Part of the greater Milwaukee Metropolitan area, Waukesha County prides itself on delivering essential services to the community with competence and skill. With their vision leading the way, the county values collaboration, ethics, as well as individual strengths, all of which play a key role in their level of service and outcomes. With an emphasis on innovation and improvement, the county offers mentoring services for their employees too, encouraging continuous personal and professional development. Above all, Waukesha County’s aim is to promote the health, safety and quality of life of citizens while fostering an economically vibrant community.
The client’s IT department purchases and installs printers for various county buildings—such as the Courthouse and other government facilities— throughout the region. These facilities had the ability to customize their orders, often adding custom features such as remote printing and additional paper trays to their purchases. However, the county had an inadequate solution for tracking the inventory and valuation of the printers in use. These processes were being managed within a multiple, non-connected SharePoint lists, which did not allow for the complex calculations, data entry, or reporting that was necessary for the solution to be useful to the county. Additionally, these SharePoint lists did not allow for amortization for custom orders, nor was the county’s finance department able to track them by account or fiscal year. It became clear that the county would require a more robust solution to properly manage and amortize these agreements.
Having relied on Planet Technology for consulting work for many years, Waukesha County tapped the organization to provide a custom solution to tackle their specific IT needs.
Working with the client’s IT solutions manager, Planet Technology began building a Power App enabling users to easily add and update account details for purchase orders. The application also provides a subset of users with administrative capabilities, such as full exports of account details by year, printer model, vendor, as well as serial numbers and descriptions for each printer. Planet Technology designed the Power App in weekly iterations, completing the project ahead of schedule in roughly six weeks. And since the application is a Microsoft Power App, it is mobile-friendly by default, and available to the users across devices, allowing to manage accounts more efficiently.
Upon completion of initial user acceptance testing, the client’s IT Solutions Manager reviewed the application with the necessary stakeholders and personnel. From there, the client provided Planet Technology with a list of remediation items, which were successfully implemented within a single business day. The client now has an effective Power App solution for managing, tracking, and amortizing their printer orders throughout the county.
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