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#21 Shifts Power Apps

Shift planner with swaps and availability

The manager builds the monthly grid, employees request swaps between themselves (with approval), and the app validates availability and overtime.

Implementation: 3-4 weeks 5 technologies
The pain

What it costs you today

In a 200-operator 24/7 operation covering 4 critical lines, the shift roster lives in an Excel that goes stale the day it is published, and an operator asking for a swap via WhatsApp on Tuesday is forgotten until Sunday at 6 pm when the phone rings from whoever has to start the 10 pm shift. Miscalculated overtime costs between USD 8,000 and USD 15,000 a month in overpayment and union-contract penalties, while an uncovered shift produces an auditable non-conformity that puts the site's ISO 9001 certification at risk. Payroll spends 10 to 14 hours a week reconciling shifts against the spreadsheet, and when an operator resigns nobody can reconstruct within a day who covered which historical shift for severance and liability purposes. "Sunday night is a desperate WhatsApp call" is the line that defines the operation every single week. What does it cost to run a roster that cannot survive the first unexpected absence and leaves us blind every Sunday night?

The value

What changes when you have it

The manager builds the monthly grid in the Canvas app by dragging shifts onto templates filtered by role, site and availability, and operators receive their shifts on the corporate phone with a Teams push notification integrated into the Outlook calendar. When someone needs to change a shift, they propose the swap to qualified colleagues who accept or reject it from the same app, and the manager validates in a single click with the overtime, mandatory rest and max-workday rule applied automatically by Power Automate. The platform fires an alert 24 hours before if a shift has no coverage and consolidates the grid for payroll into an Excel ready to be uploaded to the payment system. The visible output is the mobile Canvas app plus a Power BI dashboard with coverage rate, overtime per person and availability ranking for the operations manager. The solution is in production at a security firm with 480 guards across 35 posts where overtime fell 32% and 100% monthly coverage was held. The project pays back in under two months through avoided overtime and payroll reconciled automatically.

Stack
Technologies we touch in the implementation
Power Apps CanvasDataversePower AutomateOutlookTeams
Shift planner with swaps and availability
#21 · Shifts

Monthly grid + swap proposal between employees

Technical references
Shifts

I want this app in my company

We build the app, deploy it in your tenant, and have it running in production in less than 3-4 weeks.