The design of a feedback-loop

Project description

HLB van Daal's business model consists of invoicing clients for hours of service. To be able to advise clients properly in the various areas of expertise of HLB van Daal, information is needed. For example, to provide financial advice to clients, overviews of related financial data, such as a balance sheet and a profit and loss account, are required.

The current situation is that employees often work with their own information and documents. Arthur Schins (business innovation) and Bob van Haperen (ICT) from HLB van Daal do not consider this way of working efficient and has noticed in practice that the service from HLB van Daal they want to provide is not optimally achieved. They want to deliver a 9+ experience to clients, but because employees work with separate documents, opportunities are missed.

Context

HLB is an accountancy firm who specialises in strategic advice, innovative IT services, legal advice, administrative services and HR services and specialist knowledge in the area of, inter alia, subsidies and not-for-profit. We focussed during this project on HLB Administrator, which is a dashboard about cliental details in the ERP-system of HLB van Daal.

Results

This study sought an answer to the question: How can the number and effectiveness of views of the dashboard HLB Administrator be improved from X views to Y views by applying changes to the Microsoft Environment? For this purpose, qualitative research was carried out into the current HLB Administrator process and looked at the possibilities and effects of changes within the Microsoft Environment.

During the investigation, the process of HLB Administrator was first deregistered using Microsoft Visio, with which the connection could be made to Microsoft Power Automate.
Microsoft Power Automate looked at options to increase dashboard views and effectiveness. As a result, a notification system has been developed with mainly help from adaptive card. The adaptive card ensures that HLB Van Daal employees receive their notifications in their Microsoft Teams Environment. Employees receive an encouraging message if their data is below 100% completeness and information that is not yet in order. A check sheet is also created that goes to the relevant manager and so he can see who has to complete what and how much. If the employees have their data at 100% completeness, they also get a message, but this is a message that compliments the employees on their good work.

We also investigated how we can extend the notification system so that it is workable for all employees. It now takes a lot of time to make this because the messages an employee receives are on a personal basis, so this system should be expanded to allow everyone to get a notification based on their person.

We also look to go more in-depth within the current process. Here we look at what additional options are still possible within Microsoft Power Automate. Parts of this are a chatbot to help employees even more in the process and also an accountant is asked what they really need within the notification system. This is in favor of accepting the change in the process and ensuring that accountants also feel heard regarding the development of the solution.

Basically, the way of working doesn't change much. With this solution, it only changes that the accountants get a notification through Microsoft Teams and can act on it by first opening the link to the dashboard to see what they still need to change and secondly a link to the AFAS system so that it can also be adjusted immediately. For the managers, something changes, what they get a checklist to see if the accountants are at 100% completeness.

About the project group

Karlijn is an ICT & Business student and she also studies Industrial Engineering & Management. Thijs and Billie both study Logistics Engineering. We've spent 17 weeks on this project and the first 10 weeks we worked on the project online. Since May the 10th we were allowed to come to location.