State Utility Regional Power Compliance
Business Challenges
There are five compliance checks covering Land, Environment, Native Title, Heritage, and Compliance that require input from various people, in different roles dispersed across regional WA.
- The checks require three (3) levels of approval, including variables such as, reminders, emails, attachments, and cross process events that required management.
- Compliance advice contracts needs 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, from increased working from home to state funded projects. This in turn required more compliance checks to be completed.
Our Solution
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 people’s 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 allowing it to 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 realized in an automated system, enabling teams and logic to be placed across the whole process.
The Solution
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.
Industry: Energy and Clean Technologies
Technologies used: Microsoft Azure – Power Apps
future together