Meet the PowerApps Champions

Update 2018-09-29: The PowerApps Champions Sweepstakes has ended on September 28, 2018 at 11:59 p.m. ET, but you can continue to learn about our PowerApps Champs on this page. 

Bookmark aka.ms/PowerAppsChamps to continue learning about how Champions have used PowerApps in ways that are redefining their organizations, their careers, and their lives. Read about their impact–find out what makes them Champions.

 

Manuela

Manuela Pichler leads a development team that achieves quick wins at Virgin Atlantic. Her team has used the Power platform to reduce the time of development. Simple apps are built within 2 hours while complex apps, which previously took weeks or months, could be built in weeks or days. They have several solutions in production and under development such as apps for cargo queries, clubhouse spa health questionnaires, and safety and compliance audits. 

Manuela and her team work closely with internal stakeholders and departments to help them on their journey to digital transformation. She has started reaching out to business users who have discovered PowerApps through their Office 365 license and is building a super user community at Virgin. Additionally, she is working with IT Operations teams (InfoSec, Change Management) to define a support and governance model for PowerApps; this is currently in planning and development. Now Manuela is creating a customized admin experience that fits her team's needs.

Stay tuned for a more detailed story. 

 

Samit

Samit Saini was a security guard at London Heathrow Airport who enjoyed tinkering with technology like Excel and VBA. When he got access to PowerApps, he used it to digitize some of the paper-based processes at Heathrow such as providing translations for common questions asked by international passengers, performing customer experience audits, and supporting passengers with reduced mobility.

Heathrow has benefitted greatly from this level of substitution, having already saved more than 11,000 sheets of paper, 850 hours of time, and $460,000 in potential app costs. They cite that every 25,000 sheets of paper saved equals about 3 trees. But as Samit puts it, "In Heathrow, we're not trying to save trees, we're trying to save the forest." With this type of implementation, PowerApps is reducing the consumption of resources of paper, time, and money.

Watch a video on Samit's journey: https://aka.ms/MeetSamit

 

Martin

Martin Lee has built 50+ apps over the past year for a variety of use cases such as field technicians, call center agents, and executive conferences for Autoglass® (part of Belron® group). Belron® is a vehicle glass repair and replacement group operating worldwide across 34 countries and employing over 25,000 people. With the data collected from apps, they are generating insights and reports—getting much more than they had originally planned to do.

Read more about Martin and PowerApps at Autoglass:
https://customers.microsoft.com/story/belron-autoglass-consumer-goods-powerapps

 

Nick

Apps could be made by anyone, for anyone, to solve anything. But they could also be done any time. At the American Red Cross, a volunteer had created an app while deployed during Hurricane Harvey. The app allowed volunteers to check-in and report on their status. It was a simple use case, but had significant value, and it was made ad hoc. Nick Gill, a trainer at the American Red Cross, described this app in his Microsoft Business Applications Summit presentation, along with the app he built for First Aid & CPR instructors to order training supplies such as gloves and masks.

Learn more about the American Red Cross:
https://powerapps.microsoft.com/blog/americanredcross/

 

Camilla

Camilla Friedrichsen is a Quality Management Specialist at the LEGO Group headquarters in Billund, Denmark. She created a solution to track and communicate product quality issues with the development and operations teams at LEGO. All the information on a quality issue became available in one spot, her team did not need to search elsewhere for additional information, such as pictures. Managing access was easy as SharePoint gave the flexibility of maintaining granular level permissions. Her team was able to implement the solution for themselves, without needing IT to build it for them.

Learn more about Camilla and the LEGO Group:
https://aka.ms/MeetCamilla

 

Vanessa

At Standard Bank, Africa's largest bank in terms of assets, Vanessa Welgemoed is on Ian Doyle's team which has modified the company's app-building process. As part of their approach, they elicit ideas from those in their organization on what apps they want. Those who share ideas are also invited to learn how to build the apps themselves, so that they are not reliant on central IT. With this implementation in place, Standard Bank collectively has over 100 apps in production and is continuing to grow at a rapid pace as the energy and interest in the Power platform continues to grow.

See how Standard Bank is using PowerApps

 

Remi

SNCF is France's national state-owned railway company that operates the country's national rail services. Rémi Delarboulas, a digital adviser in the digital transformation team took the initiative to build a PowerApps application called Digi Bogies. The aim was to reduce the error rate and streamline the work required to perform this operation. The result was a very intuitive user experience that culminated in the app providing a list of recommendations and guidance around optimal spring placements.

Learn more about SNCF at:
https://powerapps.microsoft.com/blog/sncf-power-platform-customer-success-story/

 

Jonathan

Jonathan Oberhaus is an example of someone whose job is to make apps: not any ordinary apps–but specifically PowerApps. At DriveTime, he has shipped four solutions in production and continues to grow the app portfolio for scenarios such as insurance claims management and contract employee management.

DriveTime started its PowerApps journey as an early adopter in 2016 with Travis Bliele, a business analyst with Power BI and SQL background but no app development experience. He had created a mobile solution for DriveTime car buyers to inspect vehicles at auctions. As the impact of the Power platform grew, the company created a full time PowerApps developer position filled by Jonathan Oberhaus.

Learn more about DriveTime at: https://aka.ms/DriveTime

 

Keith

Arriva is one of Europe’s largest transport providers. They operate ~18% of London’s bus service and service ~2.4 billion passenger journeys each year. Keith Whatling had used PowerApps and the Common Data Service to digitize management of the quality process in Arriva London's operations center. Management and staff could stay more connected in order to continually improve the quality of their operations.

Keith speaks passionately about 'digital inclusion.' To quote Keith, PowerApps is a tool that "democratizes technology, one where the cost of quality apps, processes, and data are in the hands of those that need it, not just those who can afford it. It's the pebble in the pond. A game changer." He sees how PowerApps makes it possible to build 'never apps'–apps that would never be built for small teams. Everyone can have an app.

Watch a video on PowerApps at Arriva London

Eric

At G&J Pepsi, the largest family-owned bottler for Pepsi-Cola products, Eric McKinney was managing the company's migration to the cloud and rolling out services such as Office 365 and Skype. He substituted a paper-based store audit process with PowerApps. With real-time reporting, the company was able to respond much more quickly to issues and reduce errors. On top of that, G&J Pepsi was able to use rich PowerBI reports to derive insights over the aggregated data such as their top in-store competitors on a per-region basis. Since 2016, Eric has built several cross-platform solutions using PowerApps for auditing stores, managing merchandise and tracking resources.

Watch a video on PowerApps at G&J Pepsi

 

Ludovic

SNCF Railway has a growing community of app makers. They have thousands of app makers on their Yammer channel for PowerApps. While to some this is a large active community, to Ludovic Malondra, a digital transformation leader at SNCF, he sees this as a relatively small number. His goal is to expand PowerApps adoption to all 165,000 employees at the company, redefining the expectations of growing community.

Learn more about SNCF at: 
https://powerapps.microsoft.com/blog/sncf-power-platform-customer-success-story/

 

Ashlee

Never doubt that a twitter contest could change your life. Ashlee's PowerApps story begins with a fidget spinner–not an ordinary one, but a digital one. Having learned about a challenge to see who could build a fidget spinner in PowerApps, Ashlee used her knowledge of trigonometry to animate a spinner that wowed the PowerApps team and won the contest.

Today she builds complex apps with her dad and leads hackathons where participants of all ages learn PowerApps and crucial life skills.

Learn more about Ashlee at: https://aka.ms/MeetAshlee

 

More Resources

Would you like to learn about more customer stories? Visit https://powerapps.microsoft.com/customer-stories