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February 28, 2023

Jaguar Land Rover creates better company continuity with Power Platform app-building

Jaguar Land Rover is a UK-based luxury automotive company with 38,000 employees, 600,000 vehicles produced annually, and £22.98 billion in annual revenue. The company has adopted Microsoft Power Platform to transform operations to improve safety, efficiency, and productivity—and to help drive down costs. Leading the way for the company is citizen developer and power user Gareth Crompton, Senior Digital Engineer in Human Resources at Jaguar Land Rover. Crompton has now built more than 160 apps, providing numerous benefits to the company—from managing workspace capacity and contract tracing during a pandemic to streamlining the work-hazard reporting process and more.

“With an increased knowledge and understanding of the platform, I’m able to deliver global solutions to Jaguar Land Rover that are available to all employees via Teams.”

Gareth Crompton, Senior Digital Engineer, Human Resources, Jaguar Land Rover

Using technology to bring an idea to life

In 2017, Jaguar Land Rover’s Gareth Crompton sustained a back injury that required four surgeries. His work as a frontline storeman was physically demanding—including changing heavy barrel drums and other manual tasks. Continuing to work in that role would increase the risk of further injury, so Crompton had to find new ways to make himself useful to the company.

Naturally inquisitive about tech, Crompton decided to learn Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and Python programming languages and started to create digital tools to make his day’s work easier. “I’ve always loved technology and how you can digitally create something from nothing with just an idea,” he says. 

Soon, he was introduced to a Microsoft Gold partner who was migrating Jaguar Land Rover from Google to Office 365. As he learned more about Microsoft solutions, including Microsoft Power Platform, his passion for app-building was born. “They showed me the light,” he says. 

After three months of prototyping, building, and testing in Microsoft Power Apps, Crompton created his first app, Prototype Build Books. As word of his interest in app development spread, requests for his apps kept coming. “I was soon developing day and night, mostly by choice.”

His apps earned the attention of the Board of Management. Crompton was then promoted to Technical Engineer in 2019, not long before the COVID-19 pandemic.

My Workspace: A mobile-based workspace management solution 

Jaguar Land Rover needed a way to manage workspace bookings so it could maximize limited capacity office space, conform to pandemic safety guidelines, and perform contact tracing across multiple sites. 

The company initially used a paper sign-in sheet at each site. “If there was an outbreak of COVID-19 within the workplace, you can imagine trying to go through all of those pieces of paper to try to find out who else was in that day,” says Crompton. “It was an absolute nightmare.” 

The company needed a digital system, but there was no out-of-the-box solution available. It had spoken with multiple vendors about custom-creating a solution, but the expense was high. That’s when Jaguar Land Rover turned to Crompton. 

Within one month, he had designed, developed, and delivered My Workspace, a mobile-based Power Apps solution embedded in Microsoft Teams. It allows employees to reserve a workspace up to seven days in advance, monitors capacity, and facilitates contact tracing if any employees test positive for COVID-19.

Mobile Homescreen of My Workspace Screenshot
Mobile home screen of My Workspace booking app—simple yet powerful tool for managing workspace reservations. 

Employees access the app through their computer or mobile device via the Teams interface. They select a job site, then choose the building and the area within that building. They have the option to set that as a default. Then they select the date and a morning or afternoon timeframe. If a workspace is available, the employee receives a calendar invitation for the requested time, confirming the booking. 

Crompton built the My Workspace app using Power Apps, with SharePoint lists as the data source. When an employee submits a booking request, the app logic connects with the corresponding SharePoint list to count current bookings, compares that number to the capacity limit, and determines whether to approve or deny the request. When a request is approved, Microsoft Power Automate flows connect with Outlook to pull the booking information into a calendar invite and send a confirmation to the employee. 

Crompton also created back-end list maintenance flows to separate active and archived lists and remove archived lists after one year.

Support for contact tracing

While archived lists are helpful in tracking overall numbers, they also serve a more immediate purpose: contact tracing. Crompton explains, “Suppose I’m in the office tomorrow, and someone who’s in the same office reports the next day that they have tested positive for COVID-19. I’m then considered a “contact.” I can be notified about the potential exposure. The My Workspace app feeds that information into another COVID-19 case management app I created, which notifies the incident management team about the positive case and any additional contacts. If an outbreak happens, they have reliable data that can help influence decisions.”

Jaguar Land Rover also uses this data to identify larger trends. “We can run analytics to answer questions such as, ‘How many people have been in this week compared to last week?’ and ‘Has anyone been exposed to COVID-19 at a particular work site?’ Because we’re moving more toward data-driven decision-making,” says Crompton, “the more data that we can provide to our managers or senior managers, the better our outcomes.”

Intuitive and easy to use

The My Workspace app was used to create more than 700,000 booking requests in less than one year, and Crompton has received positive feedback from employees and the Board of Management. “The feedback I get most often is that it’s extremely easy and intuitive to use,” he says. “And because it’s hosted within Teams, everything’s together. Users don’t have to navigate away from the tool they’re already using.”

AiR2 app: Onsite accidents and incidents reporting

Another challenge for Jaguar Land Rover was managing the reporting of onsite hazards, near-misses, and incidents such as injuries. Its initial reporting system was a traditional web form that used JAVA and HTML on the front end with a SQL back end. Employees submitted safety reports and the company would have to manually collate those reports and facilitate the process of investigating and resolving each issue. Employees found this reporting system outdated and cumbersome to use and the company suspected that hazards, near-misses, and incidents were going unreported. The original Accident and Incident Reporting (AIR) system had been created by an internal team and cost £60,000 per year to maintain—and that expense was growing every year.

To streamline the manual process, encourage more widespread reporting, and cut operating costs, while increasing adoption, Crompton created an app called AiR2 that allows employees to quickly file a report from anywhere using their mobile devices. He created the canvas app in Power Apps and chose Microsoft Forms to gather intake information. “There’s a need within our manufacturing facilities for employees to raise hazards and near-misses. Not everyone in the facility has Microsoft accounts, so the way that we found was best was to integrate Microsoft Forms,” says Crompton.

AiR2 Teams-Embedded App Screenshot
Jaguar Land Rover’s AiR2 Teams-embedded app facilitates easy reporting via an intuitive interface.

The app is available for both desktop and mobile devices. QR codes are posted around the manufacturing facilities, which employees can scan on their mobile devices to file reports. The person reporting the issue is called the “raiser.” The raiser enters the name and employee ID of the person named in the report along with the location, date, and time, and a brief description of the issue. 

The app requires specific information, depending on whether the issue is a hazard (potentially dangerous situation), near-miss (something dangerous almost happened), or incident (someone was injured). For example, an incident would also require details about who was injured, where on the body they were injured, and the severity, along with information on whether first aid was applied and by whom. 

Upon submission, the raiser’s information employee ID is checked against the company’s SAP employee data to validate their employee status and initiate a Power Automate flow, sending an email receipt to the raiser and an email notification to the investigator—who updates the ticket with any actions taken to investigate or resolve the issue, plus safety measures implemented. From there, the ticket goes for further processing by the health and safety team within Jaguar Land Rover. The raiser and investigator can continue to track the progress of the report. In some cases, the data is also used as evidence in court cases.

Not only does the new app make it easier to identify and track open and resolved issues, it helps ensure that each investigation is fully resolved and that the company is compliant with company legal, health, and safety obligations. It also helps team members maintain accurate records so they can identify trends and set health and safety priorities.

Power Automate Workflows Overview
Power Automate was used to automate workflows across Outlook, SharePoint, and legacy systems. 

Crompton says that the AiR2 app has led to substantial cost savings and a rise in employee compliance with reporting issues. “AiR2 has saved about £60,000 to £70,000 per year in traditional software costs, upkeep, and maintenance. We see a lot more users reporting safety issues now. And most of the feedback is that it’s very easy to use and very intuitive to navigate.”

Gareth Crompton earns company Technical Excellence award for his Power Platform solutions.

Delivering global solutions

By the end of 2021, Crompton had developed more than 160 apps. “With an increased knowledge and understanding of the platform, I’m able to deliver global solutions for Jaguar Land Rover that are available to all employees at an enterprise level of design, build, and security,” he says.

Crompton has also started to take a pro-code and agile approach to developing his applications, including creating APIs to interact with existing systems in the organization and application lifecycle management (ALM) using GitHub.

Now in development is the Authority to Hire (ATH) canvas app, through which managers can obtain approvals to hire employees from within the organization or externally. The app will dramatically speed up the process of onboarding new employees. It will also help with labor forecasting, leading to time and cost savings, and improving the level of service and experience of company managers. 

As Crompton reflects on his work over the past few years, he offers this advice to anyone else who is on a similar journey: “Experiment while having fun, work in small chunks to overcome the issues you face, have a goal in mind, and keep going until you achieve it. Power Apps is quite addictive.”

“The feedback I get most often is that [the My Workspace app] is extremely easy and intuitive to use. And because it’s hosted within Teams, everything’s together. Users don’t have to navigate away from the tool they’re already using.”

Gareth Crompton, Senior Digital Engineer, Human Resources, Jaguar Land Rover

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