Leave Management Canvas App for a Dutch-based food processing company
Customer:
The client is a Dutch enterprise company into production and distribution of fresh vegetables and salads within the food region. It produces brilliant, convenient vegetable products for the retail and food service markets through its innovative operation of the business. The company is worried about sustainability and innovation within its operation.
Challenge:
The client had a number of problems regarding the management of the application for leaves of absences concerning internal and contractor employees. They wanted to empower these processes as much as possible using the Microsoft 365 toolset without acquiring further licensing costs and remaining within the Microsoft ecosystem.
Key issues included:
- Fragmented Leave Submission Process: Internal and contract employees submit leaves on paper manually. This inflicts miscommunication, lost requests, and general inefficiency in the process.
- Lack of Centralized Visibility: The big picture of employee leave patterns is so hard for managers to have; thus, this impacts staffing and resource planning negatively.
- Insufficient Workflows in Approval: The approval cycle involved in the process of leave sanctioning contributes to making the process very slow and always delaying, leading to frustration among employees and management.
- Poor Communication and Feedback: Nothing much was ever communicated to the employees regarding the status of their leave requests, leaving them in the dark, insecure, and unhappy.
- Compliance and Data Management Issues: Incoherent processes created potential compliance issues and made correct reporting on leave utilization hard to achieve.
- Complicated User Experience: The current state of the leave management system was complex to use, which had brought about low engagement and compliance with company leave policies.
In other words, the client wanted a solution that would ease the process of managing leaves, communicating better, getting insight, and making it lawful easier to comply within a manner that leveraged capabilities they already have in Microsoft 365 without adding to costs.
The Solution
To address these challenges, we designed an end to end Leave Management Solution on Microsoft 365 applications. Based on this system, integration of SharePoint Online for data management, Power Apps for internal employee requests, Microsoft Forms for contract employee submissions, and Automate streamline workflows.
Our solution includes the key component follows:
- SharePoint Online: It stores information about employee leave, leave type, and leave history.
- Power Apps: A simple, user-friendly application that internal employees use to request leaves.
- Microsoft Forms: This enables contract employees to request leave, whose data flows into SharePoint using Power Automate automatically.
- Power Automate: Automates the processing of approvals that shall be informed to the employees.
- Power BI: Provides deeper insight for the management in terms of trends and patterns of leaves taken.
Key Features of the Solution
Employee Dashboard: This reflects the leave balance sick leave, casual leave, and work-from-home, besides upcoming holidays. Hence, employees can easily raise a leave request.
- Leave Request: Internal employees submit the details of the leave using a Power Apps-based interface, while contract employees who do not have Microsoft 365 accounts use Microsoft Forms. Power Automate ensures that all tracked submissions are sent centrally to SharePoint.
- Intelligent Leave Calculation: It will calculate the total leave duration by excluding weekends and holidays automatically.
- Automated Approval Workflow: Maps the request to approvers as per predefined approval criteria for faster approvals.
- Email Approval: Approvers can act upon a request directly through their emails for quicker decision-making.
- Real-time notifications: Allow employees to see, in real time, changes in the status of their leave requests. This will minimize uncertainty and demystify the process for them.
- Admin Dashboard: It provides a helicopter view to managers and HR of forthcoming leaves and visualizes the leave patterns for effective workforce management.
- Power BI Integration: Comprehensive analytics are given on leave trends and consumption, and key performance indicators to make data-driven decisions about staffing and leave policy.
Results
This Microsoft 365-based Leave Management Solution allowed the client to experience large leaps in improvements through the following:
- Smoothened Leave Processes: Automating the processes of requesting and approving leaves reduced processing time and facilitated smooth communication between internal teams and contract workers.
- More Visibility and Engagement: A centralized Employee Dashboard shows complete visibility to their leave balance and schedules, engaging them more and bringing compliance adherence.
- Improved Workforce Planning: Admin Dashboard offers insights about employee availability and leave pattern analysis that helps a manager to do better resource allocation and planning.
- Smoothening Workflow Efficiency: The Automated Approval Workflow reduced the administrative burden, therefore increasing the communication between employees and management.
- Real-time transparency: It allowed real-time notifications for both employees and managers that helped build trust in the transparency of leave management.
- Data-driven decision making: Power BI allows the client to view trends in leave that keeps it compliant and assists in the workforce planning necessary for optimization of a workforce.
Overall, the system addressed the client’s immediate challenges and positioned the organization for future growth by maximizing the potential of Microsoft 365.
Tools & Technologies
Microsoft 365 SharePoint Online PowerApps Microsoft Forms Power Automate, Power BI , Low-code & No-code Solutions