Birthdays, anniversaries or contract renewals, it’s almost impossible to keep track of when there is something to celebrate. At Dynamic People we were told by Team Leads that a notification in time would be desirable so that there is enough time to think of or organize something. Be Empowered doesn’t want to hear that twice. This calls for a Power App!
A Cloud Flow can also be festive
In a short session with the HR manager, we determined how we could design this. The idea soon arose to build a Cloud Flow that daily retrieves the data of all employees with upcoming birthday’s or other anniversaries, and send a message with the names of those colleagues to the team leads. Now we know that a Cloud Flow can look at many more date fields and we have decided to make the solution broader. These were our ‘requirements’:
- We want to be able to send notifications about the following events (date fields) and this must be expandable. We chose the following fields for our Anniversaries App:
- Birthdays
- Work anniversaries
- End date of contract
- The following functionalities must be configurable:
- The number of days before the event
- Work anniversary and number of years of employment such as 1, 5 or 10 year anniversary
- Send messages via mail or Teams
- Recipients
- Message text
- Notifications management must be possible in the mobile app
- The solution must work within the existing HR environment
Power Platform Party
Thanks to the Power Platform and the low-code no-code possibilities, we realized the Power App within one week. The following components were included:
- One custom table where the notification scheme is determined. The following is recorded here:
- Type (birthday/anniversary/end of contract)
- Channel (mail/Teams)
- Days before event (e.g. if 5 is entered for a birthday notification, recipients will receive a message when a colleague’s birthday is in 5 days)
- Number of years in employment (only in the case of anniversaries)
- Recipients
- Subject (mail notifications only)
- Message text
- The Anniversary Notification Manager: a Canvas App in which the notification schemes can be managed
- One Cloud Flow per notification type that does the following:
- Retrieve notification schemes of the specific type (can be multiple, e.g. anniversary 30 days in advance and anniversary 10 days in advance)
- Retrieve for each scheme all colleagues who meet the conditions of the scheme
- Send a message to all recipients per scheme with the list of colleagues that meet the conditions of the scheme
The app has been kept simple, so that managing the notifications hardly takes time. Text for the notifications is generated automatically, but is customizable to make it more personal. The app consists of three screens: a loading screen, an overview of all notification schemes, and a page to create or update a notification scheme. The last screen formats itself is based on what is entered. A small impression:
A small impression speaks louder than a thousand words:
Loading screen
Overview
Create or edit notification:
Generic solution
As the solution has been designed with a broad perspective, it can be deployed to fit all kinds of data tables, as long as they contain a date column. Think about notifications for ending customer contracts, or reminders for a team event that’s planned in the near future.
