CLIENT STORY
Energy & Water Ombudsman NSW
Not-for-profit EWON modernises its team scheduling process in only 4 days
using Microsoft Power Platform.
KEY POINTS
- EWON needed a modern scheduling solution to replace an out-of-support system.
- Professional Advantage recommended and designed a new cloud-based team scheduling solution using Microsoft’s Power Automate, Power BI, and SharePoint.
- EWON were able to decommission several servers, saving on costs and consolidating systems.
- The no-code solution was deployed in as fast as 4 days, saving EWON significant development effort and IT overheads associated with alternate options.
"Professional Advantage’s team is technically sound and has a spectrum of understanding that is broad and deep enough to recommend different and modern ways to do things. For a client, that’s excellent!"
Bernadette Or, General Manager Finance and Corporate Services
EWON’s cloud transformation with Microsoft Azure and Microsoft 365 delivered by Professional Advantage paved the way to modernise its business processes by harnessing the capabilities of the Power Platform.
Their old system used a custom coded Windows service to make web calls to Workforce Ready, their human capital management (HCM) system. It saved the data to a database where custom developed web parts would take that information, plus information manually updated by EWON’s HR team in a SharePoint list, and group and display the content in an unsupported portal. There were three different servers used by the previous solution and managing and upgrading these services was not seen as a smart return on investment, so EWON jumped at the opportunity to decommission them all.
Watch below to see how we helped transform EWON with Microsoft 365 and Azure.
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Harnessing the power of the Power Platform
Professional Advantage implemented a modern approach to the EWON scheduling system by utilising a pure cloud play with Microsoft’s Power Platform (Power Automate and Power BI) to display results on their new SharePoint Online communications portal. Better still, the new solution was delivered rapidly and with low cost at four days consulting and development effort.
Reports are emailed to a shared email address, within which Power Automate picks attachments and saves the content to a SharePoint library. A Power BI dataset uses Power Query to manipulate the data and combine it with the Microsoft 365 User Profile Service. A Power BI report is then embedded on a page in their SharePoint-based communications portal for team members and executives to view.
The most complex part of the solution is how the data is formatted from Workforce Ready as each month has different column headings; the compilation of these files cannot simply be combined. By using Power Query, Professional Advantage was able to transform the data into a structure that is usable and can be combined.
Mashing up the current time zone data and the User Profile Service allowed people to be automatically grouped in their departments, meaning HR no longer needs to get involved in the process, removing the previous manual efforts required.
The result is a slick, no-code solution that can be embedded anywhere in their SharePoint Portal, and even on a Microsoft Teams tab.
