{"id":10549,"date":"2023-01-02T09:05:08","date_gmt":"2023-01-02T17:05:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/power-platform\/blog\/power-apps\/tmobile\/"},"modified":"2024-09-19T14:34:16","modified_gmt":"2024-09-19T21:34:16","slug":"tmobile","status":"publish","type":"power-apps","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/power-platform\/blog\/power-apps\/tmobile\/","title":{"rendered":"T-Mobile saves thousands of hours with Power Platform solution to manage customer initiatives"},"content":{"rendered":"

T-Mobile provides wireless voice, messaging, and data services in the United States, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands under the T-Mobile and Metro by T-Mobile brands. The company has over 50,000 employees<\/strong> and operates the third largest wireless network in the U.S. market, serving over 84 million customers<\/strong>. Its nationwide network reaches 98 percent of Americans. As of 2018, J. D. Power and Associates, a global marketing-information-services firm, ranked the company highest among major wireless carriers for retail-store satisfaction four years consecutively and highest for wireless customer care two years consecutively.<\/p>\n

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\u2019ll take a deep dive look at the “Orbit App” that has saved the company over $4M USD and 97,000 hours<\/strong>. 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.<\/p>\n

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%.<\/strong>
\nRead the case study here<\/a> for more details on T-Mobile’s usage of Power Automate, AI Builder and Power Virtual Agents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\"Video<\/a>
\n3 min video – Orbit app and internal community of makers<\/a><\/td>\n		\"Video<\/a>
\nInterview with Brian Hodel – expanding Orbit to use Power Automate for desktop, AI Builder, Power Virtual Agents and Process Advisor<\/a><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

Orbit App<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Business scenario<\/strong><\/h4>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Before Microsoft Power Platform<\/strong><\/h4>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Power Platform Solution<\/strong><\/h4>\n

After an initial Power Apps pilot using a canvas app connected to SQL, the team decided to rebuild the app using Dataverse<\/a>. 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<\/a>), configuring business process flows, and easily configuring role-based security permissions<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Power Apps canvas app for tracking initiatives and managing multi-stage approval process<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

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 \u2018summary\u2019 view to read the comprehensive notes and key stakeholders on the initiative, whereas a project member will use the \u2018detail\u2019 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 \u2013 e.g. service offers, device promotions, etc. Some of the key functional features of the solution is as follows:<\/p>\n