Case Study 4: First Up Consultants
Background
First Up Consultants is a professional services organization headquartered in Europe, with offices in North America. The company supports small- to medium-sized and enterprise organizations with a range of information technology, project management, change management, and finance management consultancy needs. The organization employs 500 full-time consultants and engages with over 1,000 external contractors to support the delivery of its various projects.
Current environment
The company has been using Microsoft Power Platform for several years and currently has the following implemented:
- A model-driven app named Project Planning Application that is used by the project management office (PMO) team within the company to plan, schedule and collate information for each client project. The application supports the following functionality areas:
o Storage for project-level information, such as start date, end date and client data.
o A series of inputs to capture detailed information for statements of work as part of a standard document format. This information is manually entered by the PMO team.
o Information regarding internal and external consultants is stored within a custom table called Resources.
o Information within the Resources table regarding full-time consultants is typically populated manually by the PMO team. For external consultants, the company regularly attends industry events and collates business cards for potential new employees or external contractors.
Information regarding these individuals is then manually entered into the application. The PMO team then asks suitable candidates to complete an application form in Microsoft Word standard format and upload it via a secure URL. Again, the PMO team then manually enters the data into Project Planning Application.
- A canvas app named Time Entry Application is used by the employees and external contractors to capture the time worked on projects. The application has been configured with the following defined controls:
o dpStartDate: A date picker control to indicate the start date of the time entry.
o dpEndDate: A date picker control to indicate the end date of the time entry.
o inptDescription: A control used to indicate the type of activity and project worked on.
- A mobile app stores the current user's email address as part of a variable called varUserName.
The company uses Microsoft SharePoint on premises to store all sensitive documents. Company policy mandates that all client-related documents are stored within this environment only.
The company uses SAP as its back-end accounting system. The company maintains separate SAP systems in each legal jurisdiction where it is based. The system is relied upon for the following critical business processes:
- External contractors working on a project send their invoices to a dedicated mailbox that is monitored by the company's accounting team. The accounting team must then manually process these invoices into SAP at the end of each month. Due to the number of external contractors, hundreds of invoices must be processes monthly.
- Basic API access for the SAP system is provided via a mixture of native application APIs and a middleware Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) API hosted on premises. The middleware API supports the ability to post time entries against the relevant projects in any SAP system by specifying the system and client ID as a query parameter in the URL. The middleware API was developed several years ago, and the source code is no longer available. Data is returned in XML format, which can then be analyzed further.
- When a project enters the closure phase, members of the PMO team need to navigate to SAP, enter some details, and then capture information from a PDF that is generated and opened on the screen, such as the final settlement amount. This information is then manually entered into Project Planning Application.
The company maintains a separate system containing detailed profile information regarding internal employees. The PMO team currently manually enters information from this system into the Resources table. Developers in the company have created a modern REST API for this system, which is actively maintained. The system contains highly sensitive personal information (PI) regarding each employee.
The company has several on-premises Windows environments that it has identified as suitable for usage because they exist within the same physical network as SAP and the middleware API.
These environments must be patched regularly, and all activities targeting these environments must be automated.
Project Planning Application
- Rather than manually populating the statement of work information, users should place it in a SharePoint folder for this information to be extracted and mapped to the correct inputs.
- A new automation is required to integrate with the profile information system. Because the company plans to consume this data in several ways, a streamlined mechanism for working with the API is required to improve reusability.
- An automation is required to handle the project closure steps in SAP and to store the relevant information from SAP into the app.
- Once a new candidate uploads a completed application form, information from the form should be copied automatically into Project Planning Application.
Time Entry Application
- Time Entry Application needs to be extended to integrate alongside SAP, ensuring postings for time entries are processed successfully. When a time entry is submitted, the entry should be posted automatically to SAP.
- Time entries must always be submitted with relevant text that indicates the type of activity and project worked on.
- The automation should be able to detect and handle any errors that occur when posting individual time entries.
Invoice Processing
- Invoices sent to the account's mailbox must be processed automatically and created as invoices within SAP.
General
- Development efforts should be avoided or mitigated when there is native functionality already available.
- Reusability of components is desired to assist citizen developers in creating any solutions in future.
- All automation activities should run without disruption during an outage or a patching cycle.
- Use of username and password credentials should be avoided.
- Automations should not rely on human intervention to execute.
- Use of public cloud file services should be restricted.
- Where possible, JSON should be the preferred format when transferring data.
Issues
- Users within the PMO team report that it takes many hours to put the data from each business card into the system.
- You create the automation to process the time entries, called Submit Time Entry, and add it to the application. Users report issues with the formula used to connect to the automation.
- During a monthly patch cycle, IT support team members cannot identify the correct steps to patch the machine without disrupting any automation.
- While performing an audit of the new solution during the test phase, the company's information security team identifies that users can freely save confidential documents to OneDrive for Business.
- When creating the automation for the project closure process, you discover that some of the required information needs to be exported via the SAP GUI and extracted from a comma- separated value (CSV) file.
- When building the automation for the profile information system, you identify that all requests into the API will fail unless the following HTTP header value is specified: o Accept:
application/json
Drag and Drop Question
You need to recommend a solution to address the requirements and issues.
Which feature should you recommend? To answer, move the appropriate feature to the correct requirement or issue. You may use feature once, more than once, or not at all. You may need to move the split bar between panes or scroll to view content.
NOTE: Each correct selection is worth one point.