Case study: Heathrow Airport
Let's look at an example of a real world case of how a large infrastructure, Heathrow Airport has used the Power Platform to dramatically improve their business operations.
About Heathrow Airport
Heathrow Airport (or London Airport) is a major international airport situated in London, United Kingdom. It's one of the world's busiest airports, comparable to a small city in terms of complexity and traffic. As such, there is always great value in streamlining operations in the airport, which first began with the digitisation of processes.
The first step towards this use of technology was with Heathrow Airport adopting Microsoft Office 365 for all its employees, which later was built upon when they introduced Power Apps.
Before this, the airport didn't even have corporate emails!
Digitisation Strategy
Having over 76,000 people working at Heathrow Airport, there are easily thousands of processes that happen everyday that could be improved by moving their work into apps. However, with the scale of Heathrow Airport, it would take hundreds of developers and many years of work to educate these developers on the different processes within the airport, come up with solutions and began building an application for it. So despite the obvious benefits of digitalisation, they simply didn't have the time or resources to uproot a new team for the transition to digital.
And that's right. If you were to try and develop an app for an organisation of that size, there is a lengthy procedure it needs to go through; regulation and compliance checks, upper management approval, operational processes and review, cost and resource management and more. All of these things would need to occur before even writing the first line of code.
Samit's story of success
So with a traditional approach to developing internal business apps like this, it would take many many years before even a prototype would be available for employees to use. However, what happened was the spark of a digital revolution beginning with one of the employees at Heathrow Airport, Samit Saini.
The story of this Samit Saini is that he wanted to show what could be accomplished using Power Apps. To do so, he needed to demonstrate its value by coming up with a Proof of Concept (PoC). Doing so would be able to show that if he was able to build an app that can help to improve operations at the Airport, any other employee could equally do the same.
So he began to develop an Power App that contained security information translated in different languages. This meant that instead of having to refer to a physical copy of the book which contained this information, employees could just pull out their phone and look the information up on the app. There it could display clearly what things could/could not be brought onto airplanes displayed in several languages and conveyed to passengers in the area.
Samit developed this multilingual security app within one week using Power Apps, not having any experience and very minimal coding. Showing this to his manager, he was met with astonishment with how useful the application was and how little time and money was required to build it using Power Apps. Now, this app is used by Heathrow's security officers every day, helping them to solve problems and communicate with passengers entering and leaving the airport.
A spark of change
From his act of self-empowerment using the assistance of Power Apps, Heathrow Airport thereby decided to create an official process for creating and implementing apps for employees to use. These apps could help employees build their own apps as well as utilise features from other internal apps to avoid a duplication of effort (i.e. reinveinting the wheel).
First-line workers, with their intimate knowledge of the daily tasks that keep large organizations operating, often know exactly how to optimize those tasks. As Saini discovered early on, many of these digitization initiatives are cost prohibitive for IT departments to address. Power Apps removes these financial barriers, instead relying on the ingenuity of interested employees.
Outcomes
Reduction in amount of paperwork
eliminated 75,000 pages of legacy paper
Reduced time of data entry
saved 1,000 hours
Reduction in costs in work effort
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