BSM

Creation of digital forms with Microsoft Power Apps tools for the different BSM business units

BSM is a company of the Barcelona City Council that was created in 2002 with the aim of unifying the provision of municipal services in a single company.
Currently, the activities managed by BSM are varied and include everything from aspects related to mobility to the management of reference facilities dedicated to culture, leisure and biodiversity.

The challenge

BSM’s different business units used paper to fill out different types of work orders. Given BSM’s commitment to the environment and its sustainable development goals (SDGs) and its work on one of its strategic lines for innovation and digitalization, they wanted to eliminate paper and make validation flows more efficient by digitalizing all the work orders and forms of the different business units.

BSM proposed that this project be carried out with the possibilities offered by the Microsoft 365 suite, for an exhaustive use of the solutions incorporated in this platform, in accordance with the strategy established by the corporate Information Systems unit.

Solution

The project for the digitalization of different business units of BSM consisted of the development of a set of digital forms for the Barcelona Zoo, Civic Agents and the corporate unit of Strategic Planning. Ensuring its back office management, workflows and data repository for different areas of BSM, as well as the maintenance of this and

The architecture proposed by NexTReT is based on the Microsoft 365 platform and its Power Platform application. Two products will be used within the Power Platform:
• Power Apps: Tool to create SharePoint forms and mobile applications as well as web portals.
• Power Automate: Tool that facilitates the generation of integrated automation within the Office 365 platform and its activated tools and applications.

NexTReT’s proposal was to generate within the SharePoint Online platform the different data repositories to support the forms that had to be created for the Zoo and Civic Agents as well as for Strategic Planning. The data generated by the forms would be stored within the SharePoint lists distributed in different Sites.

Power Apps was used to create the necessary apps for users to access forms via mobile or tablet and to complete or modify the information in the different stored records. Power Apps also allows users to share the application with a limited group of users, thus restricting access only to those who can use the data and the generated forms.

The automation that was wanted to be achieved, such as data approvals and data reviews to ensure the content was valid and validated by a supervisor, were done with Power Automate. Validator management was done through configuration lists where you can specify who act as validator users.

At the data architecture distribution level, the creation of a Site for each of the data and form sections to be generated (Zoo, Civic Agents and Strategic Planning) was proposed, thus ensuring a good separation of the data that allows for an adequate configuration of the data access permissions, as well as the configuration of the forms.

The NexTReT service to BSM is accompanied by preventive and corrective maintenance of the development and infrastructure of Sharepoint applications, documentation, user support service through a Ticketing tool and support and collaboration with other IT areas.

Benefits

With the incorporation of digital forms, BSM has been able to eliminate paper, a very important point due to its commitment to the environment, and make validation flows and backoffice processes more efficient.

It has several forms for the different business units that facilitate the daily tasks of employees, since they can do everything from a mobile phone or tablet.

It has increased security and control of access to information due to the different user roles available on the Sharepoint platform.

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