DIS Sensors energizes its project management with Microsoft Planner, Power BI, and JiJi Technologies Apps4.Pro solution

Summary

For 30 years DIS Sensors, a subsidiary of Rotero Holding, has developed, manufactured and supplied sensors, control systems and electronics for applications of all kinds. Their sensor range focuses on the measurement of inclination, vibration, and acceleration. DIS Sensors is also a leading supplier of rotary encoders. Because their sensors are all developed and produced in-house, DIS Sensors also offers custom solutions for specific needs.

DIS Sensors adopted Office 365 and hoped to fully migrate to use Modern SharePoint Sites with Office 365 tools such as Planner, and Power BI as part of their digital transformation journey. For project management, DIS Sensors started using Microsoft Planner, but needed a solution to provide visibility into the overall status of its various projects for all resource managers and project leads. JiJi Technologies helped DIS Sensors implement its solution Apps4.Pro, which provided a Power BI connector and custom Gantt charts for project management.

Challenge

DIS Sensors had several departments with one or more SharePoint team sites. Typically, one site was for the department itself, with additional dedicated team sites for specific work. Some of these additional team sites had a lifespan of weeks, some years – very few with an indefinite lifespan. Within SharePoint team sites, DIS Sensors was using Microsoft Planner to assign ‘work packages’ to the workers. However, because some plans were contained within one department and others were cross departmental, the collection of workers on each plan could span across departments.

In principle, this type of project management with SharePoint, Planners and email is fine. Every worker can see their assigned tasks from different plans in the Planner hub. The problem was that resource managers didn’t have access to a high-level overview of who was working on which tasks. A project lead could see from his project plan and team site who was working on the project, but unless they were part of the project plan and team site, there was no view into the workers working on other projects.

Strategy

Using JiJi Technologies’ solution Apps4.Pro, DIS SEnsors employees have access to a custom-developed Gantt chart, displaying the Microsoft Planner tasks, so resource managers and project leads can check tasks from multiple plans in one place. Apps4.Pro Planner Gantt also provides the ability to edit the tasks from within the Gantt chart itself.

Using Apps4.Pro, DIS Sensors workers can also convert their email to Planner tasks. Using Apps4.Pro Planner’s custom fields capabilities, DIS Sensors added fields to track estimated and actual work hours in Microsoft Planner, so workers can register their actual time spent on tasks. This data is then used for budget and resource planning.

The default reporting capability in Microsoft Planner is limited to only allowing filtering within the plan. JiJi Technologies’ solution Apps4.Pro leverages both a Power BI API and Microsoft Graph API to synchronize Planner data with a Power BI data set. The solution also does a periodic refresh of Planner data within Power BI. As part of the solution, JiJi Technologies provided a report with various filter options such as plan, assigned to, due date, and bucket. Now that the plan details from Microsoft Planner are available in Power BI, DIS Sensors’ resource managers and project leads can build reports and custom dashboards.

Results

The resource managers and project lead at DIS Sensors are happy with the integration of Apps4.Pro solution with Microsoft Planner, which has improved their workers’ productivity and project management. Also, with Power BI reporting, they can now get an overview of their various projects.