Case Study - Firstcom Europe
Dedicated Power Apps Canvas App
Implementing a powerful and intuitive bespoke Power Apps solution
Company Introduction
Established in 2004, Firstcom Europe have been providing advanced cloud solutions to over 14,000 customers all over Europe. Several acquisitions over the past six years have taken place and the business now has a presence in the UK, Poland, Germany, Sweden and Denmark.
Firstcom Europe’s mission is to help communication in the cloud for businesses and people. To achieve this, they provide a range of telecoms products and cloud communication platforms, alongside designing, supplying, and installing business phone systems. Firstcom Europe also offers additional services, including broadband, business mobile phones, IP CCTV systems, cloud backup, storage and disaster recovery.
Firstcom Europe have been using Dynamics 365 for several years to help manage installations, service jobs, and customer service. The business needed a more efficient way of managing service jobs, as well as streamlining the data capture and entry process for engineers in the field.
As Firstcom Europe’s existing Dynamics 365 partner, Strategy 365 were approached with the aim of developing a tablet-first app to deliver this functionality.
Solution Components
Solution Size
12 Users
Project Summary
The main aim of the project was to help Firstcom Europe implement a system to help manage their field service calls for job and case management. Previously, Firstcom Europe were updating information on spreadsheets and manually entering data into Word documents. Following thorough analysis, Strategy 365 proposed to implement a Microsoft Power Apps bespoke canvas app to help Firstcom Europe manage jobs for their field engineers and extend their existing Dynamics 365 solution to enable job scheduling and allocation.
Firstcom Europe send their field engineers to customer sites to install telecoms setups and/or service existing systems. Previously, this was recorded manually on job sheets and spreadsheets. To solve this problem, Strategy 365 designed a bespoke canvas app to enable field engineers to access and enter data from anywhere.
Jobs are initially created, scheduled and allocated in Dynamics 365, for field engineers to then access them in the canvas app. This app enables them to easily view their upcoming jobs, alongside any relevant information for the job, such as case notes, order sheets, and installation checklists. The app also works offline, ensuring that field engineers can work with job data even if they experience any connectivity issues while on site.
Once a job is completed and signed off by the field engineer in the app, automated processes are triggered to create standardised job documents, which are emailed to the customer automatically and also stored in the customer’s respective SharePoint folder.
You can learn more about Microsoft Power Apps and our bespoke business application solutions here.
Key Deliverables
- A tablet-first app to manage service jobs allocated to field engineers
- To reduce manual tasks and move to a paperless solution
- To improve the automation of job and case management
- Automatic document generation, storage and distribution
Benefits
The Microsoft Power Apps bespoke canvas app solution has brought Firstcom Europe significant benefits, including:
- Efficient management of creation, allocation, and scheduling of jobs for field engineers
- Centralised and consolidated data within one easy-to-access solution
- Automation of document and report generation, ensuring efficiency of time and resources and standardised document formatting and storage
- Offline capability for the canvas app, guaranteeing that it can be used at all times at any location
With our custom Power App, our field staff can work from anywhere, capturing just the data we need. Standardised automated reporting saves time and gives our customers a better, prompter service - all backed up by great support from Strategy 365!
Ben St Barbe, Head of Service, Firstcom Europe
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