An app in a day: A quick solution to improve efficiency
High-tech food production legends, GrowUp Farms, as part of their continuous improvement efforts, got in touch with us to support in streamlining their maintenance alerts. Our super speedy consulting team were more than happy to help, building the prototype in less than a day, and after testing it went live within a week!
The challenge
GrowUp Farms wanted to develop and improve on their factory alerts system. Their building management system would generate an alert and email it to the factory manager. This created a bottleneck for alerts if there was a situation where the factory manager was unable to action the alert e.g. holiday or sickness. GrowUp Farms approached our consulting team to support their vision of extending the functionality of their alerts system to cover more scenarios.
Our solution
Using the Microsoft Power Platform we built a mobile app that integrates with the emails and notifies a group of people – removing the bottleneck – by a push notification when a new alert comes in. And if the alert is not acknowledged by pushing a button in the app, it keeps notifying them every five minutes to ensure it gets actioned.
The process looks something like this:
- When an email arrives in the alerts@ mailbox, the details get copied into a Microsoft SharePoint list.
- Every five minutes an automated job looks at this list to see if there are any new alerts. If there are, it sends a notification to everyone who uses the app.
- When someone receives the notification, they tap on it to open the app. There, they can see the details of the alert and even open the email to review it. They can also mark the alert as acknowledged, which stops the notifications.
People can also go into the app at any time to review the status of alerts, not only when they get a notification.
The team can now pick alerts up more quickly and efficiently. The business is also safe in the knowledge that action will be taken with the 5-minute reminders in place.
“Since working with Select they have hit the ground running. We can trust them to get the job done and have been impressed with their agility and positive attitude.”
About the Client
GrowUp Farms solve problems in food production by growing food better, in perfect conditions. They use plants, science and technology to grow the best tasting food, without compromising on quality, ethics or environmental impact. They have led the next generation of high-tech food production since 2013.
Find out more about GrowUp Farms
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