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When B. Ramkumar was tasked with creating daily reports on marketing leads from hundreds of Microsoft Excel sheets for his managers, he knew he needed a more efficient way to complete the task. rice field.
Ramkumar’s team collates all reports submitted by each of the approximately 1,500 offices under its jurisdiction. Produced by multiple teams within each office, these reports contain potential leads for the sales team to follow and are an important tool for management to identify new business opportunities for the bank. is. However, reports don’t always upload correctly, and multiple users working with live data can cause significant data loss.
“We were able to collect all the information from various sources but there was no centralized place to store and follow up on them. As one R. Radhakrishna said:
SBI is the nation’s largest bank with over 450 million customers and over 250,000 employees. All SBI employees now have Office 365 and use services such as OneDrive, Teams, SharePoint Online and Power Apps as part of the 220-year-old bank’s digital transformation in 2017 doing.
In an era where almost every app exists, Ramkumar, Manager of Digital and Transaction Banking in SBI’s Chennai office, toyed with the idea of creating an app that could automate the data reconciliation process and present the data visually. rice field.
“The Excel sheet that we sent to the user not friendly Not only the people in the branch, but also the back office that was monitoring the data? That’s how I came up with the idea for the Digi Toolkit app,” he says.
However, Ramkumar, who is blind, had no educational background and no professional experience in programming. Unlike his peers, he did not learn basic computer skills in school. Computers he said technology accessibility was still decades away.
Enter Microsoft Power Apps. It’s a low-code app development platform that enables people with little or no coding experience to build apps and improve business processes.
Digi Toolkit allows employees to enter data into an app that automates the reconciliation process. On the backend, Digi Toolkit can also provide much more accurate data. Users can only access the data they enter (not the entire share sheet), avoiding intentional or unintentional tampering, and all data can be traced back to the person who entered it.
This data is relayed to the branch manager, who now has a central view of all the products of interest to the customer. Previously, each team pursued its customer leads individually.
With the Digi Toolkit, branch managers can see all the products that individual customers have expressed interest in, and easily explain them in one call instead of multiple calls from different teams. I was.
For Radhakrishna, the app provides a consolidated view of the performance of all branches in an easy-to-use way, rather than digging through an Excel sheet.
“Now we can capture leads more effectively and even track them and follow up,” he says.
The Digi Toolkit was Kumar’s second outing with Power Apps. However, I realized that I needed help to fully implement his ideas. This project was by far the largest project he had ever built.
Praveen Kumar, assistant manager overseeing SBI’s mortgages at Chennai Circle, said: “I have no coding experience, but I didn’t have full access to Power Automate, and I noticed he was struggling, so I teamed him up.”
When Ramkumar finished building the app, another colleague participated in testing the user interface elements.
“When I first started using Power Apps in 2020, Power Apps was not as accessible as it is now. But over time, Power Apps became more accessible,” he said. “I can’t wait for the next opportunity to join you in creating yet another app. And you don’t even know how to code!”
Vidya Krishnan, Deputy Managing Director of IT at SBI, said Power Apps is a “powerful and flexible” platform that enables bank staff to build custom business solutions tailored to their specific needs. I noticed
“The adoption of new technologies can lead to cultural changes within an organization. For example, the introduction of new collaboration tools can change the way teams communicate and could change the way work is organized and managed,” she says.
Fatima Syed is another employee using Power Apps. But unlike Ramkumar, who has no background in IT, Syed is an engineer. She works from her SBI’s Hyderabad office where her team handles and maintains servers.
She struggled to provide solutions to the software development requests that came her way.
“We don’t do a lot of product development,” she said. “This obviously isn’t feasible every time, because not every request warrants hardcore programming. For these, we use Power Apps,” she says.
Syed discovered Power Apps purely by accident. While responding to a request from one of her colleagues at her branch level, she suggested using Microsoft Forms to file a complaint. Her colleague recommended that Syed use Power Apps instead. This can be a two-way communication where the complainant can also track the status of the request.
Over time, she has developed half a dozen apps. Some solve one-off problems, such as collating data from all hardware connected to a network of bank branches for inventory control, while others record office maintenance complaints, Some address ongoing issues, such as collecting pictures of server racks from .
One app currently in production uses the Power Automate feature in Power Apps to add flows to emails containing branch tasks. An email can be as simple as announcing the start and end dates of your sales and marketing campaigns.
A Power Automate flow automatically adds the task to the recipient’s Outlook calendar as a reminder. The app is currently live in over 100 branches belonging to our local headquarters in Hyderabad and will be rolled out to nearly 1,300 branches.
“This saves us a lot of time because we don’t have to call every branch to let them know that deadlines are approaching,” says Syed.
Syed loves being able to deliver solutions to his colleagues without spending a lot of time or demanding valuable IT resources.
Power Apps is being used to develop several solutions at SBI offices nationwide. From keeping track of attendance, to running quizzes at the staff training center, to giving people with disabilities access to his ATM, Power Apps are in place.
Adoption of Power Apps has been rapid, with over 300 apps in regular use and over 1,400 apps in development.
For Radhakrishna, Chief General Manager of SBI’s local headquarters in Chennai, Power Apps has become a new innovation canvas. His team recently launched a QR code that SBI customers can scan and enter their requirements.
“We can now have customers enter their details themselves and prospects are automatically matched to our Digi Toolkit system. This would not have been possible without Power Apps,” he said. say.
Banking giant is setting up a Center of Excellence for Power Apps. Not only does this drive adoption, but it also finds ways to scale some apps up at the organizational level and add a governance layer to the whole thing. exercise.
“SBI and Microsoft can jointly explore the establishment of a joint Center of Excellence to provide hands-on training and brainstorming to innovate, digitize and automate routine business processes,” said Krishnan. increase.
Above: B. Ramkumar is Manager of the Digital and Transaction Banking Unit in SBI’s Chennai office, using Microsoft Power Apps to develop Digi Toolkit apps. Photo by Sri Loganathan Velmurugan of Microsoft.
Abhishek Mande Bhot is a freelance writer and editor covering news, lifestyle and luxury for Indian and US publications.
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