Building HR Appraisal App on Microsoft Power Apps

29 MAY 2020

The Client

The client is a conglomerate of eight organizations in Latin America.

The Need

The client was conducting the crucial HR Appraisal process using complex, high-maintenance legacy systems and technologies. The legacy on-premises systems made the HR appraisal of a huge number of employees of the eight organizations a time-consuming, complicated, and ineffective process. The technologies in use posed several challenges and made it difficult to customize employee records, appraisal metrics, and surveys. Additionally, the systems required extensive expertise for timely maintenance and management.

The client was looking for a modern solution that could replace legacy applications, reduce complexities in employee appraisal, and automate processes. The client approached Star Knowledge, a Microsoft Partner with extensive experience in delivering custom business solutions and Microsoft Power Apps consulting services to help them implement a solution that is easy to deploy, use and, manage in carrying out the appraisal of the employees.

The Microsoft-certified consultants at Star Knowledge performed a thorough analysis of the client requirement and learned that the appraisal procedure needed several types of feedback forms and flows to be configured to improve the HR appraisal process. The consultants at Star Knowledge leveraged and implemented the Microsoft Power Platform – Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, and SharePoint Online to build custom forms and automate process flows of the business.

The Challenge

Deploying modern business solutions is not hard while replacing them with existing legacy solutions is challenging. The legacy systems and implementation of modern customized flows posed the below challenges:

• Data – The employee information was to be brought from their legacy system which also acted as their HRMS tool
• Language Barrier – Language was a challenge as the solution was to be built in Spanish
• Customizations – There were several calculations and forms that needed to be customized and workflows defined

The Solution

Team Star Knowledge built a solution on Microsoft Power Apps while using SharePoint List in the background to store the records. A complex site structure and architecture solution was designed to support add, edit and update of the employee records and the appraisal metrics.

The entire process involved integrating the legacy on-premises application data to SharePoint list using BCS (Business Connectivity Services) connector and WCF services hosted on Azure. The solution involved setting up pre-requisite forms by the HR to setup Competencies, Indicators, Descriptors, Functions, Performance Metrics, Evaluator assignment, Employee classification and levels per organization.

The solution was architected in a way where once the evaluation began, it would notify the employee and the manager to begin the process for trial employee feedback, midyear feedback, first feedback and the annual feedback that would be calculated based on the points, level and the survey that would be conducted. The HR would be able to download custom reports and view them on Power BI as well.

The Benefits Obtained

• The solution is a low-code, easy-to-customize solution that can be easily customized
• All 8 organizations of the conglomerate were easily able to manage the process of their organizations based on security roles
• HR managers were able to streamline the process by reducing the manpower effort with the manual updates to the legacy system and follow ups that requires a lot of human intervention
• HR of each organization can get csv reports as well as the Power BI dashboards to view the performance of the organization and chief HR officer can view all organization’s data
• The solution on Power BI enabled with SharePoint BCS and their legacy solution meant no data of the user from the HRMS system had to be migrated to SharePoint manually nor change any business processes

Technology

• Microsoft Power Apps
• Microsoft Power Automate (Flow)
• Microsoft Power BI
• SharePoint Online
• HTML
• Custom Connectors
• SharePoint BCS
• WCF (Windows Communication Foundation)
• Azure

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