When you are a pirate, it is pretty usefull to know what kind of weather it is, right? And, when you first have your own Awesome Pirate Corp. app, this information should of course be available here (we know, it’s cold to be a Norwegain Pirate right now!):
To do this, we created a flow that gets your location data when you use the PowerApp, goes out and gets the weather where you are, and pushes it back to the PowerApp to show you:
Our Pirates are not happy that all the tasks they get assigned in F&O only are available there. Why should they need to log in to F&O to see them or get an email notification that they have been assigned a new task? We all know that there are more than enough emails going around, so let’s make it easier for everyone. This flow automatically includes the tasks that are assigned to you for Onboarding or Offboarding processes in F&O directly to you Microsoft To-Do list through Planner. Then they pop stright up in you list, and you can handle it from there. Pretty cool, right?
When planning for a ACDC Hackaton, we won’t just show up with our screens and work work work. It’s important to have fun too! We have planned for our “spot” in the room a long time before the event, and that’s why it looks as it does as well! 😊 And, of course we need matching clotes as well, we will feel like a very good team every hour and every day! And, just as a little extra setup as well, we have a cooler in place to make sure we always have cold, refreshing drinks to keep the spirit as good as we can! 😊
It’s a new day, and the kick-off for day two is already done! Even tho it got a little late last night, nothing stops us to start before the sun rises today! This will be an awesome day for sure!
Without the appropriate tools, it is very hard for the Pirate Planners to be able to plan as accurately as they can the different sailings with different pirates when they actually don’t know what pirate with what skill is available at what time. When the Awesome Pirate Corp. uses Dynamics FinOps as their ERP system, we need to create an easy way for the Planners to do their job as easy as they can.
To do this, we have planned to help them by doing this:
And then, what use is all this if the pirate does not have easy access to the information when they are out on the ship? We need to give them the tool they need for this, so that’s why we will create a canvas app they can use on their mobile. And, when we first do this, they we can add a lot of other features as well for them. We have planned for this app to:
Why we think we should get a high ranking in the different categories:
Excellent user experience: Pirates being out on the see can not use F&O to manage their data and their tasks. This has to be done on a mobile app! And, for those that has used F&O… It is not the most sexy system to use for regular employees and manager, we can give them a lot better experience with an app that can be personalized with their companies colors and logo. And, for all the planners and the pirates, having a very cool and easy way to plan the bookings for everyone, to be done by always having the up-to-date data from F&O is highly useful for them!
Most extreme business value: Our solution will make the workday easier for everyone in the company, every week! This is something we know is a high demand for a lot of companies using F&O today. To give this opportunity, and the possibility to get a lot of more information to every pirate in the same app, so they only have one place to go to handle everything they need to every day, will save everyone a lot of time.
Rock solid geekiness: We use a lot of different Microsoft technology, and combine it together to make the solution as smooth and “easy” looking for everyone that will use it. It will be a lot of flows, api’s, apps, dynamics and Microsoft services running together in the seamlessly and in real-time!
Killer app: Both the canvas app and the model driven app will be such good tools for everyone to use, and the data coming out from them and flowing back and forth should be enough to get us a lot of point here. All the features we have planned for the pirates to have in the canvas app, and have it all work on a mobile phone, will be awesome!
Through our Pirate Satisfaction Questionnaire, one of the things that really stood out was that now when the Awesome Pirate Corp. had implemented Dynamics 365 F&O as their ERP system, the pirates found it really hard to be able to check, complete tasks and update their personal information like bank-account when they are out on the ship and only have their mobile available. In addition to this, it was really hard for them to see where they are planned to be and the Pirate Planners had a hard time to plan where the pirates should be as they did not have the total overview over where another planner had booked the pirate the next weeks.
After reviewing this, the Awesome Pirate Corp. engaged 5 half-geeky, wanted, pirates to help out with this. The 5 PowerPirates went into their house and planned how this could be solved, and came out with this plan:
This solution will make the every-day a lot easier for everyone in the Awesome Pirate Corp, and combined with the right PowerBI reports, this will give everyone a lot better overview iver everything going on! And, maybe a Power Virtual Agent can give the pirates a lot of the answers they need, without Pirate HR to be involved? We think so 😉
Awesome app that’s detecting turtles! And, it’s pretty glussy, isn’t it? 🙂 The video was too big to upload, but you can see it here:
– GIF – Imgur
We came into this Hackaton with the idea that we could make the Onboarding process a lot less manual, a lot more secure and reduce the risk of human errors in the process significantly. And we’ll be honest, we are extreamly happy with the solution we now are traveling home with! The best thing you ask? It works like a sharm, every bit of it! We have tested it several times, and everything flows exactly as described!
You can see the full solution under here, but we’ll start with a summary of why we think we should get a lot of points in the four different main categories:
Lets start with the help this will give to the employees already working in the company:
– HR now will have a veary streamlined process for Onboarding, where all tasks that can (and should be) automated are just that. They don’ need to spend time sending out agreements, follow up with signature, enter a lot of information regarding the new employee in the system, follow up on other employees that forgets the tasks they have in an Onboarding. They don’t need to notify IT about a new employee coming it and wait for creation of user and access to systems. All of this happens automatically. Nothing is forgotten, no sensitive information is sent in emails or seen by someone who shouldn’t see it.
– IT never needs to think about a new employee coming in anymore. Everything is automated and just happens. Isn’t that the best user experience? When you actually don’t have to do even one click, and the process still works?
– Other employees in the company having tasks regarding a new employee coming in will be reminded of their tasks and make sure nothing is forgotten. Automated and nice. And, if they complete their task, no notifcation will be sent, it really is as easy as it sounds
And then, to the candidate starting. If the company implements this solution, everything will be ready for the new employee when he has his firsgt day of work. He can even get information about the company, his team, his manager and more in the Onboarding Portal before he starts, so we can keep up the good energy people feel when they are about to start working at a new company. The new employee will also feel that this company really takes care of their employees, and that they really are up to date in the digital world we’re living in.
The value for companies here are so high, that it’s almost difficult to know where to start. But, first of all, this saves a lot of time for the HR department. And, we really mean A LOT of time. Not just that everything is automated so they don’t need to do as much as they have to now to register a new employee, but they don’t have to push and follow up everyone else that hasn’t done their part and they don’t have to correct human errors that’s been done during the process. They can spend their time on something that is much more valuable to the company, and that is to make sure that all the employees already working here gets the best environment possible to do their job as best as they can! Lets face it, this is what we want the HR department to do, we don’t want them to spend time on entering data into a system.
The IT department will also save a lot of time witht this solution, that they can spend on other things as well. Not that I work in our IT department, but I assume that creating users and assigning licenses and access aren’t the most fun task they do at work. So I would think this will actually make their workday more fun!
Let’s just do an approxemently calculation of time saved. Create a contract for the new employee, upload it for e-signature, send it for signing, recieve it, ask the employee for more information so that it can manually be put into the system. Let’s say this totally takes 5 hours at best. Then someone needs to tell IT to create user and access and make sure that it have been done, a total of 1 hours. Then someone needs to follow up other employees, to make sure everything is done and ready for the new employee. This is maybe the most time consuxming, and I don’t think it’s wrong to say that this takes at best 8 hours in total during the time between someone signs and their first day of work. This means that time saved for just this one onboarding process is at least 14 hours. One of our customers typically hires between 10 and 20 employees every month, and this means that this solution will save them between 140 and 280 hours. Each month! To have an other example, an other customer of ours plans to hire 1.500 employees by the end of 2023… You do the math here!
There are so many partws in this solution that works perfectly together, we almost can’t believe that we actually made this work as good as it does now. We seriously din’t think that we would be able to automate that many parts of the process as we have done now.
We have created this as a total solution, so that everything can be uploaded and used by all companies using Dynamics FO og Dynamics HR. With only a little personalization to make the wording, logo etc. fit the different companies, this can be set up quite fast. And, of course, each part can be implemented by it’s self too, if someone don’t want the whole solution. But, we know that this will be an easy solution to sell to our customers, as we know that a lot of them already really wants this!
And now, finally, let’s go to the solution. You have been through a recruitment process in your company, and you have picked a really awesome candidate you want to send an offer to. This is what you do:
Like magic, the candidate resieves an email to view, update and sign the agreement. The Agreement is automatically filled with data from Dynamics before it’s sent out for signing, done through an API we created with OneFlow right here at this Hackaton:
The candidagte fills in the National ID number, and signs the Agreement using Bank-ID:
This triggers a PowerAutomate that first create a work email for the new emplyee, sets this new email as the primary email address on the Employee workspace in Dynamics and creates the Azure AD user for the new employee and assigns group and licenses to it, and ends with sending the login detail to the employee with SMS, together with the link to the Onboardig Portal:
And, of course we have created a PowerAutomate that will remind the employees in your company about the tasks they are assigned regarding the onboarding of the new employee if they don’t follow it up by themself:
Now, the employee can log in to the Onboarding Portal (that works on all devices), and enter in more information about himself. When submitted, the data is automatically updated directly in Dataverse, and then becomes visiable in Dynamics within seconds:
And, last, but absolutely not least, the night before the new employee has his firs day of work, a PowerAutomate runs and imports the user to Dynamics, connects the user to the correct employee in Dynamics, and assigns the security role Employee to the user so that the new employee has accsess to the Employee Self-Service workspace in Dynamics:
And, to end it all for now, we have automated the process for email signature, so that is is automatically put on every one of the emails you send out. Now they finally will lokk the same for the whole company:
When we, three NoCode/LowCode people register for a Hackaton, we kind of figured out that maybe writing code wasn’t the way to help other teams. But, that doesn’t stop us, we’ll help you out in any way we can! And, when someone needs something cut with scissors, we’re there! It’s our pleasure, and the sign looks amazing!
And of course, enjoy a cold coke while you see us working hard to acchive what you need <3
And now it’s time to show the first of our really good user experience features in the solution. To be honest, if you told a HR person today that he could do two clicks in his HR system and type the agreed salary (or proposed salary, of course this can be changed during the signing process, I mean, why shouldn’t that be possible in 2022?), and right away send an Employemnt Agreement to the candidate they’ve decided to hire? We know that the HR department at our company now will want us to implement this app as soon as we’re back at the office on Monday (yep, I know you’re reading this Christian, we’ll talk on Monday reguarding the expence claim from the bar). But, to get to the point. We’ve created an app, and published it in the Personnel Management workspace in D365 HR, and if you click the tab to open the app embedded in the workspace, you get to choose the canidate you want to sent an Employment Agreement to for signing and just do it:
