This client manages a variety of construction projects, including overseeing the budget and tracking invoices from and payments to vendors. Prior to DMC’s involvement, this process was handled through manual updates to Excel spreadsheets and manual uploads of documents to the company server. This led to inconsistencies in handling and documentation between projects, a lack of visibility for upper management, and a reduced ability for project managers to delegate tasks effectively.
DMC’s priority is to address pain points for customers. We started this project with a discovery phase to fully understand the functionality of the current solution and generate complete documentation of requirements. Then, we were able to create an architecture for a solution that addressed pain points while leveraging familiar tools and entry patterns by building within the SharePoint framework. A selection of custom forms was built using React Typescript in an SPFx webpart. These covered data entry needs for project initiation, budget entry and amendment, and tracking payment commitments and status. Budget information became easily available in a familiar table format on the landing page for each project.
The approval process leverages Microsoft’s built-in solution for approvals for notification in Teams and Outlook. It uses Power Automate to pull in additional information from SharePoint Lists and the .NET backend. The approval status is displayed on the main project page within the custom webpart. This improved visibility for the team and allowed project managers to effectively delegate budget tracking tasks to others while still being able to track and approve overall project status.
Additionally, DMC built automatic coversheet generation, which streamlined the processes for providing billing information to vendors and invoicing end clients. Generation is performed in the .NET backend, and documents are saved to the project SharePoint folders for easy re-access. Automated emails, including the relevant data and coversheets, are automatically set based on user-entered contact information.
Learn more about DMC’s Custom Application expertise and contact us for your next project.