For the first time, the event was held online and meant that even more of the Power Platform community could participate. The hackathon attracted 390 members in 49 teams, across 4 different time zones, who were tasked with demonstrating how Power Apps could help organisations during the current COVID-19 crisis.
Wanting to use an example of a “real-life” solution, Transparity’s Intelligent Cloud team proffered an app developed specifically for a leading British manufacturer to help with proactive monitoring of their employees for infection control purposes. The team partnered with the customer to build a multi-purpose app using Microsoft Power Apps, Power Automate and AI Builder.
As many businesses look to return to normal operations following the COVID-9 lockdown, organisations will look to introduce new measures to put in place, ensuring the health and wellbeing of its employees and particularly HR mangers are looking at ways in which it can ensure its employees are safe and where possible, social distancing enforced. This is particularly important for organisations where employees need to be on-site – front line workers, manufacturing and keyworkers.
Whilst each organisation will have different requirements, Transparity has worked with one of its customers to create an ‘Employee Health and Wellbeing’ Microsoft Power App solution that has been built with a modular approach in mind; enabling them to build upon the application as and when required.
Thermal Screening
One of the key preventative measure’s organisations are looking to introduce include the use of ‘Thermal Imaging for Detecting Elevated Body Temperature’ or ‘Temperature Screening’.
Existing suppliers of Thermal Imaging hardware solutions are adapting their solutions and launching a suite of fever-screening solutions using thermal imaging to help organisations mitigate against the spread of the coronavirus.
Adapting existing thermal imaging technology, identify individuals with a fever that may be symptomatic of Covid-19 as they enter public spaces, hospitals, retail units and other buildings.
To enable organisations track, manage and automate communications between employees the ‘Employee Health and Wellbeing App’ records each employee who enters the site, if the screening indicates that they have a higher than average temperature they are then sent additional information. The employees line manager is also notified; and where needed additional measures put in place to ensure appropriate containment.
- Temperature screening is the process of contactless recording of an employee’s body temperature on arrival to work
- Using AI technology built directly within the Microsoft Power Platform, the employee using the device can scan the employee’s ID card, returning their employee details and record their result
- Where an employee’s temperature is identified as being above a set threshold, they will be asked to answer additional questions and will be monitored more regularly than others
- An Admin Application to be used by senior managers to visualise and report on the status of the temperature scanning.
Self-Assessment
In addition to supporting on-site countermeasures, the organisation will also ask its employees to complete a self-assessment on a weekly basis. They will be asked to answer several questions relating to COVID-19 symptoms, including exposure to other symptomatic employees /family members.
This proactive monitoring is one of several measures being introduced that will enable an organisation to identify employees who may present with symptoms in the future.
The Self-Assessment module within the Employee Health and Wellbeing application will notify each employee every 7 days to complete a set of questions.
- Notification via Power Apps Notification / Microsoft Teams or SMS via. Microsoft Power Automate
- Scheduled reminders where a self-assessment hasn’t been completed in the past 7 days
- Where a question has been answered with a ‘Yes’, additional information is presented to the user and the line manager is notified.
FAQ Bot
Another module of the app is an FAQ ‘Chat Bot’.
To support its employees with questions / advice and links to information, the in-built Microsoft Power Virtual Agent allows the users of the app to ask commonly asked questions and receive this information in real-time.
- The FAQ chatbot provides links to company information, policies, advice and department contacts
- Employees can sign up to weekly and monthly notifications
- If an answer cannot be found, the BOT can escalate to a contact centre.
The chatbot runs on Power Virtual Agents, which sites inside the Microsoft Azure platform. The COVID-19 response team have a no-code interface to manage the questions/topics and answers within the BOT.
Management Reporting
All the information and data that is collected by the Employee Health and Wellbeing App, is then available via a dedicated admin interface which is delivered by the Power Platform ‘Model Driven’ Power App.
From within here managers/directors can review the information and use the dashboards / Power BI dashboards for further information management reporting purposes.
Aaron Rendell 