For over a decade, we have been supporting a Life Science customer with a legacy .NET application. Keeping aging infrastructure running is costly and increasingly unsustainable, with 60 to 80 per cent of corporate IT budgets going towards maintaining legacy systems. Our customer approached us to link the application to their new Quality Management System.

Our challenge was to reconstruct outdated custom .NET applications that manipulated documents and integrated with other systems, as well as redirect printing services to Ricoh’s follow-me printing. Meeting strict regulations working for a Life Science company, we needed precise data and documents to support the production process, which included both digital and paper-based solutions. Document templates were stored in the Quality Management System.

The solution that we proposed was the development of App based on Microsoft Power Platform, SharePoint, Azure, and Power Apps. The aim was to provide users with the same user experience as the old application, so that a single application would deliver all the relevant information for employees to perform their tasks in an efficient and safe way.

The Microsoft Power Platform was selected to build the solution as it allows for quick development of enterprise applications based on low code. We coupled the Power Platform to Customers Quality Management System (QMS) as a database for documents. Power Apps, the low-code development component of the Power Platform, was used to develop a user-friendly application covering all needs.

The platform was customizable to end-users’ requirements, and the development cycles were short and fast, allowing feedback from end-users to be implemented quickly. Authorization management was centralized via Azure Active Directory, ensuring that all information displayed in the application could be consulted by authorized employees only, and creating and editing the information was limited to a group of “contributor” employees. An audit trail tracked all interactions in the application.

The App on the Power Platform proved to be an amazing tool for companies to digitize and really impact the daily work of employees. The functional power of the solution lay in the fact that everything was nicely integrated with the QMS, the Azure function app, and the Ricoh printer service. The application was easily adopted by employees as it was completely in line with their needs, and the integrated analytics showed that the application was actively being used.

From an IT portfolio perspective, since SharePoint was used in combination with the Power App, this also helped towards user adoption of SharePoint and the surrounding Microsoft tools within the company. The relatively short implementation cycle and related limited budget needs were obviously an additional benefit: analysis, design, implementation, and roll-out were all covered in less than 50 man-days of work.

Technically, the fact that the Power Platform offered the possibility to build a custom application that is easy to maintain and expand is a great added value. So-called “spaghetti” code (extremely unstructured and non-maintainable code) was thus avoided, making it a future-proof technology.