Mphasis implements Microsoft’s Power Apps to keep its employees safe

A team of two built six apps in four days under the Employee Outreach program.

Titled Employee Outreach, the solution tracks employee health and the health of their families without compromising on privacy. (Pixabay)

Mphasis, an Information Technology (IT) solutions provider specialising in cloud and cognitive services, announced the implementation of Microsoft's Power Apps to ensure the safety of its employees and maintain productivity during the current lockdown.

Titled Employee Outreach, the solution tracks employee health and the health of their families without compromising on privacy. It also enables them with work from home facilities, monitors attendance and shifts, resolves IT complaints etc. Over 26,000 employees are using the app daily.

Microsoft Power Apps is a low-code platform for building and using custom business apps that connect to data and work across web and mobile without the time and expense of custom software development. Employee Outreach was developed on Microsoft's Power Apps' crisis communications template, which was released by Microsoft in March 2020. The template helps in provide organisations the agility to innovate and use rapidly those applications that are of the essence in these unprecedented times.

Within the Employee Outreach app, employees can access a drop-down menu with an option to share a health update of their families and themselves – before and after their work shifts. In case they report any kind of distress, an email is triggered to notify their managers and the organisation arranges the necessary support required. The simple drop-down menu ensures that there is no compromise on privacy.

Mphasis is also using the app to ensure the seamless productivity of its workforce. Using the app, employees can now select whether they can work from home or not. If they cannot, then the app alerts the IT team by email seeking a quick resolution.

In addition to registering attendance, employees can log in their shift start and end timings; activities during the day, and breaks taken in between. The app is cognitive and can differentiate between time zones based on the location of the employees. It also successfully records cases where shifts run beyond midnight and span across two dates.

Using the crisis communications Power Apps template, a team of two developers from Mphasis created a suite of six apps in just four days. They were able to customise it according to requirements by adding new features to the user interface, a custom validation screen to ensure seamless and rapid integration - and all of this was easy as it was not dependent upon any existing backend. 

By developing the suite on Power Apps, Mphasis was able to remove peripheral activities during the development cycle like code and vulnerability analysis, uploading the repository, or functional testing.