Introduction

Events team of a large organisation currently has a very long and manual process for handling requests for events to be held at their premises. They would like to automate this process by creating an online form, to streamline their approval process and keep track of the process.

Key Issues

The event request needs approval from over 20 departments in order to be green-lighted. These approvals are currently managed via email. Sometimes, these approvals are interlinked, but one department has no knowledge of approval status from other departments, resulting in a lot of back and forth of emails between event organisers, events team and various departments. Since all information is stored in email, there is no easy way to search and retrieve information about a single event request.

Success Criteria

The purpose of the project is two-fold. The main requirement is to create a traceable workflow for the events requests and approvals. The secondary requirement is to provide secure centralised storage for the approvals, organiser forms and other required documentation in order to comply with data-retention and reporting requirements.

Recommendation

In line with other applications, An n-tier architecture on Azure Cloud was recommended. Angular was used for the UI portal and deployed into Azure storage account. .NET Core was used for the client API and deployed into Azure as an app service.

The system is integrated with Azure AD and benefits from the Single Sign-on feature. Users are authenticated based on AD group memberships. The system will be available both on and off-site, provided the user has an internet connection.

For Reminders, Azure Automation accounts runbooks were used for scheduling background process at regular intervals.

Outcome

The application was successfully adopted by all event organisers with minimal training. 59% of the event requests were processed and approved without need for additional information. 73% of the requests were approved within 5 business days. On average, it took 15 – 25 business days to approve a request using the manual process.