GoCanvas in Reston offers their suite of electronic forms applications to entities in manufacturing, professional services, retail, wholesale, healthcare, and other areas, emphasizing pre-built templates and the ability to customize forms to suit your specific needs, boasting automated workflows on the Professional and Enterprise editions.
$45
per user/per month
Power Apps
Score 8.1 out of 10
N/A
PowerApps is a low code / rapid application development product from Microsoft that allows users to quickly build apps.
GoCanvas is ideal for any company that dispatches individuals to sites or locations and then those individuals have to do some sort of report or form to turn in and then send to their clients. The dispatch function adds a lot of power to the platform to allow one traceable documentation from scheduling to the finalization of the report. The best part is that it can be customized to any trade or function out there. It also is handy for mechanics or any other trade that needs to log info at their destinations and submit those to an office or client
PowerApps is well suited for "quick-wins" and fast prototypes of business solutions. It also is beneficial for situations where business partners and developers work together - it allows the business folks to provide a "quick-and-dirty" prototype which is then fleshed-out by developers that are trained experts on the platform. The interactive and easy to understand representation of the solution allows business partners to "see" the solution and add, remove, or correct aspects of it themselves. It provides a common view and understanding of the actual solution across business units and tech teams. PowerApps, being a low-code\no-code platform is not well suited for business processes that require many complex computations or large amounts of custom code - such as solutions that are better architected as Web Site or "full-blown" desktop solutions. There are solutions that are just not easy or quick to accomplish in a low-code\no-code platform. Enterprise Architects should know the difference, however business partners often try to create a solution and only when stuck because it becomes too complex do they engage a tech team for assistance - at which point there are sunk-costs involved and hinderences to re-platforming the solution
GoCanvas can adapt to you and the structure of your company. Our documents were sometimes a work in progress, and it was easy to change them when needed.
GoCanvas made my Sales Team more efficient and structured. We had set documents they needed to fill out and within those documents, certain areas needed to be completed before they could move forward, which enabled my team to be more accurate and fully detailed.
Power Apps has formats that are pre-built that don't require any coding which makes it easier to achieve your vision. This does become a challenge if your App needs don't fit into that format.
We deal with a ton of data so the fact that you can connect to any data source in addition to their pre-stablished data connections makes the process a breeze.
The online learning resources and tutorials are helpful as well for those who are tech savvy.
PowerApps is a great solution and I have spent the last year familiarizing myself with the platform and building custom applications to complete a whole range of tasks such as asset management, custom invoice generation, and item restriction tracking. We as a company have barely begun to scratch the surface of what can be achieved with PowerApps.
The community forums are extremely responsive to questions asked, there is a good body of online documentation and many community posts to draw from. Although the platform has changed, which means some of the posts are out of date and the solutions provided aren't relevant. Of relevance, I read over 400 articles plus documentation to get this first app built in SharePoint, move it to SQL and make it work exactly the way it should.
Much cheaper, much more customizable, and easier to use. There is not much of a learning curve and the licensing cost is much cheaper. PowerApps does one thing very well, whereas other platforms are mediocre. There is much more customization possible for your in-house workflows that you can build yourself vs using NetSuite engineers to build it for you.
GoCanvas has streamlined our communication, dispatch and reporting to reduce errors and wasted time. The impact is not exactly measurable, but it has been a substantial impact.
It has automated many of the admin functions necessary for processing reports prior to using GoCanvas. We were able to cut one full admin position and reduce another to part time which has saved us money.
It has given us a focal point for development. We now have the possibility of connecting to mobile and the default SharePoint online interface isn't always easy to manipulate. PowerApps has given us an opportunity to improve our user experience.
An improved user experience has given us a better shot at compliance. When users don't fight the environment, they don't gravitate towards workarounds or non-compliance.
As lists and libraries change, the platform scales pretty well.
Having users with the capability to create their own forms and tools has dialed back the app dev need (there is a balance though) and distributed power to the process architects and people who actually need the solutions in the first place—much more efficient model of service delivery: self-service.
