Transforming Industry

32 33 NON-PROFIT Going digital against hunger With Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power BI, The Felix Project is growing toward its goal of providing 100 million meals a year to people in need by 2024. Every day in the UK’s capital, London, 1.5 million adults and 400,000 children go hungry. Working with local food retailers, restaurants, wholesalers and farms, The Felix Project secures fresh food that cannot be sold and delivers it to over 350 organizations. Following the Microsoft implementation, the charity is on course for a tenfold increase in the number of meals it delivers. Established in 2016, The Felix Project is on a mission to save food and change lives. However, due to unwieldy and time-consuming manual processes, operations were not as efficient as they could have been. Entering information into The Felix Project’s siloed data management system and creating reports took several days of manual work each month, and it was very difficult to ensure accuracy or visibility into day-to-day operations. “What we had was a whole system of systems that didn’t talk to each other, lacked connecting interfaces and required a huge amount of manual processing of paperwork,” explains Mark Curtin, CEO of The Felix Project. With no IT department of its own, The Felix Project needed the support of trusted digital transformation partners, and turned to the expertise of Accenture, Microsoft and Avanade. Several workshops were held, led by Fjord, a division of Accenture Interactive, during which The Felix Project outlined its core challenges to determine the best way to solve them. What started as a brief to create a simple mobile app for drivers turned into a much more comprehensive and impactful proposal to replace several existing tools and methodologies. The resulting solution, based on the Microsoft Power Platform, including Power Apps portals, Dynamics 365 and Power BI, is a combination of route and volunteer management, customer relationship management for donors and beneficiaries, the mobile application for volunteer drivers, and a reporting and analytics platform. During the planning phase of the solution, the Covid-19 pandemic began, greatly increasing the demand for the non-profit’s services while limiting the availability of its volunteer drivers. With The Felix Project’s resources stretched to the limit, Accenture and Avanade developed and deployed the platform and moved into pilot testing in less than six weeks. Just four weeks later, the solution was fully adopted and in use across the organization. With the new mobile app, named RouteMe, drivers can access routes, maps and pickup information, and fill out digital forms. This has led to improved route optimization as data is automatically uploaded into Dynamics 365 in real time. Power BI dashboards give The Felix Project full visibility into operations and can generate reports in minutes. Read the full case study > ” We were able to make changes to the platform quickly to get the data we needed”