{"id":2082,"date":"2019-06-07T01:23:30","date_gmt":"2019-06-07T08:23:30","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2025-06-11T08:03:42","modified_gmt":"2025-06-11T15:03:42","slug":"standard-bank-south-africa-creates-a-center-of-excellence-for-the-power-platform","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/power-platform\/blog\/power-apps\/standard-bank-south-africa-creates-a-center-of-excellence-for-the-power-platform\/","title":{"rendered":"Standard Bank South Africa creates a Center of Excellence for the Power Platform"},"content":{"rendered":"

Standard Bank<\/a> is the largest bank in Africa with a 156-year history, 12 million customers and 54K+ employees. Their motto \u2013 “Africa is our home, we drive her growth.” Since February 2017, Standard Bank has grown their adoption of the Power Platform resulting in over 300 solutions<\/strong> being created for a variety of business needs ranging from finance to operations to HR. These solutions use a combination of PowerApps, Microsoft Flow and Power BI, connected to SharePoint Online. They have a growing Center of Excellence (CoE) within IT which operates with a principle of empowering business units to build their own solutions \u2013 \u201capps built by business for business\u201d.<\/em><\/strong>
\nWatch Ian Doyle talk about the Standard Bank Center of Excellence and wide adoption of Power Apps across several business units<\/a><\/p>\n

BUSINESS LANDSCAPE<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Standard Bank had several business problems that needed to be streamlined across various business units. There was a need to extract maximum value from their Office 365 investment, embrace digitalization, and use mobile technologies to increase efficiency and improve customer and employee experience across the board whilst servicing the unique requirements of each business lines and locations.
\nAs one illustrative example, the Cash Tribe team in Retail Banking South Africa was responsible for 8,000 ATMs. They needed to perform manual inspections of these ATMs on a regular basis for problems such as vandalism, broken screens and dirty surroundings, that were not flagged through automated alerts.<\/p>\n

BEFORE POWER PLATFORM \u2013 processes and challenges<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Prior to Office 365 and the Power platform, many of the business processes were executed using a combination of manual processes, Excel spreadsheets, email and other disparate technologies that did not integrate with each other.
\nIn the ATM inspection example \u2013 the inspections were done on a clipboard and the team was buried in reams of paperwork. The process was fragmented across various job functions such as facilities, technicians, etc. Logging of the tickets could only take place once back in the office, which resulted in issues taking up to two weeks to get reported. Moreover, there was no central data repository against which to run business intelligence that could aid in future improvements.
\nLooking across the landscape of digitization challenges, the central IT team was simply not resourced to build mobile and digital solutions for every business unit requirement.<\/p>\n

CREATING A CENTER OF EXCELLENCE – enable business units to own their own digital journey<\/strong><\/h3>\n

Ian Doyle is the Head of Employee Experience Engineering at Standard Bank. His team was formed to find ways to maximize value from their Office 365 investment. They discovered PowerApps and Microsoft Flow as \u201chidden gems\u201d in their Office 365 subscription. While their initial focus was on Office 365 solutions, they quickly expanded this scope to include building desktop and mobile apps and optimizing backend processes. An early success case was the mobile ATM inspection solution built using PowerApps and Power BI connected to SharePoint Online lists.<\/p>\n

ATM Inspection app<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Ian\u2019s team worked closely with the Cash Tribe team to build a mobile PowerApp for inspecting ATMs. Within twenty-four hours they had a working prototype, which was then tested and refined alongside the business. Today, over 300 inspectors use the app to generate over 5,000 inspection reports each month. Watch a demo of the ATM Inspection<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"ATM Screenshots of the ATM inspection mobile PowerApp<\/em><\/p>\n

The app uses the device GPS capabilities to find nearby ATMs and the device camera to take pictures when issues need to be reported. All the data is stored in SharePoine Online lists. Power BI dashboards and reports are used to visualize the aggregate data.<\/p>\n

Center of Excellence Overview<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Based on the success of the ATM inspection app and similar early wins, Ian\u2019s team proceeded to create a Center of Excellence (CoE) focused on Office 365 and the Power Platform. A key to their center of excellence approach is to involve business teams directly. The business teams are closest to the friction points in their working lives. Ian\u2019s team dedicates people to help these business teams identify friction points and then get trained to build time-saving solutions using Office 365 and the Power platform.<\/p>\n

The center of excellence has continued to grow and partner with business units to create solutions that broadly fall into these categories: client onboarding, auditing, manual to digital, cognitive services, universal client engagement, automation, structuring workflows, and chat bots. The team recently won the Beyond Excellence award for the top performing team. These are some of the 350+ solutions built over the past 18 months:<\/p>\n

Center of Excellence Best Practices<\/strong><\/h4>\n

They follow a repeatable model to take a new problem from idea to pilot to solution. Watch Vanessa Welgemoed speak to these in her BizAppsSummit presentation<\/a>. Here are some of the key principles and steps in this process:<\/p>\n