In uncertain times of COVID-19 we are faced with a deadly respiratory syndrome virus, locking us down, and wondering how/what we can do to help our community win this battle.
I received a Skype call from Ali Jani, Acumatica VP of Product development, “Harsha we need your help in a community project assisting our customers with a COVID-19 survey, would you be interested? “Absolutely” was my response, that was my chance to do something productive in helping our customers and the community.
That’s how the “Acumatica COVID-19 Wellness” project started with a very clear scope to solve the problem of our customers who wanted to track their employees’ wellness and report any findings.
Acumatica was looking to contribute with a community custom package allowing customers to use this customized plugin/package and kick-start a COVID-19 survey to their employees on a daily basis, get their health related status, report and track any adverse situation and combat spread of this crazy virus.
We had our call Apr 1st Wed with Ajoy, Product evangelist and brainstorm the project scope, and how we could leverage Acumatica MVP’s to build this custom package and set a deadline for a week turn around.
It’s always a challenge to identify the resources available for community projects. Luckily Acumatica has MVP’s and the developer community Mark Franks put together and assigned them to our team.
We all jumped on video conferencing over Microsoft Teams and started to lay down the key requirements
The Solution
Acumatica Survey – COVID19 Wellness Package
It was a classic example of managing features Vs deliverable Vs resources, we decided to keep the survey workflow to 3 easy steps in our phase 1.
Create Survey, add recipients
Activate and process survey push notifications
Collect responses from survived users
Benefits of Survey Framework
Acumatica customers and users have a flexible survey framework to create and collect responses
Ability to collect responses from employees form HR perspective
Customer satisfaction surveys from self-service portal
Employee health surveys during COVID-19 or such disasters
Integrate surveys with project accounting, manufacturing, production jobs for internal assessment
Executive mgmt teams and HR teams can initiate several survey programs to capture the sentiments of their employees, customers and vendors across ERP. (Tim Todman’s suggestion)
How to start a community project and manage?
TEAM CRT – We put together a COVID-19 Response Team (CRT) for creating this package/plugin, consisting of project managers and developers.
As we discussed the following tasks or activities would be performed by respective resources in agile development and have this done over 2 Phases. In phase 1 we will create a basic scalable structure allowing users to create surveys and share them with employees/users in collecting responses/answers. We wanted to utilize the Acumatica framework xRP platform and mobile platform, so we can design new custom screen, processing screen to send notifications and expose custom screen to Acumatica mobile app and collect responses in real time.
Survey Tables ( Initial data structures)
Survey – Survey creation
SurveyQuestions – All survey questions to be stored
SurveyCollector – All response from the survey
SurveyRecipients – Survey recipients – could be employees, customers, vendors etc
Iterations – Challenges In Software Development
We had regular daily meetings for the entire week with each resource working on a certain set of requirements across various time zones from PST to IST. We worked on proof of concept to get an idea, we had every member create a basic page to get a gist of what we are developing. We went through iterations with design ideas, roadblocks, technical hurdles in framework, execution and time limitation.
Finally, over the weekend we arrived at the DAC structure for Phase 1 covering the high-level requirements to be demonstrated on Tue, Apr 7th 2020 .
Key Requirements
Table structure (DAC)
Naming convention – screen id
Use contacts instead of user id’s
Merge all screens for workflow
Processing screen
Package for testing
Generic Inquiries, dashboards
Mobile screen
Build supporting structure to process the response through generic inquiries, dashboards, business events and reports.
The Final Hurdle
The unchartered territory in this project was the mobile integration, we had never worked on exposing a custom screen to mobile app. WE had lots of questions to be answered.
How do we push notification from a processing screen to mobile? How do we show a custom screen on an Acumatica mobile app? How do we show a grid format to accept survey responses and get this project done on time?
These questions needed to be answered for success of this project, this is where Acumatica SME’s (Subject Matter Experts) come in handy, Dhiren’s technical know-how’s and his tenacity to find a solution is commendable, he gave us the code snippet for doing push notification through process screen, so we could send mobile push notification from a processing screen instead of business event, and this was never done before.
We wrote a custom screen and exposed it from a customization package to a mobile app. We exposed the survey response screen in the attribute grid and coded the logic to accept, save and update our SurveyCollector table, firing off all engines for beta demonstration with customers.
Critical week
It’s been a week since we started the CRT project, the COVID-19 virus has consumed close to 10,000+ lives, we had to rush and deliver this project to help our customers and their employees safety in combating this virus. The team was getting ready for a demo on Tue to customer – PowerStorage Solutions and their partner Clients-First got on a call to review the community project, Derrick & team were impressed with the solution we put together in a week’s time.
We requested the customer to give us a couple of days to clean up our project, making sure we are fully tested with web and mobile, we put together our Github instructions, screenshots, demo video and supporting materials by Tue 14th and published the project.
Acumatica announced COVID-19 Wellness package on Thu Apr 16th made available through this community project to its entire customer base.
Customer Feedback
Power Storage Solution is so very impressed with how quickly this team came together and helped address a way to track the health of all our employees – thank you.
Derrick Elledge VP of Operations – Power Storage Solution, Acumatica Customer
Audio Blog post by Tim Rodman at AUGForums, in chat with Derrick Elledge on Acumatica Survey how it’s helping them during COVID-19 (move the audio to 34th minute to listen to Survey feedback)
We deployed Acumatica Survey package on Power Storage solution instance on Ver 2019 R2 and they are up and running with survey for COVID-19, mission accomplished.
Acumatica Surveys Presentation
Acumatica Survey – Overview Demo Video
20 minutes overview video of Acumatica Survey, highlighting it’s features, setup and configuration.
Download Acumatica Survey
Download from GitHub Acumatica Survey for complete instructions on how to download, deploy and configure Surveys for your organization, this is open source so no direct support is available other than online supporting documents.
Project Credits
Covid-19 Response team comprised of:
Stakeholders: Ajoy, Ali Jani and Derrick
Team Coordinator: Mark Franks
Acumatica SME: Dhiren Chhapgar
MVP Community Project Lead – Harsha Sarjapur
MVP Community Developers – Robert Waite, Yuiry Zaletskyy, Chris Hardgrove , and Murali Ramakrishnan
It’s truly inspiring to put together the team, project specs, test and provide a reasonable solution to the Acumatica community of customers, partners and developers during this COVID-19 crisis.
Future of Community Project – Acumatica Survey?
The future of Survey project really depends on the community to support the Github initiative from Acumatica, this is open-source project where any Acumatica customer, partner or developer can download the package and source code, participate by contributing to this project by enhancing the DAC, building rich integrated features and publishing back to the hub.
Limitation and Known Issues
The survey response page on iOS Mobile app has few limitation of showing the survey question and answers where the number of characters is limited to 60, Acumatica is fixing that in next build
We had a bug with dashboard reported due to duplicate screen ID, and we fixed it with a new screen id DBSV1035, remember to change all screen ID to be unique, the GI’s dashboard etc.
Users can delete a survey while it’s still active/not published
Copying a survey may not work fully, not tested
Enhancements:
While we built the phase 1, we ensure to keep the structure simple and able to scale the survey not just to employees but also to all contacts within the system.
We targeted mobile users through the Acumatica mobile app, but we kept the door open so it can any user without mobile interface and can be extended via email notification and web access through ERP interface or through Customer self-service portal
We can extend this to customer portal and use it for support system to have our customers take survey upon closing a case and we are very much interested in adding this feature ourselves
Extend this to your end-users for B2B shopping experience surveys or Company wide surveys and tie all of things back into your ERP.
Note: We have plans for expansion of this module in Phase 2 and if your interested to participate as a customer or developer who could contribute please reach out to Mark Franks at Acumatica.
