Optimizing contract management and workforce efficiency with a custom canvas application

The team leaders at MEEVivenz are in need of more insight into supply and demand when it comes to fulfilling its contracts. The current process of keeping track of the 'balance' is not only time-consuming but also prone to errors. The multitude of systems, data, and attributes (contract hours, employee hours, sick leave, expertise's) that need to be considered when balancing supply and demand often leads to overworked team leaders and scheduling errors, resulting in unfulfilled contracts. Recognizing this challenge, Context& was tasked to provide a solution that would alleviate this burden and ensure more accurate contract management through the use of the Power Platform.

Context& has created a Canvas application using existing data from external CRM systems such as Exact Synergy to build custom solutions. A Canvas application was best to accommodate the many calculations that had to be made in real time in the application. A Model Driven Application was considered together with custom pages, but this needed to allow for more customizations. One specific custom feature requested by the client was the ability to directly see the results of changes made in the application on breakdown lines of contracts. This required extensive calculations in nested galleries to calculate YTD realized hours and YTD, planned hours, and forecast calculations.

By combining data from different systems and adding several custom tables, Context& made an application that could easily calculate the gross or net hours an employee could work on a project and assign him or her to a breakdown line on a contract. Assigning employees to breakdown lines would show changes in over- and underproduction in real-time. The data for the application was migrated to Dataverse from an external data warehouse using a Dataflow, which runs every night. Power Automate flows ensured the relationships in the data warehouse were also created in Dataverse. The client and Context& worked together to transform and load the data needed to make the views in the application. Virtual tables were considered for this data migration, but Context& has opted for a Dataflow since relationships between virtual tables are not possible.

Context&, in collaboration with subject matter experts, hosted a User Experience workshop. This workshop was a platform for a comprehensive discussion on how the application should look and function. Users were actively encouraged to share their insights on the design and user interface, which were then visualized on a Figma board for everyone to see. This collaborative approach ensured that the final application not only met the technical requirements but also provided a pleasant user experience, guiding the users of MEEVivenz in creating an application that they would find intuitive and user-friendly.

With this new and improved way of working, the team leaders could steer better on under and overproduction on a contract, which led to more billable hours. The application consisted of an employee screen, a contract screen, and a planning screen. Using nested galleries, the relationship between contracts and breakdown lines was visualized. Collections were used throughout the application to keep the performance as high as possible. Furthermore, the users could dynamically adjust all dates and years to see historical values. Users can now also add expertise to employees in the application, which relates to the different contracts. This way, a better fit between employees and contracts could be achieved.

With the Canvas application, the team leaders have gained much better insight into contract management. They are now able to steer adequately and timely on over- and underproduction. This reduces the number of employees sitting idle or having too much workload. This is an essential step for MEEVivenz towards better managing its workforce.

Future development

Since Context& has copied the data and data model created in the Data warehouse into Dataverse using a Dataflow and Power Automate flows, it is now available to develop future applications. Furthermore, another team at Context& has been busy setting up Azure API Management to create the possibility of 'create,' 'update,' and 'delete' actions to the external data sources; thus, together with the already present data model, MEEVivenz plans to create more canvas applications to improve long and tedious processes making them more efficient and less time-consuming. This allows MEEVivenz to move more work with fewer hours in an industry facing a rapidly shrinking workforce.

Context&’s advice to other similar care organizations would be to use these new and innovative technologies quickly. The workforce in The Netherlands is getting smaller, and the workload in the care industry is only getting bigger. We strive to decrease the number of care hours lost by IT. We make this happen through this and future solutions that Context& will create for MEEVivenz. However, this can only happen if organizations take the leap and embrace new technologies such as Microsoft's low-code Power Platform.