The project management team at a major pharmaceutical company had a practical yet progressive vision in mind: the ability to review and update project statuses across their entire suite of existing and retired projects from a single application. If the team could meet this goal, instead of spending hours each day pulling together disparate data across projects, they could spend more time on advanced analysis and focus on finding ways to improve performance.
Power Platform Migration Boosts Tracking Capabilities
The team was already planning a migration away from their current project management platform. This migration offered the perfect opportunity to upgrade their project tracking capabilities. The Development team scoped out a technology solution using the Power Platform by Microsoft (Power BI / Power Automate / PowerApps), knowing they would need expert guidance to put the entire solution together and meet their ultimate goal of all-in-one project tracking.
When the client partnered with Onebridge to implement the Power Platform, the first step was to build on their existing SQL Server Database instance as the backbone for the entire Platform setup, then to customize the platform to suit their needs from start to finish:
- Created custom views and stored procedures inside the database that the PowerApp would call when it needed to push data
- Built the PowerApp and Flows in Power Automate from scratch
- Custom-generated Power BI reports for management-level reporting and provided the auditing function for what had been entered as a streaming dataset via the PowerApp
From PowerApps, we used Flow to create a data compilation to be added to a live streaming dataset to capture changes, along with the time and author of the change. This is especially helpful with entries containing a mistake because it makes it easy for an end-user to see what happened and fix the error.
Combining Automation with Heightened Security
The Onebridge team also automated the generation of management reporting for the PMPD team. We not only followed their rigorous security guidelines but also added an even higher level of security than their previous solution.
The automated streaming reporting was a pleasant surprise for the PMPD team. They wanted to ensure that, when using the application, they would know who was using the app, who was making which changes, and how those changes were captured. The benefit of a streaming dataset is that it is fixed – no one can edit the information saved in the dataset. This creates transparency for the PMPD team and makes it ideal for internal auditing needs.
Graduating from PowerPoint to Power BI
With the Power Platform implemented, the team was able to track all projects through one platform with management reporting taken out of PowerPoint and automated by the Power BI dashboarding, saving hours of work per Project Manager.
The project we completed with the PMPD team boosted their capabilities in terms of automation, security, and data quality. Moving from PowerPoint to Power BI has saved them hours upon hours of manual work, which has helped productivity to skyrocket. Plus, they have access to a single source of truth for accurate, secure, and complete information so they can make better business decisions faster.
