apps, embedded Power BI reports, several Power Automate cloud flows and utilized the built-in Dynamics 365 Apps for phones and Outlook.

The solution is actively used today by more than 100 Community Engagement Officers and Audiologists who are now able to collect and update data from their mobile devices, even when visiting remote communities with no internet coverage.

This article describes how Jacqui adopted Dataverse and Power Apps model-driven app to build a low-code solution for the HAPEE program. This solution later won the Australian Information Industry Association’s ACT Division Government and Public Sector Solution of the Year Award, and over the past year Jacqui’s career has evolved from being an audiologist to a low-code developer and analyst in the ICT team.

Business Challenge

All clinical aspects of Hearing Australia’s services are covered in their current IT systems. HAPEE was a new initiative that required the collection of additional non-clinical information – something that was not easily available in existing systems. As new programs take time to mature, Jacqui had found the information for HAPEE was in a fragmented form for their Community Engagement Officers and Audiologists which caused several issues:

1. It was difficult to circulate their efforts with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to other stakeholders in the program.
2. They lacked access to the most up-to-date information when visiting communities. This includes latest information on the community of their next visit, such as activities that had already taken place and what considerations and customs needed to be followed to provide culturally appropriate services.

These issues were impacting the team as they were spending a lot of time in finding and updating the information. It was labor intensive, and as the program expanded, limitations of the existing systems became more apparent.

Jacqui Peck’s journey adopting low-code

Jacqui has over 13 years of experience in adult rehabilitation and pediatric audiology across Australia and New Zealand. In 2019 Jacqui joined Hearing Australia as a pediatric outreach audiologist for the HAPEE program, visiting remote areas of Australia to work with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to prevent hearing loss in young children.

The HAPEE program was new at the time and Jacqui saw the need for a better way of managing HAPEE’s data and information. Her original idea was to have a paper form where all information needed by Community Engagement Officers and Audiologists was available in one place and could be printed prior to a community visit. However, using manual forms and other data sources such as Excel spreadsheets would still result in duplication of information leading to difficulties in updating and maintaining the information long term. Additionally, it was difficult to know if the information being viewed and acted upon from a paper form was the most up-to date or if there was newer information available.

Jacqui realized she needed a digital solution for HAPEE but their ICT team had no capacity to work on a new project. Determined to come up with a solution, Jacqui explored the Power Platform as a low-code approach to fill the gap – it ticked all the boxes. She learnt everything she could about Power Apps and Dataverse during a 3-month stint in the Australian outback where she was testing ears by day and building apps at night.

With Jacqui’s business knowledge and the ICT team’s code-first development experience, together, as a fusion team, they developed the “HAPEE Operations Hub” solution for Hearing Australia. This reduced dependency on the ICT team for development and accelerated the delivery of a much-needed solution for HAPEE.

“Power Apps really allows us to create our solutions, so building something, rebuilding it, refining it, and getting it up to the minimal viable product point of maturity. And that way, ICT has a really clear idea about working with the product that we already know works.”

– Jacqui Peck, Low-Code Developer and Analyst, Hearing Australia

As a result of Jacqui’s dedication to HAPEE, her willingness to learn new skills and her partnership with the ICT team, Hearing Australia developed a low-code Power Platform solution that is now used by over 100 Community Engagement Officers and Audiologists in the remote communities of Australia. Later in 2021, this solution led to Hearing Australia winning the Australian Capital Territory Government Public Sector Solution of the Year award from the Australian Information Industry Association. Jacqui is now part of the ICT team as a Low-Code Developer and Analyst where she continues to champion building low-code solutions.

HAPEE Power Platform solution

Dataverse as the foundation

After developing a minimum viable product for HAPEE and gaining approval from the ICT team, Jacqui was provided with her own environment to build the next version of the HAPEE solution. Jacqui and the ICT team decided early on to build on Dataverse as the data source. This was important as Jacqui realized using SharePoint or Excel would not be a scalable solution for HAPEE as they grow exponentially. With complex data they needed the ability to see all the links between their data – between the people who work in the community, the community members themselves, the cultural information they need to capture, the site visits, as well as manage and monitor hundreds of items of equipment and people Australia wide. Having a relational database in Dataverse provided a scalable solution and the team were able to gain insights through the built-in dashboards in Power Apps model-driven apps. The capabilities extended further by incorporating Power BI visualizations, using the Dynamics 365 app for phones and the Dynamics 365 App for Outlook.

Solution architecture diagram of the Power Platform HAPEE Operations Hub solution.

HAPEE Operations Hub

This is a Power Apps model-driven app that is the front-end user interface for all Audiologists and Community Engagement Officers. All users can access the app anywhere including remote locations with offline capabilities through an additional offline model-driven app. The records in the app are designed in a way that enables easy visibility into their level of engagement and support with more than 200 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

Hearing Australia can track the capability building of a clinic with the HAPEE Power Apps model-driven app, how well the clinic can support their health workers in providing hearing assessments to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

For visualization of how they’re tracking across the communities, they embedded Power BI reports with Bing Maps in the app. This allows them to see all community visits, including areas which may not have had a lot of activity and thus requires more attention from HAPEE. It also allows the program to track attendance rates to clinics and training. Power Automate acts as the central nervous system to the model-driven app and is used to refresh the dataset to generate the Power BI reports, sync data with a SharePoint Online list for historical data purposes, and automatically update fields with geolocation details. There is work underway to develop automation to notify users when training certificates expire and when equipment needs to be recalibrated.

Embedded Power BI dashboard provides greater visibility of their reach and efforts across the communities.

Community Engagement Officers and Audiologists have benefitted from additional capabilities that come built-in with Dataverse and Power Platform:

• The Dynamics 365 for phones and tablets app enables them to capture information instantly during onsite visits to communities in remote areas.
• The Dynamics 365 App for Outlook enables them to effectively track cases and enquires and received via email communications. The information is directly saved into Dataverse without them needing to leave Outlook.

Left – Dynamics 365 for phones and tablets app, right – Dynamics 365 App for Outlook.

“As an audiologist, I can now be out in the community with no internet and find the most up to date information on my phone or laptop offline. It was a game changer.”

– Jacqui Peck, Low-Code Developer and Analyst, Hearing Australia

Impact and key benefits

Today there are over 100 Community Engagement Officers and Audiologists all over Australia entering and updating the information in the HAPEE apps which will continue to grow and evolve with the program. Some of the key benefits of the HAPEE solution are as follows:

• With Dataverse, Hearing Australia now has a single source of truth for information on their communities, clinics, audiology equipment, and how they are tracking for capability building, training, and awareness raising activities.
• The offline capability of the solution enables Community Engagement Officers or Audiologists to continue to work in remote areas during their community visits.
• Clinical Audiologists have accessible information on the communities they visit, which has improved their ability to provide services in culturally appropriate ways.
• They are able to provide the data required under the reporting requirements of the grant agreement.

Upcoming Power Platform solutions

Hearing Australia Outreach

This is a Power Apps canvas app that Community Engagement Officers and Audiologists can use when visiting communities. It allows them to:

• Search where the community is and access the information on their location.
• View the profile of a community to ensure they are familiar with the cultural customs of the community prior to their visit.
• Access training and resources.
• Capture their awareness training activities during their community visit.

Any information created or updated will be synced back to Dataverse and will be visible in the HAPEE Operations Hub model-driven app by the other users.

Provides access to the cultural information of communities so that Community Engagement Officers and Audiologists can provide culturally appropriate services.

An advantage of the app is that it allows Community Engagement Officers to quickly view the profile of the community prior to their visit and understand the customs and culture of the community. This is really important as every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community in Australia is unique.

HAPEE Equipment Portal

Currently in development is a Power Apps portal that enables Hearing Australia’s HAPEE partners, such as the Department of Health, to monitor and directly update equipment details in the existing Dataverse instance. External partners will be able to see and update the same equipment details as the Community Engagement Officers and Audiologists.

The information accessible through this portal includes:

• Equipment Catalogue: A list of equipment makes and models
• Equipment Units: List and details of individual equipment units/items, who they are allocated to, the condition and calibration status
• Organisations: A list of organisations where HAPEE services are provided, this may include parent organisations and stakeholders

The portal will allow HAPEE partners to collaborate in a secure way and update equipment information used by the program.

By extending the capabilities of the HAPEE program to external users, the portal will help Hearing Australia achieve greater collaboration for the good of the communities serviced Australia wide.

Fusion team development

Having citizen developers like Jacqui collaborate with code-first developers on the ICT team has enabled Hearing Australia to go further in creating solutions that work for their teams. With a small ICT team of code-first developers not familiar with the business knowledge, citizen developers can contribute to the development of enterprise solutions. Apps are developed in greater alignment to the business needs while staying in tune with code-first development practices. The outcome is far greater than working in isolation which is evident from Jacqui’s efforts as a citizen developer working alongside the ICT team.

The partnership worked as follows:

• ICT team provided Jacqui with dedicated environments for development, testing and production usage to ensure the HAPEE apps were properly governed and are in a state where they can be merged into their enterprise solutions.
• Jacqui built the foundations of the apps – tables, columns, forms and focused on the user experience of the interfaces. When she needed further guidance on development best practices, she reached out to the ICT team for assistance.
• Together they worked in collaboration by communicating through Azure DevOps and as a method to track development efforts.

“I can see a future where we will use Jacqui as a role model and do more of this user led innovation. We’re a small ICT team here and the benefit of getting developers across the organization would be fantastic. It’s a great story about using technology to benefit Australians.”

– Mike Brett, Chief Information Officer, Hearing Australia

Looking ahead

The HAPEE apps have shown that through fusion teams, they are able to develop mature and functional apps that can integrate into their core systems by utilizing citizen developers who have strong knowledge of business operations combined with code-first developers to take the apps to the next level and ensure best practices are implemented. They are looking into creating a Centre of Excellence for Hearing Australia to enable fusion team development and achieve more with the Power Platform towards their needs. They also plan on integrating the HAPEE app with Hearing Australia’s core business Dynamics 365 applications FOCUS – Finance, Operations, Clinical and User System.

In the future, Hearing Australia hopes to make information more accessible and relevant to the communities by allowing them to update the information themselves.

“The most exciting thing I think is about being able to have a solution for the audiologists as well as the community engagement officers and it’s really an application that is built for HAPEE – to me that’s really important.”

– Jacqui Peck, Low-Code Developer and Analyst, Hearing Australia

Award acknowledgement

In 2021 Hearing Australia won an Australian Information Industry Association award for the Australian Capital Territory in the Government Public Sector Solution of the Year category. To learn more about the award browse to the Australian Information Industry Association website.

This is a testament to Jacqui’s efforts as a citizen developer and the innovative Power Platform solutions for HAPEE that she developed with guidance from the ICT team.

“Jacqui has pioneered citizen development as a new way of working in Hearing Australia. What we’re seeing is that it really does empower people to solve their problems rather than rely on IT to do it. They can prototype and develop how they would like the application to work. We can then embed it back into our core systems and use it across the enterprise. So for us, it is a new way of working and it’s really exciting.”

– Mike Brett, Chief Information Officer, Hearing Australia

Related links

• Fusion team at Hearing Australia collaborates on Power Apps for the field
• Hearing Australia dials up user-led innovation to support the HAPEE program in regional and outback communities
• From Audiology to Apps: Hearing Australia’s Citizen Developer
• More fusion team Power Platform stories
• Power Platform resources

The post Hearing Australia – Audiologist adopts Microsoft Power Platform to transform hearing loss prevention program appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Deeply rooted in communities throughout North America, Ardent Mills operates in the United States, including Puerto Rico, and Canada, with company headquarters in Denver, Colorado. They employ more than 100 certified millers and support thousands of local jobs that contribute billions of dollars to local economies – helping people, customers, and families everywhere flourish. Ardent Mills is also committed to corporate social responsibility, the quality of life and health for economy, and practice environmental sustainability across their four focus areas of Agriculture, Transportation & Logistics, Procurement, and Operations.

To stay current with the increase in operations and production across their plants in several different countries, their processes needed to be efficient and supported by the technological capabilities available today. This was a priority to ensure their cross-country teams were operating at optimal capacity.

In this article, we shine the spotlight on a long-time employee, Deborah Romero-Reinig, who used Power Apps and Power Platform to improve processes at Ardent Mills and establish reporting capabilities across their plants. Deborah started her Power Apps journey with SharePoint as the primary data source. In preparation towards building a paperless state-of-the-art-mill, she and the team are transitioning to Dataverse as the underlying data platform for all their apps. Following on from Deborah’s success with Power Platform, an internal community of citizen developers has emerged at Ardent Mills which has led to further innovation and an increase in efficiency through low-code digital solutions.

Meet Deborah

Deborah Romero-Reinig started her career at Ardent Mills as a quality manager in the flour milling team. When the company needed an ERP system, they approached Deborah to be the data lead for quality control of their operations and for managing data governance. Her deep knowledge of business operations led to her being approached again, this time as a business analyst. Through her experience working in the plants, she drew on the inefficiencies of several processes and worked towards improving them across the company’s network of facilities.

As a citizen developer with no prior experience in programming or solution design, Deborah built over 6 low code solutions – most of which are used every day in Ardent Mills’ locations spanning across the United States and Canada.

Deborah is now a Business Architect in the IT team at Ardent Mills. She continues to build solutions and helps enable other citizen developers. She also helps prioritize which solutions to digitize using Microsoft Power Platform.

Business scenario and challenge

Ardent Mills runs a companywide check sample program to ensure their equipment is calibrated to support making consistent, high-quality flour. Previously, quality managers used to type this data into Excel forms and email them to Deborah. She then compiled them into a master spreadsheet to do the calculations. This process was time consuming and inefficient for team productivity.

Power Platform Solution – Cross Check app

Deborah began to do some research on what tools exist to help improve the process and stumbled across Power Apps. After watching some online videos and learning more about Power Apps, Deborah recognized the benefits it could have on this time intensive process. Deborah created her first app, known as “Cross Check,” which allows quality managers and lab technicians from the different plants to enter the data directly in the app. This app is currently live across 35 plants and is used monthly by over 70 quality managers, lab technicians, and others, with approximately 170 checks each month.

The Cross Check app used to test the quality of the flour produced

The data collected through the app is stored in SharePoint Online lists. This was a game changer for Deborah as it not only reduced the time spent in reviewing the quality control results from the plants, but also enabled employees to enter the required data within the app rather than a form. Deborah presented this to her business partners, and they too saw the value of the solution and started to look at more capabilities for the app to handle.

Deborah then started to consider reporting on the data collected from the plants. Power BI was a natural fit due to its built-in connection with SharePoint. Power BI reports display the results of the tests. They can be filtered by sample type, month and attributes tested for, such as ash or moisture. The previous Excel calculations are now performed in the Power BI reports, as well. The end-to-end solution using Power Apps, SharePoint and Power BI has enabled the quality managers to have better insights to products produced across their plants.

Power BI report that provides insights into the cross-check results

Summary of impact

The Cross Check app has reduced the time spent on the quality control process. Power Apps helps manage the quality of the data and prevents users from submitting the form unless all data is provided. This helped alleviate some pain points with management of the forms.

Deborah previously spent more time making sure the form was filled out correctly than checking the actual data. Now, the app automatically checks that forms have been filled out correctly.

If plants are late on submitting their forms, Deborah no longer needs to manually update the reports, as Power BI automatically refreshes the data in the background with no human intervention needed.

The up-to-date Power BI reports provide insights into the testing results each month across their plants and over time provide analytics into the history of their quality control.

“You don’t have that stress anymore. The data should be correct the first time because it’s the way the form has been built.”

– Deborah Romero-Reinig, Business Architect, Ardent Mills

Additional apps

Since building her first app in 2017, Deborah’s Power Apps learning has advanced, enabling her to enhance and simplify the Cross Check app and develop several more apps. The Cross Check app took Deborah a month to build, whereas now through time and experience she is able to build apps within a week. To date, four of Deborah’s apps are live and used across Ardent Mills plants in the United States and Canada, ranging anywhere from 10 to over 70 users in each plant. Two additional apps are also ready to be deployed in production once portable devices are available for the team members in the new facility. Below are couple examples of additional apps built by Deborah.

Bulk Carrier Feedback

An app known as “Bulk Carrier Feedback,” was developed for the transportation department where logistics coordinators rate the service received from their transportation vendors. This is required to be filled out each month and a reminder email is sent using Power Automate cloud flows. This feedback is valuable in strengthening their relationships with their carrier partners and allows for open and data driven conversations. The data is surfaced onto Power BI reports for further visibility on the ratings of the transportation vendors.

The transportation department rate the service of transportation vendors in the Bulk Carrier Feedback app

Vehicle Inspection

When a vehicle arrives at a site to be loaded with products, loaders at the plants must inspect the vehicle for food safety, operation safety or any other issues. If the vehicle is clean, and can be safely loaded and sealed, then the vehicle is loaded. If the vehicle does not meet the requirements, the vehicle is rejected, and an Ardent Mills manager needs to be notified.

Deborah built an app known as “Vehicle Inspection” to help manage this process in real-time. Truck drivers sign their initials in the app in acknowledgement of inspections performed. If the truck is rejected, the app immediately sends an email notification to the manager. This saves team members from having to remember to inform the required personnel and managers. Additionally, historic vehicle inspection data is now stored and can be reviewed as needed.

Truck drivers inspect vehicles and managers are notified of the inspection

Inspiring other citizen developers

Despite not having a traditional software development background, Deborah built impactful solutions and went on to share her knowledge with the broader team. Inspired by Deborah’s low-code apps, an internal group of citizen developers formed who, like Deborah, are developing low code solutions with Power Apps and Power BI for their departments or plants. They meet twice a week to provide updates, support each other, and prioritize development of apps.

Ardent Mills currently has a combination of existing enterprise applications and Power Platform solutions. The existing applications include Asset Management for Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management and a ‘homegrown’ system used for scheduling and operations. If there are gaps found in these applications, such as missing functionality or insufficient capture of data, Power Apps is used to fill these gaps. Deborah meets with the team regularly to review their outstanding needs and helps identify when to develop a Power Apps solution and when to add functionality to their existing enterprise applications.

One example is magnet checks associated to equipment. Magnet checks need to be performed daily, sometimes in every shift, and the frequency of checks is important for operations. Even though Asset Management has some capabilities in quality control, it does not have the ability to capture inspections. This type of process and collection of data can be developed in Power Apps.

Advancing app development with Dataverse and AI Builder

 Meet the team

The team that is digitizing the Port Redwing facility

Preparing for the State-of-the-Art Port Redwing Facility

Ardent Mills is building a brand new, state-of-the-art flour mill in Port Redwing, Florida with various technological advances and the ability to grow with their customers. The mill also aims to minimize the use of paper. SharePoint has been the primary data source but with the Port Redwing flour mill underway, and the continued growth of data, Deborah and her team are in progress of shifting to Dataverse. Dataverse will be the data source for new forms being developing for the project which will help Ardent Mills reach their goal of minimizing paper. There are around 100 forms that Deborah and the team want to build as tablet-ready apps so that employees can capture information and complete processes digitally while at the flour mill instead of being desk bound.

Additionally, as their data grows and more apps are developed, Dataverse is seen as being more sustainable for housing their information in the long term due to its feature rich capabilities of role-based security and quick forms. Deborah and her team have already migrated some of the data in the original SharePoint lists to Dataverse with two apps ready to go-live and four other apps still in testing.

One of the apps being built in the new Dataverse is for Pre-Job Hazard Analysis (PJHA) which can range from 20 to 75 users. Depending on the size of the plant, each team member is required to complete at least one analysis per month. The PJHA form is typically completed by all team members and a manager, or a safety leader, enters how many forms they received for that month. The new app will allow for a quick count of how many PJHA’s were performed as well as the ability to see any trends to any safety concerns found during discussions when the PJHA was performed.

Going further with Lobe and AI Builder

Ardent Mills is also exploring the possibility of using Power Platform in their baking lab. After learning about Lobe and AI Builder integration at a webinar session hosted by Microsoft, Deborah recognized the potential impact it can have for their bread making and grain processes.

Exploring the capabilities of Lobe and AI Builder in their baking lab

Deborah is now actively learning about Lobe and AI Builder capabilities and looking forward to using these in the future to enhance quality control and automation capabilities for their bread lines. As a free, easy-to-use app, Lobe will enable Deborah and the Ardent Mills team to build image classification models on their own. They will simply capture images and label them, and Lobe will automatically train a custom machine learning model. The team is currently progressing with a pilot to evaluate using Lobe with AI Builder to train the model in several areas in their baking lab – bread baking and grain grading to detect bread or grains that need to be flagged for further evaluation. Deborah is interested in understanding how easy it is to train the model and the level of accuracy.

Solution architecture

The following is a representation of a common architecture across all the apps developed to date by Deborah and other citizen developers. Power Apps is the primary front-end interface with Power BI used for reporting to provide insights into their data. SharePoint Online was the original data source and with the new state-of-the-art mill underway, Deborah and her team are transitioning to Dataverse which will be the long term data solution for all their apps and Power BI reports.

Solution architecture of the Cross Check app with plans to incorporate Dataverse

Using this common architecture has resulted in solutions that help with productivity and made their business processes more efficient across 35+ facilities in North America.

Looking ahead

Deborah plans to continue working on establishing Dataverse as the core data source for their apps and reports and explore the possibilities with Lobe and AI Builder for quality control in their bread lines. Deborah is also looking into establishing a Power Platform Centre of Excellence as a means of governance for their continued growth in apps built by citizen developers. Deborah and the other citizen developers plan on continuing to add Power Automate cloud flows to their apps for scenarios such as sending a notification when a sifter in their mills need to be inspected and to ensure they’re operating at the required frequency.

“We’re in the process of building more apps with a long list of about 100 different forms. I’m working on the back end as I bring on more citizen developers.”

– Deborah Romero-Reinig, Business Architect, Ardent Mills

Deborah’s advice to other organizations is to embrace low-code and Microsoft Power Platform since it enables subject matter experts in the organization who are deeply familiar with their business processes to create sustainable solutions on their own.

Related links

• Power Platform Stories curated by Power CAT
• Power Platform Centre of Excellence (COE) Starter Kit

The post Ardent Mills uses Microsoft Power Platform to enable a paperless state-of-the-art mill appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

EY is also a global leader in providing digital solutions. Most recently, the EY Nordic Tech Hub team transformed their annual salary review process with Microsoft Power Platform. The solution uses Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, SQL, and is connected to SharePoint online. With this new technology, a process that once took four months, now takes only two.

Power Platform solution – EarnEY

EY Nordics (which includes Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and Finland) conducts annual salary reviews. A project was in-flight for a new global compensation solution to improve the high-volume process; however, it was a few years away from completion. To reduce complexity sooner, EY Nordics leveraged Microsoft Power Platform to rapidly develop an interim, scalable solution within four months. The solution was built by EY Nordic Tech Hub, an internal digital transformation team that defines and develops cutting edge solutions for the Nordic region. Emil Hovgaard, Leader of Nordic Tech Hub, stresses how EarnEY was developed with an agile fusion development approach which incorporated an agile team of Pro Developers, Human Resources, Business Analysists, End-Users and more.

“EarnEY enables our Talent professionals to focus on strategic value – add activities, and not routine administration. This allows our people to do less and be more.”

– Mette Storm, Nordic Chief Operating Officer, EY

Power Apps canvas app provides an overall view of employees with insights on their annual salary reviews

The EarnEY Power Platform solution was used by Service Line Leaders and Compensation Managers to successfully complete salary reviews of all 8,000 employees in EY Nordic. To reduce the high-volume files that would otherwise have been distributed to the different teams involved in the annual salary reviews, files added to SharePoint folders are extracted by Power Automate cloud flows and uploaded into an Azure SQL Database. The information from these tables for the salary reviews is accessible by the Compensation Managers, Country Service Line Leads through a dedicated Power Apps canvas app, known as EarnEY. The Nordic Service Line Leaders also interact with the Power Platform by receiving automated approval requests. A Power BI report was developed to provide visibility of the submissions from the Compensation Managers and an overview on the overall financial consequence. After this process is complete, EY employees are automatically notified on the outcome of their salary review.

Data is retrieved from the salary review files uploaded in SharePoint document libraries. The data is extracted using Power Automate cloud flows and stored in an Azure SQL Database. It is surfaced into the EarnEY app and in a Power BI report for insights on the salary reviews.

As represented in the process flow diagram below, the data is shared with each individual based on their role and access rights. Each has a particular role as follows:

• EY Nordic Reward team – regularly upload Excel files with salary information into SharePoint document libraries
• Compensation Managers – review and enter salary and bonus components for each employee
• Human Resource Business Partners, Country Service Line Leads – review and approve salaries at a country level, track all submissions by the Compensation Manager
• Nordic Service Leads – final approval of salary increases at a service line level

Process flow diagram of the different individuals involved in the annual salary review and how they interact with the Power Platform solution

Summary of benefits and impact

• The team was able to optimize the complex and high-volume process for which the planned solution was still a few years away from being implemented.
• Time to complete the annual salary process was cut in half. It previously took 4 months to complete and is now reduced to 2 months with automated and simplified employee compensation planning.
• Has enabled a secure and scalable centralized platform that can be repurposed for future salary reviews.
• Richer insights into salary reviews with the ability to quickly filter on dimensions such as gender, rank, performance indicators etc.

The rapidly developed EarnEY app enabled a secure and efficient solution to performing the annual salary reviews.

“By investing only four months of development time, we were able to reduce the lead time of a crucial and complex business process by 50%.”

– Emil Hovgaard, Nordic Tech Hub Leader, EY

Looking ahead

The EarnEY solution is one of many innovative ways in which EY Nordic Tech Hub is using Microsoft Power Platform to drive rapid solution development. Another solution to be deployed soon is Project Zilla, a complete reinvention of how a Global Finance function posts journals to its general ledger. Project Zilla is being developed for EY’s own Global Finance function. The solution is built with Power Platform technology and is expected to deliver significant cost savings combined with a ~95% lead time reduction.

“Building a future-ready EY demands deep levels of integration across business-critical systems and processes. By fusing Microsoft’s technologies with EY’s transformation experience, we will continue to alter how work is being done while growing organizational agility.”

– Emil Hovgaard, Nordic Tech Hub Leader, EY

The EY Nordic Tech Hub team behind the EarnEY solution

More Power Platform success stories at EY:

• After digitally transforming and automating HR operations, EY and Microsoft Unified Support reduce manual processes by 70%
• Ernst & Young processes emergency loans for small business using Microsoft Power Platform
• EY teams speeds time to market using Microsoft Power Platform, delights clients with flexible, all-in-one solution
• EY picks Microsoft Power Platform to digitize complex enterprise scenarios

Additional resources:

• More Power Platform Stories
• Power Platform resources

The post EY Nordic Tech Hub transforms annual salary review process with Microsoft Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

With a thriving rental business across several stores, the company looked at how Microsoft Power Platform can improve several core business processes and accelerate the service provided to their customers. Their journey started in 2018 after coming away inspired from an exclusive Microsoft event for Caterpillar dealers. In this episode we look at how they digitized, modernized, and transformed two business processes fundamental to their growth:

1. Reducing the turnaround timeframe of rental returns, and
2. Enabling their sales team out in the field to better understand their prospects and customer spend.

They accomplished this by working as a fusion team using a combination of low-code technologies (Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI) along with “pro-dev” or code-first technologies (ASP.NET Core, Custom connectors, Azure Blob storage, Azure SQL).

Meet the Strategy & BI Solutions Team

The Western States CAT Strategy & BI Solutions team, led by Justin Bailey, Director of Strategy & BI, is tasked with enabling innovation and insight within the business by providing data and application solutions. The team utilizes an agile approach and a variety of Microsoft applications to deliver products and data solutions in alignment with Western States CAT’s corporate strategy. The past year has been a particularly busy and successful year for the team. Despite the COVID-19 pandemic, they collectively delivered 284 products or product feature releases and 884 individual work items for the business.

From left: Chris Jaques, Shayne Ephraim, Justin Bailey, Michael King, Saif Al Mahmud

The Power Platform journey for Western States CAT started in 2017 when Justin attended a meeting of North American CAT dealerships hosted by Microsoft in Redmond, WA. Here, James Phillips and his team presented their vision and plans for the Power Platform. Justin was hooked. He went back, and as a citizen developer with no formal programming background started to build simple Power Apps solutions. He then shared his excitement with Chris Jaques, a code-first developer on their IT team with over twenty years of experience building software solutions using tools such as Visual Studio and .NET. Chris was hesitant at first, but after seeing firsthand what the platform could do and how “whatever they threw at it, they managed to get it working”, he was sold on the idea of expanding his code-first toolbelt to include low-code technologies offered by the Power Platform.

BI Strategy & Solutions team working hand in hand with business teams in the field to test and improve apps

Justin provided input from a low-code perspective on behalf of the business while Chris elevated the apps using code-first approaches. They worked hand in hand with business teams across the stores to get direct feedback on the Power Apps solutions and ensure what they created would be of value and assist the users in their daily operations. As a result, the Strategy & BI team has developed an underlying architecture that all theirs apps follow for a cohesive ‘low code + code-first’ solution design pattern with Microsoft Power Platform.

As a result, with the combination of a strong agile culture, code-first experience, and a drive to deliver results, the Strategy & BI team members have exceeded expectations and have helped changed the digital culture of the organization. This year, the team delivered several critical Power Apps solutions for the business – Store Observation, Return to Ready, and Client Connect. Utilizing APIs, Power Apps and Power BI, the team is working to scale their app and reporting strategy, utilizing the same data connections, reducing redundancy, and streamlining business processes.

The following sections will deep dive into two solutions and the supporting architecture.

Power Platform Solution – Return to Ready

Business scenario

For customer equipment rentals, it is business critical to ensure rental inventory is safe and ready to rent out as soon as possible. This process was called ‘Return to Ready’. To maximize revenue generation, it is important to minimize this turnaround time and have their fleet rented at maximum capacity. Once a machine is returned it must be inspected and serviced, and the rental contract closed to invoice the customer.

The Strategy & BI team was also tasked with measuring and tracking the time intervals from rental call to contract close, as this information was not captured in their ERP system.

Before Power Platform

For years the business had used a manual ticket workflow to manage the return to ready process.  Each of the seventeen stores had a physical notebook at the front desk that was used to organize and prioritize the day. Drivers, service attendants, coordinators, and yard attendants all had to continuously check the notebook for their next priority. This posed several challenges:

• No visibility across the business
• Tracking rental return timeline and accuracy was not possible
• There were rental contract delays when dealing with damaged rentals
• No real dispatch solution for drivers
• No reporting

Solution details

After several weeks of shadowing users in the field and beta testing, their first Power Apps solution was developed using low code and code-first approaches to address the issues previously encountered from their manual ticket workflow. This app became what is known today as the “Return to Ready” app. It allows employees to update the events originally created in their ERP system (Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012) and automatically captures timestamps, which are critical to the business in measuring their turnaround across the stores.

The team applied their code-first knowledge to surface the rental data from their ERP system by creating custom web APIs using ASP.NET Core. Information about the transactions, rental contracts and equipment movement records are all accessible through the custom connector which enables all users across the stores and yards to view their outstanding work items based on their individual role, with Power Apps as the front-end user interface. In larger stores there might be several employees in the same role that share the workflow tasks. They can all easily switch from one role to another within the app itself.

The app provided visibility on the different role-based tasks which improved communication across the team, and reduced redundancy and confusion when returning a rental. Now the rental return team can manage their return tasks with ease thanks to the key features of the app, such as:

• Role level task assignment across their stores
• Damage handling procedure and alerts for returned rental equipment
• Equipment coordinators and drivers have visibility on equipment location status updates
• Drivers use built-in maps to navigate to rental locations
• Yard attendants capture photos of rental equipment before and after a contract – pictures as proof of any damages are captured directly within the app and stored in Azure Blob storage
• Equipment coordinators use an inspection checklist to confirm equipment is compliant before being rented
• Operators can track equipment stats such as odometer readings, fuel consumption, etc.
• Equipment coordinators are notified within the same day the rental is returned

Return to Ready mobile app for employees in the field to action the events required for rental equipment and take pictures of any damages

Summary of impact

The Return to Ready solution has resulted in total visibility of the rental return process and allows dealers to optimize rental availability for a $140M fleet of equipment.  Utilizing this app, along with the reporting created in Power BI, the business is better able to ensure each location has the appropriate staff and resources to maximize rental asset availability.  Employees are better enabled to do their daily job and visibly see if they have accomplished their daily, targets, something they were never able to do before.

Western State CAT is about ensuring the equipment is ready and available to rent. The entire process of return to ready was reduced to a single day, which is critical in the peak period of summer where 75% of their fleet can now be rented within a day due to the quick turnaround enabled by the Return to Ready app. Since the app also provided the capability to take photos of damages immediately when a rental is returned, their reimbursement for damages increased by 7%.

Paired with an embedded Power BI report, management now have visibility on the time it takes for a machine to be ready for the next rental. Considering the average daily rental rate of the entire fleet, this change is significant and enables sales teams with more opportunities to win business.

The usage of the app continues to grow with no major changes for almost 9 months, which is a testament to the effectiveness of the Strategy & BI Solutions team’s partnership with the different users to ensure what they’ve developed is fit for purpose across the company.

“It takes less than a minute for them to do a turnaround and the app captures all the timestamps.”

– Chris Jaques, Senior Application Developer, Western States CAT

Power Platform Solution – Client Connect

Business scenario

For sales it is important for the Western States CAT employees out in the field to view their interactions with both existing customers and potential prospects, view opportunities and leads to upsell to, and view customer spend to help better manage their pipeline of equipment rentals across all stores. Following up on the success and learnings from the Return to Ready app, it was the next logical business process to improve since rental sales is a key contributor to their growth in revenue.

Before Power Platform

Western State CAT was using the basic built-in CRM capabilities of Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012. As an on-premise system, it was not mobile friendly and accessing it remotely was a hassle – it required jumping through hoops to connect into the company’s network and access the data. This was inconvenient and time consuming for the sales team. They needed an effective mobile solution that was tailored to their activities and helped them with their management of sales across the yards.

Solution details

The Strategy & BI team applied the same development approach from their Return to Ready app to create their own purpose-built sales app known as Client Connect where again, Power Apps was used as the front-end mobile interface. The app enables their sales teams across stores and yards to view and record information on leads, prospects, opportunities, activities, history of rental equipment by customers and so forth, which is directly updated in their Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 system. Using the built in AI Builder business card scanner capabilities in Power Apps allowed them to quickly scan in customer contact information from the app. Having the data accessible in the hands of their sales team enabled them to do a pre-call plan and understand the prospect or customer they’re working with, often while out in the field and with the customer standing right next to them.

Key features of the app include:

• Ability to create prospects and contacts powered by the in-built capability of AI Builder Business Card scanner.
• Embedded Power BI reporting within the app for visibility on the customer’s total year-to-date spend and breakdown of sales by department
• Ability to create and update sales pipeline through prospects, leads and opportunities
• Ability to create and log customer interactions instantly via activities
• Impersonation for supervisors to view the business through their direct reports’ eyes

“AI Builder and other tools help us create plug-and-play solutions that we can deliver quickly to the field.”

– Justin Bailey, Director of Strategy & BI, Western States CAT

The team has also used custom connectors to directly integrate the app with a third-party auction platform API. This enables them to provide real-time auction valuation of machines to customers. They’re also adding GPS mapping of equipment so staff can easily find machines that are out in the field. These are great examples of capabilities that Justin and Chris simply did not imagine would be possible to build with a low-code platform when they started their Power Platform journey.

Client Connect mobile app for sales employees to view opportunities, agreements and historical information of customer spend

Summary of impact

The Client Connect app is Western States CAT’s go to sales system and is used daily throughout all their stores. Since the app went live, there’s been a 135% increase in usage over the previous solution. They are no longer desk bound to capture sales, view the total spend of a customer or manage their pipeline, as they now can do this and much more through the Client Connect app when out and about in the field.

Solution Architecture Pattern

The Strategy & BI Solutions team followed a ‘low-code plus code-first’ development pattern for both their Return to Ready and Client Connect apps. Both apps read equipment and customer spend data from a SQL Server database which is a replication of their Microsoft Dynamics AX 2012 ERP data. The retrieve and write of data and events are performed through a Power Platform custom connector which interacts with custom web APIs developed in ASP. NET Core. The two apps have been developed with Power Apps. All pictures taken from the Return to Ready app is handled by an Azure hosted web API that leverages Azure Blob storage. The AI Builder Business Card scanner is used by the Client Connect app to create prospects and contacts easily across all their stores. All information of their rentals and sales created and updated in the apps are surfaced into Power BI reports.

Screenshot of swagger definition file for the custom connector

The benefits of capitalizing on the same development pattern ensures that the underlying framework will continue to work when Western States CAT eventually upgrades their ERP system to Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations since the custom web APIs will adapt accordingly based on the data source. It also enables other Power Apps to be developed that are dependent on their ERP data thanks to their custom web APIs developed in ASP. NET Core that can be reused for different purposes.

High level solution architecture that combines low-code and code-first development patterns

Looking ahead

Western States CAT have seen a 632% total growth in Power BI and 273% growth in Power Apps over the last two years. Almost half the company uses Power Apps each month and 80% have used an app at least once in the past two years. The BI solutions team vision is to further improve and develop their Return to Ready and Client Connect apps as premier mobile applications for Western States CAT. In the next year the Return to Ready app will be converted to a total company equipment inventory management solution that will serve multiple departments and divisions. Planned features include introducing a new sales role to view equipment configuration, marketing photos, and availability status; inventory audit capabilities, expand damage logging for all inventory, heavy haul dispatch integration, checklists for inspections and servicing, and much more. The team will continue to work closely with the business across the different states to ensure what they develop is in tight alignment to their operations and strategy.

With the innovative apps Western States CAT has developed, other CAT dealers are now interested in Microsoft Power Platform. Justin Bailey will be presenting their Power Platform journey and apps in the Annual 2021 North America CAT dealer conference – to inspire other CAT dealers to use low-code and work as fusion teams to digitize their processes.

Justin Bailey, who leads the Strategy and BI Solutions team, and has seen his own career and the charter of his team continue to grow over the past three years, sums up his enthusiasm for Microsoft Power Platform as follows:

“We love where Microsoft is going with ‘low code meets pro dev’. As we look to the future, we’re excited to see how it will help drive our digital innovation journey at Western States. The imagination and determination of our employees coupled with the power of Dynamics 365, Azure, and Power Platform will challenge us to reach farther and enable us to achieve more.”

– Justin Bailey, Director of Strategy & BI, Western States CAT

Related links

• MBAS 2021: Fusion teams at Western States Caterpillar build Power Apps for field staff – YouTube
• Power Platform resources for code-first pro-developers and fusion teams
• Power Platform Stories curated by Power CAT

The post Western States Caterpillar – fusion teams use Microsoft Power Platform to build mobile apps for field staff appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

In this blog post we look at how they used the CoE Starter Kit to establish robust governance practices and cultivate a thriving internal community of makers building Power Platform solutions across several departments. We’ll also look at two Power Apps solutions built by citizen developers – an app used to track key activities and goals, and an app used to record flexible work hours and assist with enabling hybrid work.

Business challenge

After H&M Group deployed Microsoft 365, there was an acceleration in development of innovative solutions built by their citizen developers across the company, but challenges arose from the rapid rise of solutions. As the company approached 1,500 apps with over 30,000 users licensed on Power Platform, H&M Group realized that they needed a controlled approach to development with the platform. To foster the creativity of their citizen developers they needed to keep an open approach, but with some governance and control. That’s when a plan to build a Power Platform Center for Enablement began to take shape.

H&M’s Center for Enablement journey

“We knew we needed to put better controls in place to maintain security and governance, but at the same time we wanted to foster an environment where people could continue to build great solutions on the platform.”

– Helena Forsberg, Microsoft 365 Solution Architect, H&M Group

The CoE at H&M Group was led by four employees with various levels of development experience but no prior experience in setting up a Power Platform CoE. Two of the team members were Helena Forsberg as the Microsoft 365 Solution Architect and Claes Söderström as the Cross Delivery Coordinator at H&M Group. The team reviewed Power Platform guidance from Microsoft and set up their CoE based on three core components: administration, governance, and tools & processes to help establish digital guardrails for Power Platform development. In addition, initiatives were put in place to educate and empower citizen developers and inspire new and future development. In alignment to this balanced approach, the team named their CoE the ‘H&M Group Center for Enablement’.

Using Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence Starter Kit

One of the tools from Microsoft that H&M Group used was the Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit. Included in the kit is a Power BI dashboard template that provided H&M Group with the needed information to identify potential risks. The initial telemetry provided the company with three key insights:

1. Apps were being developed with no Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies in place which is a company risk as their data could be accidently published externally such as on social media sites.
2. An increase in the usage of premium connectors which, left uncontrolled, could lead to licensing cost overruns.
3. High-usage apps that only had one owner. If the owner left the company, there was no one in place to provide support and maintenance.

The Power BI dashboard template (sample data) that H&M Group uses for telemetry of their apps created by citizen developers across different countries.

Fortunately for H&M Group, none of these risks had yet posed any serious problem. Better yet, with its Center for Enablement plan, the company was on the right path to effectively address each one of them.

Controlling access to Power Platform resources

H&M Group established a tiered structure of environments to manage access to apps, flows, and connections available to employees. Environments within the Power Platform can also be used to separate apps that may have different security requirements or target audiences. Appropriate security policies are implemented based on each employee’s role.

Diagram showing three-tiered environment structure. Employees start in the default Productivity environment and can request access to higher-level environments with more advanced connectors and tools.

All employees start inside a default ‘Productivity’ environment. The team limited the environment to the standard connectors that come with a Microsoft 365 E5 license. These connectors satisfied most development needs for the apps being created by H&M Group.

The next tier is environments for more ‘Important’ apps that might require premium connectors to other data sources. Here, data loss prevention (DLP) policies are used to control which connectors can be used by which makers. H&M Group employees can request access to this environment using a form in SharePoint.

The top tier is for ‘Critical’ environments, enabling development of apps requiring custom connectors.

The team was able to handle all configuration and deployment of environments and DLP policies in the Power Platform Admin Center – a straightforward process that was completed through a series of simple, click-through menus.

“Setting up our security and governance structure and controls for Power Platform took us just two weeks to complete for all 30,000 users at the company.”

– Helena Forsberg, Microsoft 365 Solution Architect, H&M Group

Inspiring citizen developers

In addition to the security and governance controls, resources formed to help support citizen developers:

• Yammer was used to cultivate an online Power Platform community to foster ideas, guidance, and collaboration.
• An automated welcome email with links to online training resources is sent to citizen developers when they create an app or flow.
• SharePoint online was used to display a catalogue and stories about apps and solutions created by their citizen developers. This is also promoted in meetings throughout the company.

“It’s been particularly inspiring when makers can see apps developed by their colleagues that solve problems similar to their own.”

– Claes Söderström, Cross Delivery Coordinator, H&M Group

H&M Group has created an internal portal for showcasing the Power Platform apps created by its citizen developers. The concepts and tools within these apps have inspired hundreds of other solutions.

Apps built by citizen developers

The Power Platform solutions created by their citizen developers addressed a wide range of what used to be time-consuming data entry scenarios.  Apps built to collect form responses is one of the most common use cases. Another is transferring data automatically, rather than sending via email.

“Together, Power Platform solutions created by our employees have made a huge impact on business processes across every brand and region in the H&M Group.”

– Claes Söderström, Cross Delivery Coordinator, H&M Group

Examples of two apps that have made a difference are as follows:

PO Key Activities & Goals App

This app enables employees to set and track the progress of global and regional activities against goals set annually. The solution not only collects and consolidates reports but automatically displays activities in Power BI. Marie Nordstroem, a citizen developer at H&M Group who created the app, says, “The initial design was intuitive enough to roll-out to a wide audience right away. We’d like to refine the UI even further and Power Platform enables us to make continuous improvements quickly and easily.”

The main input screen for H&M Group’s PO Key Activities & Goals app developed on Power Platform.

FLEXI App

When flexible working hours were introduced in many offices at H&M Group, employees found it increasingly difficult to track down colleagues. The problem was elegantly solved with the FLEXI app – a solution that won top honors for citizen developers Elsi Gnagniko and Sofia Gustafsson at a company hackathon where it was created.

A mobile app created in Power Apps makes it easy for employees to quickly update their location and view similar updates from colleagues. The updates can also be added to an Outlook calendar, sent to a manager – or combined with a larger master list in SharePoint to view by managers. Six different flows automate the process. The app deletes updates at the end of the day – a privacy control that earned it a GDPR validation by H&M Group’s IT security group.

This mobile app is part of H&M Group’s FLEXI App solution which is used by employees to update their teams about their location and status during flex hours.

The solution was initially released to the developers’ own team. Word spread quickly about the app through the community and now the app is used by over 1,000 employees across the company’s global network. It’s also proven especially useful for managing limited office capacity requirements during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Interactions of the end users with the Flexi app solution

Looking ahead

As the number of Power Platform solutions continue to accelerate at H&M Group, they plan to expand their CoE and scale for the future. The team will continue to add DLP controls to 400+ connectors which will enable even more options to citizen developers and their apps – while also protecting data and maintaining control. They also plan to archive unused apps – again, for reduced risk but also for the option of reusing components in other projects down the road. With the help of a Power BI dashboard in the CoE starter kit, they can monitor the usage patterns by region and target lower-scoring regions with more training and support to better promote the platform to encourage citizen developers.

Forsberg is a believer in having a balanced approach in having the IT department drive the Center for Enablement with a focus on security but also have flexibility for citizen developers to be creative with their apps and solutions with guardrails in place. Establishing a set of policies and controls that supported their citizen developers’ creativity is what enabled H&M Group to have a successful Power Platform CoE and that’s her advice to other companies.

“We agreed that for us it’s equally important with governance, security, as well as the creativity to foster an environment where people want to use Power Platform.”

– Helena Forsberg, Microsoft 365 Solution Architect, H&M Group

Related links

• Microsoft Customer Story – H&M Group strikes an effective balance of Power Platform development and security
• MBAS 2021: H&M enables citizen development at scale – YouTube
• MBAS 2021: Download slides
• Power Platform Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit
• Power Platform Guidance Center
• Power Platform Stories curated by Power CAT

The post H&M Group enables citizen development at scale with Microsoft Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.