Elly Yates-Roberts |
Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole Council (BCP Council), in the south of England, has implemented Microsoft Power Apps to improve efficiency and deliver more effective, relevant and responsive services to residents.
The local authority is streamlining labour-intensive administrative tasks, auditing services and broadening the digital skills of its teams via the drag-and-drop app creation templates.
BCP Council began seeing the benefits of Power Apps during the Covid-19 pandemic, when the suite of services enabled employees to safely work from home while maintaining vital citizen services.
“Power Apps are giving us the opportunity to improve our services and make people’s lives better,” said Neil Poulton, head of development at BCP Council.
The technology has been particularly helpful given that BCP was formed in 2020 as the amalgamation of the Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole local authorities. Before the merge, each council had departments for the same, paper-based processes and legacy IT systems.
“We chose Power Apps because it offered a solution that we could quickly integrate into our current tech stack,” said Poulton. “We’ve taken the opportunity to rationalise some of our old IT systems and because Power Apps is low-code, our team is empowered to develop apps that benefit their roles and they get to implement them.”
Since implementing Power Apps, the council has transformed an unwieldy paper-based service into a single app in Microsoft Teams called the Facilities Management Request function. It also created a Mailroom Delivery/Tracking tool to replace third-party software and internal paper systems with a mobile app that tracks the delivery parcels to the council’s various offices.
Moving forward, BCP Council intends to share the apps it develops with other councils through GitHub, so that they can copy or adapt them to save money and time in their own processes.