EY teams speed time to market using Microsoft Power Platform, delights clients with flexible, all-in-one solution

Centralized mobility platform

Companies around the world know the EY organization for helping clients build a better working world, foster trust in the capital markets, and create long-term value for society. Working across assurance, consulting, law, strategy, tax, and transactions, EY teams ask better questions to find new answers for the complex issues facing our world today.

Many of its clients turn to EY teams for enterprise mobility support. EY professionals helps them manage everything related to corporate international travel or relocation, such as employee immigration, tax implications, compensation, visas, and lodging.

The EY organization has been offering enterprise mobility services for few years, but clients and staff had to handle each aspect of these services individually. The firm began to develop a product in-house called the EY Mobility Pathway (EYMP) to consolidate the web of legacy systems. It was incredibly complex and involved huge amounts of data.

Rapid development unlocked

EY teams have worked closely with Microsoft for many years and won the 2020 US Microsoft Partner of the Year Award for Advisory Services. In early 2019, the EYMP team turned to Microsoft Power Platform to create a proof of concept for the EYMP. “We used Microsoft Power Platform and within six weeks, we built a prototype that we could demo to EY  clients,” says Michael Maloney, Senior Technical Architect at Ernst & Young LLP.

EY developer teams determined that all case management could take place in the Microsoft Power Platform. A “case” refers to the employee that the mobility services focus on, and each aspect of a case is called a task. Internally, EY analysts and case coordinators use EYMP to help move client cases forward. Clients also access EYMP, including the employee going overseas, who might need to upload relevant documents, and the HR staff or corporate managers who track the employee’s case. Developers augmented EYMP with Microsoft Power BI for reporting and analytics, which the HR and corporate managers access to gain visibility into their overall case status across various tasks.

EYMP uses Microsoft Dataverse to store data related to the cases, such as citizenship, contact, and dependent information. The developers also took advantage of Microsoft Power Automate to automate the many tasks within a case. EYMP automatically creates cases when triggered by certain conditions and generates tasks as the case moves through different stages. “We’ve added a lot of automation with Power Automate as our workflow engine,” says Maloney. “We’ve drastically reduced manual work, even on complex workflows, which is fantastic.”

EY developers used React, which its creators describe as “a JavaScript library for building user interfaces,” to create a custom front-end portal. React communicates directly with the various back-end systems through APIs. “We trained all our developers in using Microsoft Power Platform because it’s extremely powerful and flexible,” says Maloney. “It’s been easy for our developers to work across Microsoft Power Platform with the React portal just by adding APIs.”

To manage traffic to the EYMP portal, EY teams uses Microsoft Azure Application Gateway. The organization also relies on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service to support case management, including document management and contact access for customer profiles.

Unprecedented speed to market

EYMP is an incredibly complex solution, but EY teams were able to take it to market quickly by taking advantage of Microsoft Power Platform. The team began development in May 2019 and took EYMP live with the first client in November of the same year. “We built our product quickly with Microsoft Power Platform because it’s a low-code, highly configurable platform that handles large datasets,” says Doug Fighter, Senior Manager at Ernst and Young LLP . “The EYMP leadership team was happy with the speed with which we built this product.” 

Added value to clients

Through EYMP, the organization now offers a more streamlined, sophisticated experience to its clients to help them manage corporate travel. “The biggest impact for EY  clients is the seamless experience offered by EYMP,” says Fighter. “Rather than information in siloed applications, we now provide visibility and a rich user experience for EY  clients to help manage information within one tool. It’s a huge upgrade that clients are thrilled with.”

With all enterprise mobility services in one cloud-based platform, EY teams have  positioned itself to serve the unique needs of large clients more easily. “EYMP is a supporter for some of the  enterprise clients. We now can deploy into an environment specific to them and customize EY services for their needs in just 2 months instead of 6 to 12 months,” says Fighter.

He concludes, “We have the flexibility and the business logic to manage thousands of different combinations of country-to-country travel within one tool, which has made a real difference for EY clients and our internal teams. Choosing Microsoft Power Platform has definitely been a win-win for us all.”

For more information about how the EY organization uses Microsoft Power Platform, read this story. 

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