Manufacturing / McCain

Enhancing Performance with Component Framework

Global Food Leader McCain Partners with TribalScale. Powering collaborative workflows: see how McCain enhanced their PowerApps performance to streamline daily operations.

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Challenge

The core issue faced by the Digitized Daily Meeting Cadence (DDDS) application was its inability to efficiently handle the creation and editing of Handoffs due to several challenges:

  • PowerApps, the platform used for development, struggled to render complex, multi-layered schemas efficiently.

  • PowerApps imposed a restriction allowing only one person to edit the application at a time, significantly impeding collaborative efforts.

  • The absence of a comprehensive testing framework within PowerApps hindered thorough testing of custom components, affecting the application's reliability and performance.

Key results

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Enhanced Customization and Efficiency

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Improved Performance, Stability, and Scalability

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Increased Client Confidence

Solution

To overcome the challenges, our team utilized the PowerApps Component Framework (PCF) and integrated Fluent UI. PCF, powered by React, enabled the creation of custom components within PowerApps, extending its capabilities, especially in handling nested data structures. Fluent UI ensured consistency in user experience and interface design, offering a wide array of components that mirrored native PowerApps functionality.

PROCESS:

After realizing that optimizing built-in functionalities wouldn't suffice for overcoming challenges without hindering efficiency and potential growth, we explored alternative solutions. This exploration led us to discover the Power Apps Component Framework (PCF) as a viable option.

IMPLEMENTATION:

We began with a Proof of Concept (PoC) to validate the suitability of PowerApps Component Framework (PCF). Its success led to the development of our initial PCF component, ensuring compatibility and seamless integration into the DDDS application, establishing PCF as a foundational element. We strategically revamped backend schemas to accommodate advanced functionalities introduced by PCF components, ensuring seamless integration and supporting a broader range of capabilities. Subsequently, rigorous optimization efforts were undertaken to enhance PCF component performance, interaction efficiency, and data integrity, resulting in reduced latency and improved application responsiveness.

Technologies

  • Power Apps Component Framework (PCF)

  • React

  • Fluent UI

  • Git Repository

  • Jest

  • Redux Toolkit

Outcome

The integration of PCF into the DDDS application yielded several key outcomes:

  1. Enhanced Customization and Efficiency: Tailored components enabled a more agile development process, swiftly accommodating diverse client requests.

  2. Improved Performance, Stability, and Scalability: PCF deployment significantly boosted application performance, stability, and scalability, ensuring robustness and efficiency.

  3. Comprehensive Testing: Transitioning to PCF introduced automated testing, enabling rigorous evaluations of component rendering capabilities and codebase accuracy, enhancing quality assurance.

  4. Increased Client Confidence: Tangible improvements in application performance and customized solutions bolstered client confidence in our team and solution.

While PowerApps offers robust out-of-the-box functionality for simple workflows, our integration of PCF with React enabled complex workflows that would have been challenging in PowerApps alone. This approach not only accelerated development time but also enhanced testing capabilities, establishing an efficient solution for teams needing sophisticated functionality within PowerApps.

End Result

  • Enhanced Customization and Efficiency

  • Improved Performance, Stability, and Scalability

  • Increased Client Confidence

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TribalScale’s expertise with Agile development has been key in this project, which is ultimately a great learning opportunity for McCain as we are focused on building a capability to build digital tools.

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Caroline Morissette

VP of Digital & Data at McCain Foods

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