Background
The Ministry of Energy, Mines, and Petroleum Resources is the BC Government agency responsible for the administration of BC energy sector services, with a core mandate to deliver affordable and reliable services to Canadian citizens and to maintain a sustainable and innovative economy that works for all people of BC. As part of this commitment to advance the public good, the Ministry is tasked with development of improved and properly resourced approval processes to assess funding applications. To accomplish this, MEMPR has selected Dynamics 365 as the collaboration platform to jointly manage this funding with the Fiscal Negotiation Team of the Ministry of Indigenous Reconciliation. This project- the Clean Energy Emissions Database (CEED), was the first Dynamics 365 cloud application deployed by a BC Ministry. The Ministry selected Alianz to migrate legacy application data to CEED and develop business processes and workflows to streamline fiscal management under a fixed price contract.
Project Goal
Supplying a cross-departmental cloud-based solution for funding application payment management, auto-calculation of disbursement figures to energy project stakeholders, budget tracking, intake management, and real-time financial analytics.
Alianz Role
Alianz migrated all legacy fiscal data from Access to CEED and is the exclusive provider of CEED Capacity and Equity management module and Revenue Sharing Agreement management modules.
Challenges
We faced the following major challenges:
- Re-alignment and streamlining of Ministry business processes
- Complex fiscal calculation rules that have changed per fiscal year while retaining historical figures
- Harmonizing data models to suit the needs of both Ministries
- Limitation at the OCIO level for leveraging SharePoint as a document management repository
Major outcomes
As a result of the implementation and migration of legacy data to CEED, the size of the CEED database grew by a factor of 10, empowering Ministry staff to move away from managing fiscal data in disparate local sources and leveraging the automation capabilities of Dynamics 365. With the onboarding of the Fiscal Negotiation department of the Ministry of Indigenous Reconciliation, the CEED userbase expanded 5-fold. In addition to streamlined reporting and management capabilities, Alianz delivered a custom data migration solution that cut down manual entry of yearly fiscal report summaries from 1 month to 10 minutes.
As SharePoint integration was not an option for this project, Alianz developed a custom self-contained document repository solution with intuitive UI controls within Dynamics 365 to achieve the needs of the Ministry with regards to document management.
Timelines and Methodology
At all phases of the project, Alianz was in close contact with business stakeholders and presented weekly demonstrations of solution functionality to refine project scope. All documented deliverables and solution feature sign-off and training was provided for each milestone prior to formal acceptance and payment.
All major milestones were completed in April, with the latest ongoing enhancement set deployed Q2 2020.
Training
We have trained system administrators as well as end-users over the course of the design and implementation as well as at the end of each project’s milestone. We have been keeping current all training materials and user manuals as part of implementation and change management procedures.
Support Contract
Will commence in Q3 2020
Environment and Technology
Dynamics 365 CS
Power Apps Portals
Alianz
