Apollo moves to PowerApps for Modern Work

About Apollo Fire Detectors Ltd

Apollo Fire Detectors Ltd specialises in the design and manufacture of high-quality fire detection solutions for commercial and industrial applications. With regional offices in the UK, America, China, Dubai, Germany and India, plus a network of partners and distributors on five continents, they have cemented their place as a world-class fire solutions provider. 

Apollo have long used SharePoint to manage various production and quality processes. Microsoft’s current suite of Cloud technologies, including PowerApps, Flow, SharePoint Online and Azure SQL Server, have made a compelling case to begin creating cloud-based services and moving away from on-premise servers. 

This means that the IT team can focus more of their time on creating new tools to help the business, and less time maintaining and upgrading on-premise servers. 

The challenge

A key process at Apollo is the requesting and tracking of sample testing from their in-house laboratory. This is an important process to manage efficiently to ensure that testing is done in a timely way, and that results are fed back accurately.  

Apollo was running a number of similar processes on legacy servers and wanted to begin moving these onto a modern platform whilst re-using current in-house technical skills. 

The solution

We’ve been working with Apollo for a number of years supporting their business systems. To take advantage of Apollo’s Office 365 infrastructure, a SharePoint Online, PowerApps and Power Automate solution seemed the obvious way to go. This gives people seamless access to the system with no new passwords to learn, means users can easily access the system from any location. Power Automate takes care of all of the messaging, letting people know when a sample has been received, when a test has been carried out, what the results were, and provides quick links to the test results.  

Moving a current process into the cloud meant that the new technologies could be trialed in a low risk environment, with the current system being used to fallback to if any issues were found. Confidence could then be built in the ability of Office 365 to run key processes at Apollo. 

The outcome

The project ran extremely smoothly, with the new PowerApps system providing all of the functionality needed to manage the Service Requests efficiently. The notifications that the system provides give the required information in a timely way. In addition, the excellent reporting capabilities of PowerBI mean that administrators can quickly access system logs to look at how the system is being used, and to check for any issues.  

As a result of this successful implementation, we went on to work with Apollo Fire to build and Audit Management process, Product Testing Power Apps, and a SharePoint Online Intranet.