Case Study

PowerApps Enhancement Services Help a Security Company Improve End-user Experience

Customer: A global provider of security products, services, and software Profile: The client specializes in cash management, entrance control, and safe storage products for retail, airports, mass transit, public and commercial buildings, and industrial and high-risk sites.
Industry: Security and Investigations
Services: PowerApps Enhancement

Business Need

The security products company used PowerApps to empower employees with a streamlined mechanism of creating apps and integrating them with every day business tools.

Unfortunately, the PowerApps implementation was not done properly; the earlier vendor did not use any specific development guidelines to implement PowerApps. The entire solution was directly created on the production environment, which resulted in several UI/UX challenges.

Users found it difficult to navigate through these apps in particular:

  • Note for Approval (NFA) – An application for sales managers to create item discount approval for the customer. Approval process matrix is based on the discount percentage, Net Value and CGM
  • Electronic Validation Order Form (EVOF) – An application to execute the approved NFA order or new EVOF order directly from EVOF and complete the sales order
  • Travel Request – An application to enable users to create a travel request specifying information such as mode of transport, travel dates, hotel details, and advance amount
  • Other Expenses – An application to enable users to create other expenses such as mobile reimbursement or any other expenses
  • Dashboard – An application for approvers to approve NFA, EVOF, Travel and Expense requests

At the same time, users were facing challenges across:

  • Discount approval process
  • Traversing from one screen to another
  • Email notifications
  • Loader
  • Print functionality
  • Attachments
  • Document storage
  • Configuration
  • Locker screen
  • Expenses
  • Performance
  • Development environment
  • Testing

The security company reached out to Synoptek for enhancement of workflow-based applications using PowerApps and SQL.

Solution and Approach

In order to enhance and overcome pain points for the client’s existing PowerApps, Synoptek carried out the following activities:

NFA Process

  • Redesigned the NFA entry form to improve user-friendliness
  • Implemented print functionality, allowing users to print/download NFA details directly from PowerApps
  • Revised NFA discount calculations like GM, CGM, gross profit, and total net sale
  • Enhanced NFA approval process to cover all scenarios of the approval process defined by the business process
  • Improved email format to improve user experience and achieved end-to-end email notification to approvers and requestor
  • Implemented NFA copy functionality which creates a new copy of the centralized NFA
  • Implemented loader in required PowerApps screen

EVOF Process

  • Redesigned EVOF entry form to improve user-friendliness
  • Implemented functionality for creating new delivery address and new billing address of customer in EVOF form
  • Implemented print functionality, allowing users to print/download EVOF details directly from PowerApps
  • Implemented loader in required PowerApps screen
  • Implemented file upload functionality and user-friendly UI to upload EVOF documents
  • Implemented locker and customization for EVOF line items
  • Implemented split lines functionality for customized items
  • Implemented preview screen before submitting the EVOF

Travel Request

  • Enabled single screen for creating a travel request instead of two different screens
  • Updated email format for better user experience
  • Enhanced hotel expense and transport expense screens
  • Implemented a functionality to highlight Policy-AV entries
  • Implemented loader in required screens

Other Expenses

  • Enables single screen for creating other request instead of two different screens.
  • Updated email format for better user experience
  • Implemented a functionality to highlight Policy-AV entries
  • Implemented loader in required screens
  • Enhanced print format

Dashboard

  • Implemented dashboard button visibility control based on user login.
  • Implemented approval accessibility based on user permission
  • Redesigned NFA and EVOF approval view screen
  • Created view item screen to search item by code or name and display resulted item details like unit price and cost
  • Created view all NFA screens for approver to quickly search NFA and view its details

Integration with AX 2009

  • Created EVOF integration with AX 2009 to generate Sales order in AX 2009 using EVOF
  • Implemented syncing mechanism for updating Sales Order from AX to PowerApps SQL database

Azure DevOps

  • Created different environments for development, stage, and production
  • Implemented Application Lifecycle Management to import and export PowerApps from development environment to stage environment and stage environment to production environment

Business Results

With Synoptek’s PowerApps enhancement services, the security company was able to:

  • Strengthen the development environment and enable easy and robust governance
  • Improve end-user experience by enhancing PowerApps features
  • Enable seamless concurrent usage – without witnessing a drop in functionality or performance
  • Overcome app loading as well as data storage issues
  • Enhance the process of Travel Requests and Other Expenses
  • Enhance NFA discount approval process to cover all business steps
  • Enhance EVOF creating process with line customizations
  • Enhance PDF file and printing functionality
  • Enable file uploading in single screen
  • Enjoy better UI/UX
  • Integration of AX 2009 with EVOF to generate Sales Order Synchronization with AX masters and PowerApps database
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