Business Apps and Portals Solutions
Our Business Application Services
App design
Our team are experienced in creating business apps and portals across different industries, needs and technologies
App build
We love to create solutions for businesses like yours, making your day-to-day processes more efficient
Support and advice
Simply in need of some support and advice on business apps or portals? Contact us for a free no-obligation chat
What are business apps?
Business apps is a general term for applications and related technologies used by businesses, primarily to improve personal and interpersonal productivity and cohesion. Whether within teams, across teams, or across organisations, good business apps provide a streamlined interface to get a specific task or related group of tasks done efficiently.
With the ubiquity of smartphones, modern business apps will run on desktop, laptop, and handheld devices; and with modern web technology, as an alternative to platform-specific apps locked to a single vendor, they can be deployed to almost any device as cross-platform web apps that look indistinguishable from their native counterparts.
Examples of business applications include everything from simple single-function plug-ins to existing products like Microsoft Teams to multi-function web portals for employees, customers, and suppliers for conducting secure self-serve activities. In the context of your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solution, you can use business apps to allow users to interact with business processes rooted inside the ERP without opening access to the full system.
The Power People design, build, and support apps and portals for businesses of all shapes and sizes. This page will discuss the different ways you could use business apps technology to benefit your business.
Talk to us about your options
How can I use business apps?
Business application solutions can be used in a wide variety of ways to increase productivity amongst both your employees and users outside your organisation. This is done by automating manual processes and sharing common data and business rules.
These business apps can be used alongside your central ERP solution or completely independently, feeding or retrieving data to or from any source.
Examples of business apps include:
Customer web apps
Allow your customers to access key intel and self-serve via a business app, also known as a web portal or web app.
Customers can log into the app and, starting from a dashboard displaying the most prevalent information, be able to:
- View account balance
- Reprint invoices
- View open cases
- Raise new queries
- View stock levels
- Create sales quotes or orders
The customer web app can also be tailored to add access to additional information such as other documents, facts, and figures available from various data sources.
Give your customers round-the-clock access to key activities so that they can do business as and when it best suits them, whilst simultaneously carrying out interactions that you would otherwise have to do yourself.
Book a demo of our customer web app
Vendor job apps
Share an app with your suppliers to enable them to work on sub-contracted jobs assigned to them from your back office. Allow them to:
- See new jobs you’ve requested
- Accept or reject jobs
- Confirm dates and costs for planned work
- Notify you when work is complete
- Update costs and other info associated with the job
A business application solution outside your main ERP allows you to target your suppliers with specific actions, whilst ensuring data they provide doesn’t need rekeying later, avoiding delays and mitigating risk of errors in the process.
Options to customise the software means that we can work together to tailor the app to perfectly fit your needs in line with your supplier interactions. For example, dashboards can be enhanced with performance KPIs, custom elements of information can be captured or displayed, and additional processes key to your way of working can be fully supported.
Field service apps - great for offline working
In field service, apps provide a very useful way of working offline where online access is reduced, as well as giving engineers the necessary digital tools to do their jobs. This could be for technicians on-site who need to monitor repairs, take photos of damage or track part fixed asset numbers across a site.
Global Energy Ventures (GEV) partnered with The Power People to create a Power App designed to reduce paper usage across their inspection services. By designing a tablet-based solution, GEV could conduct their inspections, take measurements, take photo evidence and work completely offline. The information is then pushed to their ERP solution, Dynamics 365 Business Central, when online access is ready.
See our app in action
Logistics and warehousing apps
When optimising the way your warehouse is running, allowing your warehouse staff to log into one application for scanning, packing and shipping goods off to customers brings great efficiency.
The Power People have designed and built a packing bench app for warehouse workers to bring every required step into one application.
Built as a Microsoft Power App, users can use a web browser to scan items for a shipment into multiple packages, print the various labels and update the necessary records back into the main ERP solution.
See our packing bench app
Proof of delivery apps
A proof of delivery app could be used by a business delivering goods to empower drivers and make their jobs easier. The app, situated on your drivers' mobile phones, makes easy work of deliveries by automating the manual effort of selecting optimised journeys. Everything the driver needs to do their job is in a singular application.
The app's functionality includes:
- Intelligent route planning based on upcoming destinations
- Multiple views to switch to depending on the current need, including a map, list or a combination of the two
- Checks for the driver to complete when the destination and current location at the point of delivery do not match
- Signature and photo functionality for confirming the delivery
Apps inside of Microsoft Teams
We're very excited about using business apps inside of Microsoft Teams. Many of us spend most of our working day inside of Teams, so adding business apps to that environment could streamline how we work and consolidate multiple apps into one.
Examples of business apps inside of Teams include:
- Meeting room booking for your office
- What does X look like - for identifying staff members you may not have met before
- A customer success app, showing information on your customers such as overdue invoices, key contacts and much more
Business apps are powerful on web and mobile, which most of us think of in the first instance, but apps inside of Teams have the potential for consistent repeat use.
The Power Platform
Microsoft Power Apps are one of the fundamental technologies we can use to build your business apps. They exist within Microsoft's Power Platform, a suite of technologies that integrate seamlessly to provide a framework for creating modern user interfaces and automating processes, with connectivity to a vast array of other products and systems.
The Power Platform has much to offer – not least, it’s great for:
- Speed of design and build of business applications
- Powerful process automation across multiple systems
- Component-level design capabilities for easy sharing of business functions across applications
- Seamless integration with the Microsoft Dataverse
- Microsoft's backing and constant improvement of the technology
Progressive Web Apps technology
There are multiple technologies we can use to create business application solutions to meet your requirements. One of the most versatile is Progressive Web App (PWA) technology.
A progressive web app (PWA) is an app that delivers a seamless experience across desktop, laptop, and mobile devices, and functions equally well as a web site in the browser or as an installed app on a smartphone.
They can usually be built at a much lower cost than their equivalent vendor-locked business app counterparts, whilst still offering the capability for features such as offline working and push notifications. Unlike other app store downloads, PWAs are not beholden to the same processes associated with either initial publishing or subsequent updates, meaning deployment is simpler and more economic.
Learn more about Progressive Web Apps
Why The Power People
Here at The Power People, we are huge fans of how we can use the available technology to improve everyday life for people at businesses like yours. As discussed on this page, Microsoft's Power Platform and Progressive Web Applications are two such technologies that enable us to achieve wonderful things.
But it is also important to mention that your choice of Partner is something to consider over and above the technology. Without a solid, dependable Partner, your business apps project will most likely fail.
After all, a good choice of Partner should give you:
- A knowledgeable and experienced team to work as an extension of your own
- Support through issues that you may be unequipped to deal with
- A route to successfully completing a project with a clear plan through design, build, deployment, support, and review
The Power People could provide you with all of the above. Talk to us today and see what we can offer you on your business apps journey.
Book a Business App Discovery Call
We offer a free one-hour call with one of our consultants, designed to help you achieve more using business application solutions. In the call, we'll identify opportunities for you to use appropriate solutions to cure manual processes and speed up repetitive tasks.
We will then present our observations back to you, giving you some short, medium and long term actions to get you to where you want to be.
Book your Discovery Call and one of our Power consultants will be in touch. As a Microsoft Power Platform Partner, we can't wait to demonstrate our expertise.
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