Best option to go go paperless (Power apps, Excel, Sharepoint, Forms...)

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Posted on 3 Feb 2025 14:43:55 by ML-03021442-0

Hi,

I was mandated to find a way to digitalise our service reports which we currently have to print and have our on-site team fill out.

A few notes:

About 100 employees
We have the Office 365 plan that includes the standard Power Apps and Power Automate
They sometimes have very limited or no network
Multiple people may work at the same time
It must be free/included in office365
We also have Sharepoint where we could store the data

Power apps

I initially thought this would be our best option as it checks a lot of our needs, but it seems you need a premium plan to use Dataverse for the offline mode. I've read that I could leverage the collections feature within Power apps to locally save the data and have them uploaded once back online. It is also fairly easy to develop a solution where our employees fill out the forms and have the forms saved in Sharepoint lists. I've also tested out Dataverse within Microsoft Teams, but the button to work offline is greyed out.

Are there any other viable solutions given our limitations? Perhaps a mix of Excel + Power automate?

Thank you in advance for your inputs.

Best regards.

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ML-03021442-0 2 on 03 Feb 2025 at 18:10:46

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Best option to go go paperless (Power apps, Excel, Sharepoint, Forms...)

Thanks for your reply.

My apologies as I've edited my post. We do have access to Power Apps (no premium connectors) and SharePoint/Power Automate.

We will create KPIs using Power BI and modify our maintenance plans based on them.

All the reports are currently scanned and uploaded in SAP manually.

Best regards.
ronaldwalcott 3,653 on 03 Feb 2025 at 17:29:45

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Best option to go go paperless (Power apps, Excel, Sharepoint, Forms...)

If you have the Standard Office 365 plan (no Power Automate), no budget and no network not sure how you can digitize using online solutions. At a minimum you need somewhere to store the data and a means to collect it. A non-recommended solution would be to get a license for SharePoint and Power Automate, use Microsoft Forms to collect the data where one of the fields has to be some type of verification code that Power Automate would use to verify that the data is from an employee and the data is uploaded to a SharePoint list (even though it can default to Excel without using Power Automate and your standard license).

What do you do with the data that is collected?

Does it feed into another manual process?