The client is one of the largest nonprofits in Canada, currently serving more than 21,000 people in need across Edmonton and several other communities in central Alberta. As an NGO, they focus on a multitude of areas including psychological counselling, immigrant & refugee support, supporting people with disabilities, supportive housing and more.
To ensure that they delivered the right service to the people in need, they had a detailed assessment process. To assist with the assessment process, the agency had an existing NAARS assessment app, which was built using Microsoft Power Apps. The workers and volunteers used the app to record the details of the beneficiary and calculate the beneficiary’s needs on a scale, and then to generate the appropriate plan if needed. The performance of the app was central to the entire service delivery process.
The Challenges in Generating Reports though the Application
One of the key actions of the existing application was to generate a report based on the beneficiary’s needs. The reports aimed at helping the entire team understand the general trends and address the specific needs of each individual beneficiary. However, their existing application created issues while downloading the reports. This was a major hurdle for the team in performing their daily activities and serving the community.
Just like most other organizations, the client spent a considerable amount of time on repetitive tasks. For example, they had to manually export the report from the NAARS application every time they needed it. Hence, they were also looking to automate the process of exporting reports.
The Problems in Making the Application Adapt to their Needs
Like other sectors, the demands have changed for the nonprofit sector as well. Therefore, the client wanted to customize the application to adapt to their changing needs. Hence, they were looking for a reliable partner who can help them fix the issues with their NAARS application and make suitable changes to it.
After thoroughly analyzing the needs of the client, we decided to use a custom Azure function to solve the critical challenges with the performance of their existing Power Apps application.
Azure Functions is a serverless computing service, enabling the execution of small units of code, called functions. Since there was no need to manage servers, the response time was vastly reduced. This meant that the users could download real-time reports from the NAARS app more quickly.
After zeroing in on Azure Functions, work started on conceptualizing and developing a solution for enhancing the performance of the NAARS application. Our team of experts developed an optimized Azure function that avoided unnecessary processing and took significantly less time in generating the report through their existing application. All issues with downloading the report were resolved.
Previously, the client faced issues with the report format generated by the app. This required additional effort to correct the format. With custom Azure functions, such formatting issues were also resolved.
As mentioned earlier, manually exporting reports was a serious impediment to their operational efficiency. Therefore, we decided to automate the process with Microsoft Power Automate. Power Automate offered several advantages. One of the biggest benefits was its ease of use. Since it is a low-code automation tool, users from different technical backgrounds could easily operate and make changes to it, without extensive coding knowledge.
Using Power Automate, we fully automated the process of exporting reports through the NAARS app. By eliminating the need for manual effort, we reduced the time taken to complete processes and allowing the team members to focus on more productive aspects of their work.
We also planned and worked on redesigning the Power Apps application to meet the changing needs of the agency. All the requests and requirements of the client were considered and included in the new design.
Once all the customizations were integrated into the NAARS application, we rigorously tested it in the UAT environment. After ensuring that it met the desired level of performance, we deployed the application in the production environment.
After deploying the enhancements to the application, the users were able to download the up-to-date reports from the app, every single time, without any issue. By automating the exports of reports, the time taken for assessment was also significantly reduced. The customizations made to the app ensured that it could meet the demands of the agency, deliver better service, and work more efficiently towards the upliftment of the community.
Reduction in Performance Issues
Faster Report Downloads
Workers Benefitted
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