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:

• Create a model driven app that gets all the data it needs from F&O with DataFlows and PowerQuery (Projects, WBS, Resources, Worker information, Skills for the worker etc.).
• The palnners will then use the model driven app to plan the pirates on the different sailings and tasks on that sailing depended on the skill-set they get for the different pirates from F&O.
• We will also create PowerBI reports that always shows what pirates are booked for what the next weeks, so that we easily can see if someone is overbooked or if someone has too much free-time and needs to get booked so that they don’t do less than the workforce they have available (more sailings equal more gold to bring back home!)

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:

• Give them the option to update their personal information in F&O from the canvas app
• Have access to their personal PowerBI showing them where they are planned when
• Have tasks assigned to the Pirate in F&O (for example Onboarding tasks) automatically be a To-Do so we can show their To-Do list in the app and they can work with the tasks there and mark it as Completed in F&O when it is completed in the To-Do list.
• Create a Power Virtual Agent in the app that can answer questions they need answers to, without needing to bother the HR or other departments (and, maybe they can ask other questions too that chatgpt can answer for them 😉)
• Make it possible for them to fill out their timesheets for the week directly in the canvas app

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!