Driving internal digital transformation with self-built apps—based on smapOne and Microsoft Power Platform

The challenge: Companies in need of task-specific apps and digital expertise are lacking in funds and developers 

For a long time, pen and paper were essential tools of the trade for service technicians at Bayernwerk Netz GmbH when it came to servicing the meters and technical devices used by smaller energy suppliers. At the end of a workday packed with customer appointments, it wasn’t surprising that data and entries were sometimes incomplete. It was time to introduce a digital solution that would put an end to this paper chaos. The employees at Bayernwerk Netz GmbH weren’t fazed by the lack of standard software that catered to their needs—they simply went ahead and developed their own app. Today, service technicians can record maintenance data quickly and in full using their smartphones. By digitalizing its processes, the company is responding to a new market situation as the energy transition brings with it a whole new layer of complexity. Novel ways of sustainably producing energy have become possible in recent years, but they entail additional effort and outlay on the part of grid operators, such as for installing meters and maintaining systems.

As was the case at Bayernwerk Netz GmbH, many teams and departments in companies of all sizes are looking to digital technologies to assist them in their day-to-day work. Despite core processes having gone digital a long time ago, many other workflows and procedures are stuck in the past. Software companies still have some catching up to do before standard solutions are able to take every work process into account. Many business applications are very broad in scope and first have to be adapted to individual processes. Although larger companies tend to have in-house development departments, they still don’t have the capacity to cover every aspect of a company’s business operations with their own software, or to gain a comprehensive overview of the processes involved.

This means employees, regardless of company size or industry, have no option but to organize their everyday work to some extent using forms, checklists, handwritten notes, or other workarounds. All the while, the potential for data collection and analysis goes untapped: unstructured, analog data can be evaluated only in part—and real-time analysis isn’t even an option.

The solution: App building made simple with the 360° solution from smapOne and Microsoft

This is precisely where the no-code concept pursued by Hanover-based smapOne comes in: smapOne provides an app-development platform as a Software as a Service (SaaS) that enables employees to “click together” a mobile business app in next to no time. All they have to do is drag and drop the elements that reflect their specific requirements and work processes. smapOne is primarily aimed at people whose day-to-day work does not involve IT tasks. Users can choose from a range of functions such as text fields, yes/no boxes, and mathematical formulas. They can even incorporate native smartphone features, for example to upload photos, scan barcodes, or provide their current geographical location. What’s more, there is a whole host of templates for what are referred to as “smaps” (self-built apps), from service checklists to assembly reports or fault logging, right over to the complete mapping of construction management files. 

“Departments usually create between 20 and 30 smaps, each one representing a form or sheet of paper they had to fill out in the past,” explains Sven Zuschlag, co-founder and CEO of smapOne. “The service manager at an SME, for example, could use our app-building kit to digitalize pretty much all of their department’s daily processes: reports, acceptance protocols, time recording, etc.” he continues. “Hundreds of employees working for one of our logistics customers are using smapOne to digitalize their workflows in logistics centers all around the world.”

The smapOne platform runs entirely on Microsoft Azure. “We knew from the moment we launched in 2014 that we didn’t want to develop our own hardware,” says Thomas Schwarz, CTO and the other co-founder of smapOne. “Microsoft was our first choice when we started looking into a suitable cloud platform.” According to Schwarz, use of the Azure services has grown rapidly, with Azure providing everything from computing capacity to logging and analytics services. “We’re in good hands with Microsoft,” he says. “They are a prestigious partner that is also valued by our customers. And they take the critical topic of data protection as seriously as we do and can provide us with tremendous support in this area.” He continues: “Many companies use Microsoft 365, which means they’re already part of the Microsoft cloud and are also using the Azure Active Directory. Employees at these companies can try out smapOne by simply logging in with their Azure AD details—a secure and user-friendly option.”

Citizen development: Software development without the need for programming skills

“On our app development platform, citizen developers—or creators, as we call them—can access pre-defined modules. They can play around with these modules by using drag and drop to assemble their very own application. It’s like putting together a Lego kit. New applications can move into the productive phase much quicker than in the past: in a matter of days rather than months,” Zuschlag says. “This saves around 90 percent of the costs associated with conventional software development. Development is more agile, there’s no need for functional specification or product requirement documents, and, most importantly, employees are already open to the solution as they are directly involved in its creation.”

His advice to anyone considering the no-code approach: “Go for it, you can’t go wrong.” The initial phase mostly deals with noncritical data at the team or department level, which doesn’t need synchronizing with other databases. For more demanding projects or sensitive data, customers can draw on Microsoft’s Power Platform, Power Apps, and Power Automate. These solutions provide a way of scaling and expanding app development to the extent needed by drawing on low-code technology, i.e. with very little programming effort. They run in Microsoft and support quality control, analytics functions, security, and governance. To help get the ball rolling, Microsoft also offers a Center of Excellence Starter Kit—a collection of components and tools designed to ease the way into strategic low-code development with the Microsoft Power Platform.

So what does this look like in practice for Bayernwerk Netz GmbH? The service technicians use mandatory fields and checklists to record data digitally on-site with the customer. Once this is done, the app automatically generates a PDF, which is always saved to the right place in SharePoint, and the measurement data is transferred into Microsoft Excel. Colleagues based in the company headquarters are able to analyze, in real time, which meters have already been read. They can coordinate which devices are yet to be checked and plan routes efficiently based on information updated that day. While smapOne is used primarily to map operational processes, canvas apps designed in Microsoft Power Apps are created wherever several departments work in one app or where different data sources are connected via interfaces. All the data recorded by smaps and Power Apps can be processed smoothly and evaluated via Power Automate or Power BI.

“Our goal is to unleash the entrepreneurial qualities within a workforce,” Schwarz says. To this end, IT teams in larger companies always have the smapOne platform to hand as part of their Azure environment—preventing the risk of shadow IT.

This means that, even in the business world, the question “Isn’t there an app for that?” can be answered with a resounding: “Yes, there is!” Companies simply have to give employees a playful, accessible way of creating applications themselves. As demonstrated by Bayernwerk Netz GmbH, the sky’s the limit when it comes to project scope and complexity, thanks to the 360° portfolio made possible by smapOne and Microsoft. No-code development scales seamlessly—from a simple data collection process for a grid operator to AI-assisted, business-critical processes within a major corporation.