Solution: Asset Management (Built with Model Driven App)

Complete solution with Approvals and Microsoft Flow to support the business processes.

Context

This App decentralizes the control of asset allocations and uses the contacts/employes database already implemented in the organization’s Dataverse.

With this we get rid of yet another use case of Excel spreadsheets for control and database. Also guaranteeing the security of information (maintained in the organization’s tenant) and the continuous business process.

What you can do with the app:

• Create, update, deactivate and delete asset and asset allocations
• Assign an asset to an employee for a period
• Check approval and allocation verification status
• View collaborator and asset details
• View Power BI reports regarding the allocation process

When should I use Model-Driven Apps?

With Model-Driven you don’t need to explicitly worry about the data model — logically it is possible, and advisable, but here one of the benefits is starting from the business rule.

Application Building Steps:

1. Construction of tables in Dataverse
   1.1 Asset
   1.2. Asset Allocation
   1.3. Contact
   1.4 Asset Checks
2. FORMS construction (Main Forms, Quick View Forms, Quick Create Forms)
3. Build Views
4. Implement Business rules
5. Sub-grids and Lookup views
6. Business Process Business Flows
7. Approval Automation
8. Finally, creating the Application
9. Embedded Dashboards (in this case, I just insert an aleatory Powe BI report)
10. Additional automation — change item status with Power Automate
11. Sharing and Security
12. Testing and debugging

Final result

As the result, now users can search for Assets, see its features, if they are located and open a process to allocation (1st phase). For this phase, if the Allocation is checked as “Out of Policy”, an Approval process will be opened by a Power Automate Flow.

If the Asset is available, the mandatory fields are filled and the Approval process was succeeded (if is out of policy), the Allocation Process will go to the second phase, “Asset Verification”, which consists of the inspection of the Asset. (2nd phase)

For the third phase and the forty phase the steps are simpler, they consist in check the Asset as “allocated”, define a return date and return the Asset -for these two final phases another Power Automate Flow was used for updating Asset Allocation Status

Here it is the screenshots of the APP:

APP and Flows Screenshots

Future features and improvements

In the Asset item screen, there is a view with the allocation's history. I would like to have this lower view filtered by the field — just like in the Contact Form (quick view)

This will require to filter the view in using JavaScript, you can use the Xrm.Page.getControl method to get the view control and then use the addCustomFilter method to add a custom filter to the view. But for that, I’ll shown in a future article.

Links and References:

My Notion page with project notes
Git Repository for the entire solution