Return to Work - workspace management using Microsoft Power Platform, SAP Cloud Platform and SuccessFactors

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Context:

Recently SAP and Microsoft organized a joined hackathon for its partners. It was a great opportunity to unlock capabilities of both the platforms and build on various ideas.

We decided to choose on creating a Return To Work - workspace management solution post COVID. I thought it would be good to share the idea and some glance of our submission.

 

 

Why Return-To-Work:

At a glance

Since March this year and multiple lock-downs, the meaning of office space has changed dramatically, both for companies as well as the team members. A Gartner study finds that 82% of company leaders* plan to allow employees to work remotely for some time. At the same time, 83% or companies are looking to limit or sequence the employee attendance at the workplace *.

Challenge:

Whilst many studies show that productivity while working from home is higher, it is the reality for some of us that working from the kitchen or bedroom doesn’t provide the same facilities than a proper office space. Also, for the ones living alone, remote work can be a real torture. So the desire for interaction and collaboration is one of the key reasons why people come to the office**. The challenge becomes to manage this hybrid workforce and provide a safe environment as well as the right capacity. Give the team members the necessary tools to properly plan their attendance and make the most out of it, as well as provide the right KPI’s to the leaders to be able to plan capacity.

 

Solution:

With the Return-to-Work application, we allow Corporate Planners to split the workforce into groups and perform a rough planning for attendance as well as monitor the usage to be able to take this into considerations for future planning cycles. This activity is done in SuccessFactors by creating a custom grouping and assignments of groupings to employees.

An FAQ bot gives the Team Members the ability to ask questions about the offered facilities and the safety protocols in place.

For the Team Member we offer the capability to manage their attendance, look for opportunities to meet teammates in the office and make the most out of their days spent outside. Furthermore it offers the ability to report  cleaning requests as one of the key concerns is to provide a safe collaboration space for employees, both for the safety of the team members as well as the organization.

Measuring the experience of the employee after they went to the office and monitoring the adoption of the offered capacity will allow corporations to strike the right balance between allowing flexibility to work from home vs. providing the right capacity and facilities to the team members to maximize the productivity of the workforce in a sustainable manner.

 

Technical Architecture:

 

Solution Glance:

 

FAQ Chatbot:

FAQ chatbot helps employees with various questions around application access and workplace safety.

 

Employee Application:

Power application is integrated to MS Teams for an integrated experience.

My Workspace Plan (Home Page):

• MS Teams Integrated power app


• Calendar view of entitled office days


• List of likely people to be in office on selected day


• Navigation for Planning & Cleaning Request.

 

People (Planning Page):

• Search for employee directory


• Calendar view of entitled office days for searched people


• Likelihood of being in office on selected day


• Office Location


• Integrated Teams button to initiate direct chat

 

My Cleaning Request (Cleaning Request Page):

• View for employee’s past cleaning request


• New request with integrated camera and seat Number.

 

Cleaning Staff Notification :

• Adaptive card notification to cleaning staff on specific Teams channel.


• Request overview information.


• Direct navigation to SharePoint item for cleaning request

 

Workspace Manager Application:

Admin application is developed as an UI5 extension application sitting on top on SuccessFactors and a CAP application on HANA Cloud.

  Statistics:

• Workspace planning trends.


• Capacity planning status for every quarter


• Cleaning staff’s workload


• Planned workspace utilization trends

Actions:

• Trigger workspace planning for specific quarter

 

Video highlighting some of the features and Live Demo:

 

Summary:

It was a great initiative by SAP & Microsoft teams. Me & my team absolutely loved creating this solution and learning at the same time.

Special mention to my team mate adityas for his SCPI magic.