Customer
Alcumus
HappyWired
HappyWired specializes in helping organizations utilize and push their Office 365 and SharePoint environments to their limits. HappyWired enables businesses to benefit from their current investment in Office 365 or take the first steps to the cloud. HappyWired focuses on helping organizations embrace Office 365, enabling organizations to accomplish a successful digital transformation. HappyWired develops and consults across Office 365, SharePoint, and Azure.
Learn moreSummary
Alcumus is the United Kingdom’s market-leading provider of software-led risk management solutions, serving more than 48,000 clients with the knowledge, expertise and digital tools needed to manage exposure to risk, comply with legislation, improve business performance and encourage workforce engagement.
Alcumus customers rely on the considerable industry experience, sector specialisms, and wide-ranging breadth of support from 570 highly-skilled employees to become safer, healthier and stronger. Staff retention and well-being play a central role in Alcumus continued success.
To support a more efficient time-off request system, Alcumus worked with their trusted Microsoft partner, HappyWired to implement a custom “My Time Away” application, using Microsoft PowerApps.
Challenge
With a highly dedicated workforce, often putting customers before themselves, Alcumus recognized a trend towards under-utilization of holiday entitlement with 25 -30% of requests being requested at year end which impacted the businesses ability to prioritize client interests.
With no central process in place, entitlement was managed using spreadsheets and balances needed to be manually tracked for every leave request. For managers with teams of between 4 and 20 colleagues, the current process was consuming up to 2 days of valuable management time per month. This hindered their ability to proactively identify potential risks to staff well being, and resource availability
Strategy
After an initial company-wide audit of leave entitlement, working closely with HR and corporate stakeholders, HappyWired designed and built the “My Time Away” application, using Microsoft PowerApps to overhaul the way annual leave was managed.
My Time Away application features:
- Ability to review current leave entitlement, including flexi-leave, length of service bonuses, and carry over entitlement from the previous calendar year
- Ability to request time off between date ranges with automatic adjustment of weekends, public holidays, company shutdown days, partial days
- Leave approval from management within minutes through Microsoft Flow.
- Consistent and equitable process of part time hours, versus full time contracts
- Calendar views of leave at a team, department or specialism level, through the app, or within SharePoint online, allowing users to quickly identify and plan for potential skill shortages
HappyWired have become an innovation partner whose creativity and responsiveness in PowerApp development has transformed our workplace at great pace.
Chris Elias (Internal Communications Manager, Alcumus)
Results
My Time Away has made a huge difference in employee consumption of annual leave with 90% of employees using the app within its first 2 weeks. By adding an essential self-service application to the Intranet, My Time Away has driven employees to their new digital experience at the heart of Alcumus investment in people strategy.
