Management System with PowerApps
Introduction
Triage provides a range of education, skills and employability services that help people secure a job, progress in the workplace and build meaningful careers.
Delivering from locations across Scotland and North East England, Triage works with local, regional and national stakeholders to deliver government-led initiatives in the skills and employability sector. Working in partnership with public, private and community organisations, Triage deliver a range of education, skills and employability programmes that respond to social and economic growth agendas.
Challenges
Triage were using an old case management system to maintain the organisation and control of their program Clients and Participants. The system was slow and required a heavy amount of duplication, plus bringing together effective reporting necessitated multiple spreadsheets of extracted data.
They required a new solution that would bring together the various different elements involved in this case management system, making it easier to use, more structured and also enable a more granular level of reporting.
Our Solution
After understanding all the requirements of the case management system, it became apparent that Triage were using this like a small CRM, maintaining the relationship between clients and participants in order to ensure positive outcomes on outstanding vacancies. Given this, Dolphin suggested the implementation of a Model Driven PowerApp because this would provide the necessary structure to maintain their contacts, while also providing clean data entry forms to make the solution simple and easy to use.
Model Driven PowerApp
Model Driven Apps are built from the data upwards. That means we needed to establish all the data required first, then build out a datamodel to incorporate all of these requirements. We then built bespoke forms and views in order to facilitate navigating the solution and maintaining the data.
Business Process Modelling
The solution that we built also modelled the business processes inherent in the case management process. This means that the app itself enforces that the correct process is followed by Triage, and that all the correct data is recorded at every stage.
Automated Job Conversions
A key part to the solution was to convert vacancies into interviews into jobs. The existing system resulted in a lot of duplication in doing this, whereas Dolphin were able to automate this using Power Automate and remove the duplication of effort.
Job Milestone achievements enforced
Written into the datamodel were specific milestones needed to identify successful placements of participants. We built rules into the app that only showed these milestones once an action was required, thus simplifying the solution for the end users and only showing them what is needed at that time.
Calendar Canvas Apps For meeting
Triage also required that we integrate the app with operative outlook calendar. That can't really be done in the Model Driven app, however it can be done using a canvas app which is embedded within the solution. Using this canvas app, operatives are able to create meetings to cover milestones but also keep a record of it within the app to refer back to.
Integrated Reporting and Power BI Dashboards
A key part of the solution was the ability to establish better lines of reporting. In addition to embedding simple reports in the PowerApp, Dolphin also built Triage a PowerBI book which connected to the Dataverse tables that underpin the solution. This gives them the ability to ask questions about the case management system they have never been able to before and helps them to monitor their programs in near real-time reporting.
The Future
The final idea to the system was to expand it at a later time should they require. PowerApps are extremely flexible and scalable, so should they require enhancements these will be very simple to include.
Client Testimonial
Outstanding service from Nicholas. He explained everything really well and managed to take our ramblings and wish list ideas and come up with a very good digital solution. The caseload management tool he designed is very good, we asked for simple and ease of use for the end user but with robust reporting options, which he delivered on. As it is the first one and the first time we have worked with Dolphin and PowerApps, Nicholas has also been very flexible with us supporting with last minute changes/fixes. I have worked with various pre built caseload management platforms and providers in the past, some have been very good, but the tailored service we received from Nicholas and Dolphin has been outstanding.
