John Cockerill builds enterprise apps with SAP integration using Power Platform

John Cockerill is a company that is constantly reinventing itself, moving from one success to another. With over 200 years of history, the company began manufacturing technical equipment such as steam engines and locomotives. It then moved to steel production before returning to its manufacturing roots. Today, the John Cockerill Group develops large-scale technological solutions to today’s most pressing issues, including facilitating access to low-carbon energies, enabling sustainable industrial production, and preserving natural resources.

Several years ago, the company launched a major digitization strategy. Along with system updates like Dynamics 365, leadership also wanted to build quick, custom solutions to streamline business processes. “Back then, we didn’t have an internal development team. Instead, employees would do their best with SharePoint and Excel,” explains Julien Bonsangue, Head of Digitalization, BI and Architecture at John Cockerill.

John Cockerill had just released Microsoft 365 to employees. Leveraging Power Platform seemed like the logical next step. "Given the varied nature of our businesses, we needed a digital solution that was as versatile as our operations,” says Denis Debroux, CIO of John Cockerill Group. Bonsangue got straight to work building a Power Platform practice, starting with just one developer and one UI designer. Their first project enabled employees to reserve desk space during the COVID crisis. 

With a well-designed user experience built on Power Apps, the app was an instant success and is still used today by more than 1,000 employees. Several more quick wins followed—mostly digitalization of small team processes—but these wins set up an opportunity to make an even greater impact. 

Enterprise apps with backend system integration 

Frontline workers had been submitting their hours using paper forms—a long process that also required manual input into SAP. To streamline the process, the team created two apps—a mobile app for employees to input time and another for foreman reviews. They also set up read-only integration into SAP, giving managers insight into the data fields required for reporting purposes—without having to log into SAP separately.

After a successful, six-month trial period to build confidence in the new solution, the team moved to read-write SAP access using a custom connector. This not only removed the need to input data manually but resulted in fewer errors and missed deadlines. A related time tracking app for engineers followed and both solutions are now being rolled out across other divisions with the company. With faster data input and less time spent tracking down people to complete and correct timesheets, these apps are currently saving the company almost $200,000 a year. 

As reporting needs have grown, so too has the solution. For example, to align time tracking information with specific business units, cost centers and employee data, the team integrated data from SAP SuccessFactors, a cloud-based HR tool. Employee data is moved daily from SuccessFactors into Azure Data Lake leveraging Azure Synapse pipelines. Data is then made available into Dataverse using virtual tables based on the serverless SQL pool in Azure Synapse Analytics. The result is a more complete record for easier reporting and review.

Dataverse has also made it easier to display data in Power BI, enabling managers to quickly review worker activity on a daily, real-time basis. In fact, almost all of the apps at John Cockerill are run on Dataverse and include a Power BI dashboard. As Bonsangue explains, “Our digitalization strategy is not just about building apps but using these apps to gather quality data that can be easily analyzed by managers.” His ultimate strategy is to use this data to drive CRM activities and continuous improvement.

Today, there are over 30 Power Platform solutions deployed at John Cockerill, with more than 2,000 daily users. Other enterprise-wide solutions include more efficient processes for ordering company cars, creating customer contracts, and hiring temporary workers. “Power Platform has enabled us to create bespoke applications that meet the specific demands of each business unit. This has been key to our successful digital transformation, ensuring that every part of our organization benefits from innovation, no matter how unique their needs," says Debroux.

Leveraging the experience of pro developers

Every enterprise solution built on Power Platform at John Cockerill was built by a team that includes just four professional developers. This group works closely with the rest of the 15-person team which includes business analysts, product owners, and UX/UI designers.

Professional development experience - and the ALM experience that goes with it - has helped the team maintain quality. This has been especially important as the need for enterprise-grade apps has quickly accelerated. “Every solution we have put in production using Power Platform has always performed exceptionally well over the long term. Even apps we built four years ago are still being used today,” says Bonsangue.

The ALM Accelerator for Power Platform has made the job even easier, providing a simplified interface to Azure Pipelines and Git source control for ALM in Power Platform. With the ALM Accelerator, developers can perform source control, enable version history, and deploy their solutions in Power Platform.“We have been early adopters of Azure DevOps and automated deployments using the ALM Accelerator for Power Platform and we are progressively transitioning to native pipelines,” says Gilles Meyer, Lead Architect at John Cockerill on the Power Platform development team.

Bonsangue acknowledges that moving professional developers to low code hasn’t always been easy. He tells the story of a friend who is a senior C# architect. “During my first year at John Cockerill, I spent many evenings with a friend over dinner explaining the advantages of developing with low code on Power Platform. It took a while to convince him but, at some point, something just clicked, and he said, 'Yeah, as a pro developer, I’m far more interesting in delivering business value and not just lines of code.'”

He's had similar conversations with his own team. “I encourage my team to get out of their comfort zone and move from a code set mentality where apps can take weeks, even months, to a more agile, low-code mentality with Power Platform where you can build something from scratch in three or four weeks and release it to thousands of people.”

While Bonsangue encourages his team to use Power Platform wherever possible, he also acknowledges that traditional code is sometimes necessary. And that’s where his pro developers’ experience again proves valuable. “By working with both low code and pro dev code platforms – my developers have become really good at knowing when to use what.” And if low code doesn’t provide the most efficient solution? “I remind my team that Power Platform is part of a broad ecosystem under Azure that provides all the tools we need for the most complex applications. I consider this a powerful advantage over other low-code platforms.”

Supporting a citizen developer community

While the company is enjoying great success with Power Platform and its small team of pro developers, the company is also eager to expand on this success with a growing community of citizen developers.

To help support that objective, IT business partners have been assigned to each business unit at John Cockerill. Employees regularly present business cases to these partners who route development to a central team - or guide citizen developers to build themselves. An internal portal provides extensive training materials on Power Platform and every business unit has a dedicated dev and test environment. The central team evaluates each app for quality and security before moving it to production.

Additionally, a community meeting is held every 2-3 weeks to showcase successful apps. “Most attendees want to build apps, but I try to push them to think bigger and also explore opportunities to automate processes using Power Automate,” says Bonsangue. He also sees opportunities in the near future to promote the AI capabilities of Power Platform, while also leveraging integration with a growing Dataverse repository of company data to build highly effective chatbots. “With Power Platform, it’s all about enabling an end-to-end digitization journey and using data to really benefit the business.”

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