We made the approval process work – enabling trips to be approved and tracked – and reduced manual effort.
Problem:
A Further and Higher Education College provides education to around 30,000 students across the country. The college organises several trips throughout the year and need to track trip details including information on student and staff attendance, and formalise their trip booking process, with enhanced security and compliance.
Solution: (built using SharePoint, PowerApps and Power Automate)
OfficeLabs suggested an extensible and flexible ‘Educational Visits’ platform built with Microsoft PowerApps and SharePoint list storage to allow a multi-platform, integrated solution while taking advantage of Microsoft 365 security and integration. Power Automate automated flows would be leveraged to provide the required workflow functionality to ensure that notifications are made to the relevant contact groups for timely action.
OfficeLabs created a PowerApps application to record the following information:
- Trip details
- Costs
- Health and Safety Documentation
- First stage approval
- Student Details
- Details were brought in from an existing SQL database using a workflow
- Staff details
- Travel details
- Final approval.
We then built an approval process:
- A two-stage approval process which required 7 approvers in total
- A notification system where the user could send the trip for approval and the approvers would be notified
- The approvers would receive a link to the specific item in need of approval and could approve/reject the item using approval functions which were conditionally visible to them.
And finally, we built reporting/querying:
- Gives users a summary of the trip details
- Users were able to search and filter for items using the gallery scree
- Users can navigate to either the item details or straight to the student details screen to log attendance on the day of the trip.
Benefits:
The College can now more productively manage, approve, and report on their educational trips.
We can build you any approval solution to reduce your manual effort and improve reporting. Let OfficeLabs help you map your path to improved productivity – contact us today.
