An archive with Power Apps, for instant consultation

The customer's problem: adopting a functional system to consult company data at any time

Operating in the public transport sector, our client must manage a vast volume of information every day concerning activities such as train monitoring, route planning, vehicle maintenance and passenger management.

However, it could not count on a functional system to manage this amount of data and allow operators to access it quickly.

The resulting risks for regulatory compliance and the quality of the service offered were high, threatening to compromise the company's operational efficiency and competitiveness.

The customer was in fact exposing himself to risks in terms of:

• Security and customer satisfaction, not being able to identify any critical issues in daily operations in a timely manner.
• Fines and penalties, due to poor data traceability and therefore not being able to demonstrate compliance with stringent industry regulations.
• High time and costs, associated with difficulties on the part of operators in accessing and retrieving information useful to carry out their activities.
  ‍

We therefore designed together the right solution to simplify data management, providing users with an intuitive tool to update and consult company archives at any time.

Our solution: a custom Power Apps application to simplify the storage, management and consultation of business data

The solution designed to meet customer requirements consists in the development of a vertical custom application for internal data management.

Power Apps of the Microsoft Power Platform was the basic technology of the project, since its functionalities for low code development allowed us to create a customized application quickly and at a reduced cost capable of:

• Manage business data within an intuitive and scalable archive.
• Make data accessible at any time and from any device.
  ‍

To simplify the use of the different features and optimize user activities in the new application, we have created three sections dedicated to:

1. Adding new information
2. Consultation of data, with the possibility of exporting them
3. Modification of the items in the archive, to allow them to be updated quickly

The application also integrates with a custom Power Automate flow, to monitor the process of archiving and consulting data by automatically sending notifications via email.

In this way, responsible users are notified every time new information is inserted into the archive or is exported for personal consultation by a specific operator.

The solution thus offers an optimal user experience. But not only that.

Corporate data security was a second crucial aspect of the project, which is guaranteed thanks to the use of an SQL server to save information in the application.

This technology has the following advantages:

• Reliability and robustness, with backup and recovery capabilities to protect data from accidental loss or hardware damage. In addition, SQL servers support ACID (Atomicity, Consistency, Isolation, Durability) transactions to ensure data consistency even in the presence of competing transactions.
  ‍
• Security, with advanced features that include role-based authentication, data encryption, auditing of user activities, and granular access controls to ensure that only authorized users can interact with the data.
  ‍
• Scalability, thanks to an infrastructure capable of managing large volumes of data and intensive workloads without a drop in performance.

The results obtained

Together with the customer, we tracked the performance of our custom application, to understand if it was really the right solution to improve the employee experience. The answer? Let's see some facts together:

• To date, 2,207 items have been added to the Activity Log section.
• As of today, the General Request section houses 2,559 items.
  ‍

Since the launch of production, the company has not yet received any negative feedback from users.