{"id":10320,"date":"2020-07-14T13:10:00","date_gmt":"2020-07-14T20:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/power-platform\/blog\/power-apps\/city-of-kobe\/"},"modified":"2024-10-03T10:40:41","modified_gmt":"2024-10-03T17:40:41","slug":"city-of-kobe","status":"publish","type":"power-apps","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/power-platform\/blog\/power-apps\/city-of-kobe\/","title":{"rendered":"City of Kobe \u2013 Supporting citizens with Microsoft Power Platform"},"content":{"rendered":"

Kobe is a city in Japan 300 miles west of Tokyo. With the spread of COVID-19, the city faced critical challenges that needed an immediate response. In this blog post we describe how they used Microsoft Power Platform to rapidly build solutions that have enabled the city to respond to the crisis.<\/p>\n

As a result of these solutions, the City of Kobe successfully reduced the number of calls to their call center by 90% from 40,000 calls per day to 3,000 calls, resulting in an overall better experience for citizens, and cost savings for the city. It also allowed better accessibility for citizens with hearing impairment as they could use a website to find information instead of making a phone call.<\/p>\n

This story is also published as a case study on the Microsoft customer stories site – City of Kobe connects citizens to key information during COVID-19 with Microsoft Power Platform<\/a>, and was called out by the mayor of the city in a recent press conference.<\/p>\n

Challenges that needed a rapid response<\/h2>\n

As part of their COVID-19 crisis response, the Japanese government announced a Special Cash Payment Program that allowed every citizen to apply for a subsidy. The citizens could apply for the cash subsidy through either mailing a paper application form or using a government website. However, there was no system to track the application status once the citizen had submitted an application. Tracking the application had to be done separately by each local authority. As a result, city officials were facing a high volume of incoming phone calls – over 40,000 calls on a daily basis.<\/p>\n

With a limited number of officers available, phone calls were being dropped and only a few thousand calls could be taken each day. This caused further issues with citizens calling again, increasing the overall call volume. The phone-based system was also not very accessible for citizens with hearing impairments.\u00a0City of Kobe officers urgently needed a system to monitor, manage and quickly respond on the status of these applications.<\/p>\n

Another issue faced by city officials was keeping their website up to date with the latest COVID-19 related statistics. They had to manually update the Excel-based graphs published on the city\u2019s official website. They did this by following a series of manual steps – consolidating data from multiple reports, editing Excel spreadsheets, updating graphs in Excel, and then uploading the graph images to the website. A lot of the time was being spent everyday consolidating and reporting on critical information.<\/p>\n

Power Platform solution<\/h2>\n

To overcome these problems, City of Kobe created the following solutions to help support citizens and officers. The solutions use Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents, and Power BI. The development efforts started in April 2020 with each solution below taking less than two weeks to build. As of May 2020, they’ve been deployed to all citizens and accessed by thousands of users per day. The Power Apps portals solution hit peak usage of over 200K+ in a single day, and as of July 2020 has been averaging 35K+ page views per day.<\/p>\n

Special Cash Payment Application Management – Power Apps<\/h3>\n

A website was created using Power Apps portals, where citizens can quickly check the status of their application on their own. Using a desktop or mobile device, they provide the application number and instantly get detailed up to date information about their application. They no longer needed to make a phone call.<\/p>\n

The out of box responsive layout capabilities in Power Apps portals enabled them to quickly develop a solution that adapts to desktop and mobile form factors.<\/p>\n

The solution also includes a Power Apps model-driven app that is used by city officials to manage back office operations. This includes looking up details of an application while on a phone call or manually updating the application status. All the\u00a0data is centrally managed in Common Data Service.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Power Apps portals site used to check special cash payment application status<\/em><\/p>\n

Automated phone enquiry service \u2013 Power Automate<\/h3>\n

For citizens who prefer making phone calls, they can now call a designated phone number prepared by Twilio, a communication API service, that is connected to Common Data Service via Power Automate. The first prototype of this automated phone enquiry service was developed in less than a day, as Power Automate enabled them to quickly develop the integration between Common Data Service and Twilio with easy point-and-click setup.<\/p>\n

The system runs in the following steps:<\/p>\n