All Pro improves efficiencies with Microsoft Power Pages and saves CAD $30,000 in ERP fees

All Pro, a Canadian electrical and construction company, started in 2012 as a small operation and has grown over the last twelve years from a handful of employees to more than thirty. While the company had cemented its place in a highly competitive industry, the business was looking to modernize its administrative processes to keep pace with growth in the industry. Alexander Koch, Data Engineer at All Pro, joined the team and immediately set to work automating common businesses processes to assist All Pro in streamlining work, saving time, and boosting compliance. The company relied heavily on email communications, manual data entry, project tracking in Excel, and used Google forms to gather employee signatures on personal safety inspection (PSI) forms. “The amount of work they were doing, in the manner they were doing it, had become challenging to manage,” says Koch. “The business leaders knew they wanted to automate things.” The question was, how best to bring these processes into a new, more modern era for All Pro? “We explored pre-built solutions and various ERP tools, and even sat down with some consultants,” says Koch. “However, many of these systems were overly complex for our needs, didn’t fit our industry, or required lengthy implementation times. In the end, we knew we wanted to build our own solution quickly, and that is when we discovered the Microsoft Power Platform.” 

Ultimately, All Pro used the Power Platform, including Microsoft Power Pages and Microsoft Power Automate, to create a custom solution perfectly tailored to its industry and unique processes. The result is a one-stop solution, called the All Pro Employee Portal, where All Pro’s workforce can carry out tasks like onboarding new staff, submitting expenses, completing PSIs, and managing leave requests. Already, the solution has saved one administrative employee an entire eight-hour workday every week, improved compliance, and helped the business stand out among the competition. “Having this data at our fingertips builds trust with existing clients and allows us to demonstrate excellence in RFPs for new business. It really provides a business advantage,” says Koch. The company continues to expand the functionality of the portal to encompass more use cases. “Microsoft Power Platform proved to be exactly what we needed to modernize processes at All Pro,” adds Koch. “It’s been a game changer.”

Saving an eight-hour workday and streamlining processes with Power Pages

All Pro’s initial goal with the Power Platform was to create a solution for three of its most time-consuming and inefficient processes: submitting expenses, filling in PSIs, and approving time off requests. In the case of expenses, the former process required all thirty employees to submit expenses on a weekly basis, every Friday, and required an administrative employee to spend the weekend compiling the relevant data and sending it to a team member for approval. Those submissions were made via email, and a large part of the administrative employee’s work involved manually imputing expense data into a separate spreadsheet. “There was a lot of time lost extracting metadata from the photos of receipts that people sent in,” explains Koch. “Things like when the purchase was made and what category it fell under.”

With the help of Power Pages, Koch created a solution that employees can access from their devices to upload photos of receipts and fill in relevant data themselves, creating huge time savings. Images of receipts and the accompanying metadata are uploaded directly to Microsoft Azure Blob Storage and Microsoft Dataverse, respectively. “The solution we built with Power Pages is fantastic because it captures the relevant metadata automatically and streamlines the review process for our finance employees,” says Koch. “We went from a process of extracting data to simply reviewing it and saved one employee an entire eight-hour workday in the process.”

Foregrounding compliance and safety with a mobile solution

In addition to the expense reporting solution, Koch also used the Power Platform to modernize how employees in the field fill in crucial safety forms – an important aspect of compliance for the business. “When All Pro employees arrive at a job site, the first thing they need to do is fill in a personal safety inspection form to certify that they are following proper procedures,” explains Koch. “In the past, we did this using Google Forms, which worked in theory but made it very difficult to track who had filled out the safety forms and who hadn’t.” Today, retrieving the completed forms has been vastly simplified because completed forms all reside in a centralized location, Dataverse, and All Pro has gained the ability to track compliance in real time, even sending out reminders to employees who have not filled in their safety forms promptly. “That insight into compliance was the biggest thing we were missing before we created a safety form solution with the Power Platform,” says Koch. “We were operating on a trust system, and now we have a Power Automate workflow that sends reminder emails to employees on the job site who have not completed their safety form.” The new system not only keeps safety top of mind, it also helps ensure that the company remains compliant and gives managers insights at a glance. “It’s all tracked and documented in a central location now,” says Koch.

Time off requests have been similarly streamlined with the use of the Power Pages-based portal and a model-driven Power App that was created for the All Pro management team to manage requests, automate approvals, and create reporting on these submissions. Today, employees submit requests for approval from their devices via the portal. It’s a big improvement over the previous process, which saw employees submit requests via Google Sheets. “If those requests were approved, the requests would then be manually added to a static spreadsheet,” says Koch. “This made tracking or planning hours difficult because the Google Sheets did not integrate well with most of the technology we used, and the spreadsheet was disconnected from the rest of our processes.” Now, managers find it easier to track employees’ hours and plan accordingly, staying up to date on information that might have remained elusive in the past.

Launching a custom portal in months rather than years

All Pro’s success with its Power Pages is a testament to how well a custom solution fits the culture of the business. “Everyone at All Pro takes a lot of pride and ownership in the work they do, and when it came to creating an automation solution, it made sense to build something ourselves.” All Pro worked with Upzoids, a member of the Microsoft Cloud Partner Network, to create and implement a solution in a fraction of the time a pre-built solution would have required. “The reason Upzoids stood out as the right partner for us was that they were willing to co-build the solution with us, rather than keeping us disconnected from the process,” says Koch. “This suited our agile approach.” Not only did All Pro value the chance to develop a solution internally, the flexibility of the Power Platform helped the business avoid costly consultant fees. “By building our solution in house with the Power Platform, we saved 30,000 dollars in fees,” says Koch.

Crucially, the All Pro Employee Portal is designed to accommodate the various employee types at the company, some with All Pro emails and some field employees who do not have company emails. “The approach we took to the portal is that everything employees do is via Power Pages,” explains Koch. “This allows for external users who don’t have company emails to interact with Microsoft Dataverse in the field while employees with All Pro emails use a separate application that requires a different level of access. We use data connectors to make the two systems talk to each other.” Working with Upzoids helped the small business realize value quickly. “Upzoids and Power Pages allowed us to build an agile solution that achieved impact in weeks, not months,” says Koch. Ultimately, All Pro went live with the new solution in ten weeks, an impressive speed to value, especially compared with the 12–24 month timelines the company had been quoted for comparable solutions.

Next, All Pro will be adding additional functionality to the portal, including for project management, change orders, invoice tracking, and purchase orders. And, the business is also looking to create interactive dashboards using Power BI. “Having all our data in Dataverse allows us to create additional use cases very seamlessly, especially using other aspects of the Microsoft ecosystem like Outlook and Excel.” As for the changes brought by automating processes, Koch sees the move as part of All Pro’s overall drive to become ever more competitive in its industry; “the more effective we can be internally, the more we can take on as a business. The solution we built allows us to be more competitive and allocate fewer resources to manual administrative tasks that are time consuming and make it more challenging to drive the bottom line,” he says.