Power Apps makes capex management a breeze for Oceania Healthcare

With residential units and care suites dotted all over the country, Oceania Healthcare is one of the country’s largest owners and operators of retirement villages.

It has assets worth $2.1 billion under management and is constantly investing to ensure its independent living, assisted and higher-level care units deliver the best experience for residents and patients alike.

“The app was delivered on time, slightly under budget and was excellent work. You can’t ask for anything more than that.”

Central to that goal is Oceania’s capital expenditure approval system, which streamlines the process of requesting and approving new items of capital expenditure (CAPEX).

“Managers at our villages might need to purchase some bed mattresses for care units or replace a couch in the lounge,” explains Jacqui Keller, Head of Technology Delivery at Oceania Healthcare.

“When the spend goes over a certain limit, the request needs to get a higher approval.”

Oceania’s CAPEX approval software was nearing the end of its life, presenting Keller with a choice - invest in an entirely new system or explore using Microsoft’s Power Apps platform to replicate the existing CAPEX management functions.

Leveraging what you already have

With Deptive’s help, Keller took the latter path and has ended up with a brand new, lightweight and secure application that has greater functionality, leverages Oceania’s existing Microsoft licences and is pointing the way for automating of business processes in other parts of the company.

The project saw Deptive replicate all of the features of the old standalone CAPEX approval system with the additional benefit of making the application available on smartphones.

“That was a huge improvement,” says Keller.

“People had been asking for the ability to use it on their mobile phone rather than having to log in over a virtual desktop.”

Now managers can lodge a CAPEX request from wherever they are with the request immediately sent to the appropriate delegated authority for consideration. Alerts sent to Oceania’s operations team and full traceability of authorisations allows Oceania to have full visibility into its CAPEX needs and spending.

The data entered via the CAPEX approval app sits in SharePoint, offering the convenience of being able to be easily fed into Power BI for CAPEX reporting and visualisations as well. 

From the initial requirements workshop with Deptive, through to the development of a prototype, testing and final deployment, the whole process took just three months.

“Because we were moving platforms, we needed something to replace all of that functionality within a really short timeframe,” says Keller.

“It was incredible, our user acceptance testing basically became our user training because the app worked just how people envisaged it would. We just swapped out the link within our intranet to the new application and sent people there,” she adds.

With the use of the new Power App covered by Oceania’s existing Microsoft licence, the company won’t be hit with additional charges as the number of people using it increases. That factor, combined with the speed of deployment means that the Power App investment will have a quick pay-off.

“We are using it to showcase how we can quickly start making improvements within the suite of applications that we've already got,” says Keller.

A collaborative, flexible approach

“Power Apps is ideal for those business processes that you'd like to automate or streamline but without actually having to go down the track of developing a fully-fledged application.”

Keller says Deptive’s Modern Workplace Consultants, including project lead Tanel Vahk, brought a collaborative, flexible approach to the project.

“We just really enjoyed working with Deptive. It makes a project so much easier when you have that sort of relationship, she says.

“The app was delivered on time, slightly under budget and was excellent work. You can’t ask for anything more than that.”

Oceania Healthcare is now evaluating where else it could deploy Power Apps to great effect. 

“We found that Power Apps fits nicely between a manual process and having to buy something out of the box,” says Keller.

“The use of technology across our retirement villages is only going to increase and we’ve got lots of ideas about where we could take this next.”

Want to explore how Power Apps can help streamline and automate your business processes? Get in touch with our Modern Workplace team to learn more about Deptive's Power Apps services.