State Utility Regional Power Compliance

There are 5 main compliance checks covering Land, Environment, Native Title, Heritage and Compliance that require input for many different people, in different roles dispersed across regional WA. 

• The checks require three (3) levels of approval, included many variables, reminders, emails, attachments, and cross process events that required management.
• Compliance Advice contracts needed extensions, reviews, and improvements which was hard when the static documents resided in people’s email. 
• Covid-19 played a significant role in the increased demands on WA’s regional power network, everything from increased working from home to state funded projects.  This in turn required more compliance checks to be completed. 

The Objectives:

The increase in demand for regional works was significantly pushing the already choked compliance process to the limit; and the team needed to process more requests to meet the demand.

Compliance advice contracts can’t live in peoples email as a static document, and the best way to deal with this was to build a system that contains the contracts in electronic form and could be updated and re-issued as required.

The limitations of paper also didn’t allow all the business rules and business logic to be manifested to crew workers.  Building an electronic system allows triggers, events and rules to be realised in an automated system, enabling teams and logic to be placed across the whole process.

The Compliance Portal developed brought together a myriad of Microsoft cloud technologies and delivered a system capable of processing over three (3) times the volume of compliance requests.  Power Apps provide the front-end, business rules, navigation, and the various stages of assessments in the compliance checks. Power Automate was used to create advice contracts, send emails, manage attachments, and send reminders to all team members involved in the process.  Azure SQL provided the database layer and reporting layer for Power BI reports. Integration with on-premises system were handled using Custom Connectors, OAuth 2.0, OpenAPI with an AWS endpoint.

Contract advice documents are now successfully generated automatically after all assessments have been completed and approved.  Approvers can preview contracts and make amendments prior to sending out through a controlled process. This prevents any user from being able to manually edit contract documents. 

This State Utility client was so pleased with the app outcome, that the project is now in its second release with a third release planned for GIS integration when completing land and native title checks.

Technologies

Microsoft’s cloud-based app development suite allows some 18 technologies to be synergised, governed, and managed in one easy to use platform.  Never before have we been able to bring together the best-of-breed technologies, with low code and deliver it to users anywhere in the world.

Modis leveraged Dynamics 365 business process flows, MS Teams chat, SharePoint Online attachments, folders and multiple document uploads, Power Apps components for easy creating of nearly all elements on the screen, role-based permissions are used throughout.

Simple effective connectors like MS Word document create allow the business to control their advice contract templates and keep their business processes up to date as legislation changes without having to involve 3rd party developers.

Scheduling using MS Outlook and Power Apps provides a powerful way to make sure the team is processing requests in the most efficient way possible.

About Modis

At Modis we connect people, technology, and businesses to the opportunities they need to thrive in a rapidly advancing world. With 1,300+ technology professionals across six locations (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Adelaide, Canberra, and Perth), we work with our clients to deliver solutions and talent to transform technology portfolios, streamline business functions, drive innovation, or enhance organisational capability. www.modis.com.au