Delivered Power Platform applications automating maintenance workflows across retail locations in Canada and the US, with dynamic Word document generation and SharePoint integration.
A large retail organisation needed to replace a manual maintenance request and reporting workflow spanning dozens of store locations across Canada and the United States. Store managers submitted requests through email, facilities teams tracked them in spreadsheets and reporting to regional managers was compiled manually.
The client operated within a Microsoft 365 environment and wanted to use Power Platform to minimise licensing overhead while leveraging existing infrastructure. The scope included a request submission app for store staff, a back-office management app for facilities coordinators and automated document generation with reporting.
Store-facing Canvas App (Power Apps)
Store staff use a canvas app to submit maintenance requests with location details, issue category, priority and photo attachments. The app surfaces active requests for the submitting store, showing status, assigned technician and estimated completion.
The UI was designed for quick interaction on tablets - large touch targets, minimal navigation depth and auto-populated location fields based on the logged-in user's store assignment. Form validation prevents incomplete submissions before they reach the coordination team.
Back-office Model-Driven App (Power Apps)
Facilities coordinators manage requests through a model-driven app built on the Dataverse schema underlying both applications. The model-driven app surfaces the full request record with edit access, assignment workflows and status management.
Model-driven was the right choice for the coordination layer - the coordinators needed a denser information view with filtering, sorting and bulk operations that the canvas app's tile-based layout was not suited for. The two app types serve different user needs against the same data.
Automation flows (Power Automate)
Several Power Automate flows run alongside the apps:
SharePoint Communication Site
We built a SharePoint Communication Site as a centralised hub for maintenance documentation: completed report libraries, procedural guides and a dashboard web part surfacing key metrics from the Power Apps data.
We implemented document generation using a Word template with the Power Automate Word Online connector rather than building a custom document generation service. The connector supports dynamic content injection into bookmarked template fields, which was sufficient for the report format and avoided introducing any external services into a Microsoft-only environment.
Dataverse was selected over SharePoint lists as the data layer. SharePoint lists are often the default choice in Power Platform projects, but Dataverse provides proper relational data, server-side validation and more reliable performance at scale. The trade-off of a higher licensing tier was justified by the data model complexity.
The manual spreadsheet workflow was retired across all locations after rollout. Regional managers gained real-time visibility into open requests rather than waiting for weekly summary emails. The Word document generation eliminated the manual report compilation step for the facilities team - completed maintenance records were available in SharePoint within minutes of a request being closed.