Solving Common Business Challenges Via Digital Transformation - Cambay Consulting | Cloud Infrastructure

What do one of the world’s leading children’s hospitals and medical non-profits have in common with an international life sciences behemoth and a retail chain with hundreds of locations? They’re all tapping into the Microsoft Power Platform to solve some of their most common — and pressing — business challenges.

Whether you want to move away from managing mission-critical tasks via spreadsheet or gain deeper insights into sales data, with Cambay’s help on the Power Platform, you can do all that and more. In this post, we’ll share a number of customer case studies to illustrate the range of problems and challenges that can be addressed by harnessing the power of the Power Platform.

The instances you’ll read about below are representative examples of ways we have quickly crafted and deployed innovative technology solutions to address what are often-complex business problems, resulting in:

Higher employee satisfaction scores and retention rates
Increased productivity and data accuracy
Real-time access to actionable data
Dramatic shortening of a critical order-to-fill process

Children’s Hospital Says Goodbye to Spreadsheets

Children's Hospital Says Goodbye to Spreadsheets

The Problem: One well-known children’s hospital found its staff continually mired in manual tasks surrounding their Return-to-Work standards. Tracking vaccination and testing details of close to 2000 employees via one massive spreadsheet was not only cumbersome, it opened the door to version control issues that posed a threat to data quality and integrity. What’s more, the constantly shifting ground of employee statuses made scheduling a never-ending nightmare.

The Solution: A rapid POC built in Power Apps demonstrated that we could build workflows to integrate the hospital’s on-premises data to the Dynamics 365 platform. This removed the need to manually update a spreadsheet based on the latest information. It provided the hospital with an automatic, seamless process to manage employees’ and volunteers’ test results and manage their access levels accordingly. The solution also used Power Automate to remove much of the manual aspect of scheduling.

Life Sciences Company Gets to a Single Source of Truth

The Problem: A large life sciences company’s sales team found themselves spending more than half their time on work that wasn’t client-facing. Even the simplest of tasks took multiple steps. They used an alphabet’s soup of different apps throughout the sales organization, which led to there being multiple sources of information and redundant work. It also led to a lack of consistency and introduced a free-wheeling aspect to the sales process that wasn’t befitting of a company with their leadership position in the space.

The Solution: We worked with the life sciences company’s leadership team to help them envision how “one app to rule them all” could solve many of the issues they were facing. We helped them identify which features and functionalities a variety of different personas would need to do their jobs more quickly and effectively, then built those out using Power Apps. And we helped them ensure there would be a smooth rollout to staff by developing a pilot program where we onboarded small groups of employees to the app, observed how they used it and gathered feedback from them, and continued to improve the app as we rolled it out to a large percentage of the sales team.

The end result was a single intuitive app that’s a single source of truth, which is being used enthusiastically throughout their sales organization. In addition to Power Apps, we employed Power Automate cloud flows, Power BI, and Dataverse while integrating with Dynamics 365 and Azure

Retail Chain Sees Their Data in Real-Time For the First Time

The Problem: One of our customers in the retail space found that their ability to report on important in-store sales metrics was increasingly antiquated. Their process relied heavily on in-store data collection, followed by evaluation of data both in-store and at the home office. A sophisticated BI application did tie all of their stores’ data together, but there was sufficient data that real-time processing was prohibitively expensive, which meant reports had to be run overnight. The end result? When the data would have been valuable and actionable, i.e. in or near real-time, it wasn’t available.

The Solution: Working alongside the company’s sales leaders, we rapidly prototyped an app that provides real-time insights to everyone on their team, whether they’re in-store or at the home office. This is critical in helping the team learn what kind of promotional activities are driving the most foot traffic and revenue. Adoption has also increased due to the app being accessible and intuitive on any mobile device or computer, as is the case with any apps built on the Power Platform. You can write once and run anywhere.

The solution was built on Power Apps and taps into the Power Platform’s connectors to integrate with Azure functions, Azure Table Storage, Bing Maps and already-existing APIs.

Medical Non-Profit Trims Order Lifecycle from Weeks to Days

The Problem: A non-profit in the healthcare space was struggling to manage the steady flow of equipment requests that were coming in from their 650 instructors nationwide. This equipment, like gloves, masks, and face shields, were critical for ensuring that the valuable trainings this organization provides could safely continue. The existing process of emailing a scanned form to a group email address had several major flaws. There was no way of tracking which orders had been placed or when they would be received. Orders that were successfully filled took 3 weeks to a month to arrive, on average. When dealing with critical health care supplies, that was far too long to wait from the time an order was placed to when it arrived.

The Solution: In short order, we stood up a “shopping” app that allows instructors to add needed equipment to their cart and submit those requests to management. The app makes it easy for instructors to follow the status of their order, and it has drastically reduced the amount of time it takes to go from order to fill. What had taken 3-4 weeks previously has now been condensed to 4-5 days. Management can also now run reporting on requests, statuses, and orders filled that they never could with the paper-based process.

The app is powered by Power Apps and Microsoft Flow. It incorporates Power Automate to trigger approval workflows and Power BI to visualize KPIs.

Cambay’s Expertise

Cambay Consulting helps customers get the most out of Power Apps and the Microsoft Power Platform. We help you rapidly build, deploy, and manage the applications and experiences that power your business, enabling you to continually improve the customer and employee experience. As a Microsoft Gold Partner, we have more than a decade of experience consulting with organizations like yours to drive value from your technology solutions, including Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate, Dataverse, and Dynamics.