The Agency for Maritime Services and Coast (AMDK) is an agency of the Flemish Government. They are responsible for the management of the Flemish seaports, promoting safety at sea, managing the coast and beaches, and carrying out hydrographic measurements. The ADMK plays a crucial role in ensuring the safety and efficiency of maritime traffic and in managing the coastline in Flanders.
The AMDK was looking for 2 solutions:
Power BI rollout on Planview
To get the data from Planview and into the cloud environment, data transformation pipelines were used. These retrieve the data in Planview, transform it into a more user-friendly structure, and place it in a data lake in the AMDK’s Cloud environment. Databricks and Azure Data Factory were used to set up the pipelines.
In a next phase, reports were drawn up via Power BI. Here, all information about the projects and financial data can be consulted via structured tables. Thanks to a smart structure of click-through options in these tables, users can analyze data in greater detail if desired. Due to the different filters present in the Power BI report, the content of the tables can be easily adjusted so that what the user wants to see is displayed, after which the table with this display can be exported from Power BI to an Excel file.
To ensure that the most recent data was visible in the Power BI reports at the time the user wanted it, a solution was made via Power Automate where the user could refresh the data in the report with a simple click of a button by retrieving the current data from Planview.
Automation of SharePoint
In Power Automate, a solution was built that can recognize new incoming emails. A large part of the information is taken from the email and a new folder is created in SharePoint that receives various characteristics based on the content of the email. Thanks to these characteristics, it is easy to filter and search to get a better overview of all tasks. A copy of the email itself and replies to this email are then placed in the folder without requiring manual intervention. In addition, it is possible to automatically notify the employee assigned to this task by noting the name of an employee in the folder. This happens via an email that also contains all the details of the task. The result
The AMDK has all the data from Planview in a structured and organized manner in their own Cloud environment thanks to the data transformation pipelines, where it can be used for various purposes. This data can be easily consulted via the reports in Power BI, where everything is displayed clearly and they can determine what is displayed thanks to the click-through and filter options. After the tables have been adjusted so that they display what needs to be displayed, these tables can then be easily exported to Excel files, so that this no longer has to be transferred manually.
Thanks to various Power Automate solutions, the AMDK can quickly and easily refresh the Power BI reports with the current data from Planview. In addition, incoming emails are automatically classified and stored in SharePoint, in a folder that contains information about the content of the email itself. The person responsible for the execution of these emails can also be automatically informed about this in a simple way. Thanks to these solutions, a lot of time is saved, as everything happens automatically in the background instead of manually by an employee. In addition, the chance of errors is reduced and the consistency of the result is improved.
