Mimaki automates internal process with Power Apps

As Mimaki's digitalization partner, E-mergo developed a mobile app with Power Apps to digitize the expense claim process. With this app, Mimaki employees in the EMEA region can submit expense claims and request approval. In this blog, we discuss the solution for Mimaki and how we built it for them with Power Apps.

Mimaki is a leading manufacturer of large-format, high-precision inkjet printers and cutting plotters. Mimaki's product range includes a fully integrated workflow solution, with hardware, software, and consumables. The company has major production facilities in Asia/Pacific, the United States, and Europe.

We carried out this project for Mimaki Europe B.V., which consists of the European headquarters in the Netherlands and 7 other locations in the EMEA region. Mimaki Europe is responsible for sales, marketing, logistics, administration, and managing a large group of field technicians and a network of distributors and resellers in the EMEA region (Europe, Middle East, and Africa).

Mimaki's needs

At Mimaki, various internal processes involving an approval process were not yet (or only partially) digitized, such as submitting expense claims and requesting purchasing budgets. As a result, these types of processes weren't carried out consistently, there was no overall overview of requests and approvals, error-proneness was high, and a relatively large amount of manual work was still needed. Mimaki wanted to solve this by using low-code techniques.

Mimaki chose Microsoft Power Apps as the platform for digitizing internal approval processes with custom applications that all employees in Europe could use.

The first step was to develop an application for claiming project-related costs incurred by employees during business trips (travel and accommodation expenses). Employee expense claims need to be reviewed before payment and approved at various levels by managers. Once an expense claim is approved, a PDF and XML file must automatically be sent to the Finance department, so the claim can be imported into the financial administration system. The application needed to form a scalable and extensible foundation for adding other similar approval processes, such as requesting purchasing budgets.

Our solution

Using Microsoft's Power Platform, E-mergo developed a solution for Mimaki employees and managers involved in the expense claim process. The solution consists of a canvas app developed with Power Apps and a number of flows developed with Power Automate.

The app was developed with a mobile user interface, so expense claims can be submitted on both a desktop and a mobile phone. The flows handle the integrations with Azure AD and Office 365 and the automatic routing of requests to the people who need to approve them.

User roles

When opening the app, the user's role (employee or manager) is automatically determined by looking up the user's details in Mimaki's Azure AD tenant. Based on the user's role, certain functions in the app are hidden, for example the ability to approve expense claims. When submitting a claim, invoices and receipts can easily be added as attachments by uploading a photo or file.

Expense claim process

After a request is submitted from the app, the employee's direct manager automatically receives an email with the request for approval. The email contains the key details of the request and a link that opens the app and displays the details of the request. The manager can then view the details of the request along with the attachments in the app, and then approve or reject it with a button.

When rejecting a claim, a manager has the option to add a comment. Depending on the amount of the claimed expense, after the first approval the request is automatically forwarded to the department manager or the managing director for additional approval. After this, the employee automatically receives an email with a notification of the status change and a link to the request in the app.

Other functionality

Employees can do more in the app than just submit expense claims. They can view the status of pending requests in the app and request an overview of approved requests.

Managers can approve expense claims in the app, but can also submit expense claims themselves. In addition, managers can set a substitute on a personal profile page in the app for a certain future period during which they'll be absent (for example, during vacations). During that period, the app will automatically forward any new request to the substitute manager for approval. This way, the expense claim process is not only digitally supported, but the process around it has also been improved and made clearer.

Finally, managers and administrators can perform a number of administrative tasks in the app, such as adding projects and linking a department manager to a department.

The benefits for Mimaki

Thanks to the combination of Power Apps and Power Automate, there's no longer a need to work with PDF forms or Excel files, or to send emails yourself to request approvals. All data and documents related to the expense claims are stored and retained in a consistent, scalable, and durable way. The data created by the app is automatically stored in Dataverse. This is a database in the Azure Cloud that forms an integral part of the Power Platform. The data in Dataverse is well secured and can easily be accessed from Power BI for creating analyses and reports.

Getting started with digitalization and automation?

Many companies still deal with processes that make heavy use of forms, resulting in unnecessarily many manual actions. Has this blog sparked your interest, and would you like to know more about digitizing and automating such processes with Power Apps? We're happy to discuss your specific needs further in an online introductory meeting.

Written by Edmond Thaqi
Consultant