Stakeholder engagement and visit tracking platform for corporate affairs

The Need

JTI's Corporate Affairs & Communication team needed a centralized solution to manage relationships with thousands of stakeholders including government officials, regulatory bodies, industry associations, community leaders, and media contacts.

Managing stakeholder profiles, tracking visit logs, and maintaining engagement records using spreadsheets and disparate systems created inefficiencies, data inconsistencies, and limited visibility into relationship management activities.

The team required a comprehensive platform that could centralize stakeholder information including contact details, organizational affiliations, relationship history, and communication preferences, while systematically tracking all visits and engagements with personal and positional data.

The challenge was to create a system that could support team-based task assignment and granular access control across admins, super users, supervisors, and field agents, ensuring each user role had appropriate access to stakeholder information and engagement records.

With the need to track 5,000+ stakeholders and log 120,000+ visit records, JTI required a scalable, user-friendly platform that would transform relationship management from ad-hoc tracking to systematic, data-driven engagement.

The Solution

We designed a centralized stakeholder and visit management platform that has become the operational backbone of JTI's Corporate Affairs & Communication team, providing comprehensive visibility into relationship management activities and engagement effectiveness.

The Role-Based Access system implements granular access controls across four distinct user types. Admins have full system access including user management, stakeholder database administration, and system configuration.

Super Users can manage stakeholders and visits across all teams and territories. Supervisors oversee specific teams or regions, managing stakeholder assignments and reviewing visit logs for their areas of responsibility. Field Agents (Members) have access to their assigned stakeholders, can log visits and engagements, and view relevant relationship history. This hierarchical access structure ensures stakeholders see appropriate information based on their roles while maintaining data security and operational accountability.

The Visit Tracking Engine systematically logs all stakeholder visits and engagements with comprehensive personal and positional data. When field agents or team members meet with stakeholders, they record visit details including date, time, location, attendees, discussion topics, outcomes, and follow-up actions required. The system captures both personal information (individual contacts engaged) and positional context (their organizational roles and decision-making authority), creating rich relationship intelligence.

GPS coordinates and timestamps provide verification, while photo uploads document meetings and events. This systematic visit logging transforms anecdotal relationship management into data-driven stakeholder engagement with complete audit trails.

The platform maintains centralized stakeholder profiles containing contact information, organizational affiliations, areas of influence, communication preferences, relationship history, and engagement patterns. The system tracks all interactions with each stakeholder across time, enabling team members to understand relationship depth, identify engagement gaps, and ensure consistent communication.

Stakeholders can be tagged, categorized, and segmented for targeted engagement campaigns. The relationship management capabilities ensure institutional knowledge isn't lost when team members change roles and enable coordinated engagement across multiple touchpoints.

The Hybrid Tech Stack leverages Microsoft PowerApps for the frontend, providing rapid development and familiar interfaces for non-technical users, combined with ASP.NET Core APIs and SQL Server backend for robust data management and scalability.

This hybrid approach delivers enterprise-grade capabilities with the agility of low-code development, enabling quick iterations based on user feedback while maintaining performance and security standards.

The UX-Led Agile Build process employed rapid prototyping using Balsamiq and Excel to validate user workflows and interface designs before development, ensuring the platform genuinely met the Corporate Affairs team's needs.

Feedback-driven UX validation throughout development ensured the final product aligned with how the team actually works, maximizing adoption and minimizing training requirements.

The measurable impact demonstrates the platform's effectiveness: tracking 5,000+ stakeholders in the system and logging 120,000+ visit records, providing unprecedented visibility into JTI's stakeholder engagement activities and relationship management effectiveness.

The Challenge

The primary challenge was designing a system that could serve diverse user roles—from corporate affairs executives managing strategic relationships to field agents logging routine visits—with interfaces and access controls appropriate to each role's responsibilities and security requirements.

The role-based access needed to be flexible enough to accommodate complex organizational structures and reporting hierarchies while remaining simple to administer and understand.

Building a visit tracking engine that captured meaningful relationship intelligence without creating excessive data entry burden for field agents required careful UX design.

The system needed to collect sufficient detail for relationship analysis—who attended, what was discussed, what outcomes were achieved, what follow-up is needed—while remaining quick and intuitive to use during or immediately after stakeholder meetings. Balancing data richness with ease of capture was critical for user adoption.

Creating centralized stakeholder profiles that could accommodate the diverse types of stakeholders JTI engages—from government ministers to local community leaders—required flexible data modeling. Stakeholders have different attributes, organizational structures, and relationship dynamics, yet the system needed to manage all types within a unified framework that enabled consistent tracking and analysis.

Implementing the hybrid tech stack combining PowerApps frontend with ASP.NET Core backend required careful integration architecture.

PowerApps provided rapid development and familiar interfaces but needed to integrate seamlessly with custom APIs for complex business logic, data validation, and reporting that exceeded PowerApps' native capabilities. Ensuring the monolithic architecture maintained tight integration between frontend forms and backend business logic required disciplined development practices.

Achieving 120,000+ visit records demonstrates the platform's usability and adoption, as successful logging at this scale requires the system to be genuinely helpful to field users rather than an administrative burden.

Designing workflows that encouraged consistent visit logging while accommodating the time pressures and diverse contexts of stakeholder engagements required extensive user research and iterative refinement.

The Partnership

Our collaboration with JTI's Corporate Affairs & Communication team was built on deep understanding of relationship management workflows and the strategic importance of stakeholder engagement for a multinational corporation operating in complex regulatory environments.

We worked closely with team leaders, relationship managers, and field agents to understand existing stakeholder tracking practices, pain points with manual systems, and the specific intelligence needed to manage relationships effectively.

The partnership employed a UX-led agile build process beginning with rapid prototyping using Balsamiq wireframes and Excel mockups to validate user workflows before committing to development. This iterative approach ensured the platform would align with how the team actually works rather than imposing theoretical best practices that might not fit operational realities.

Throughout development, we conducted feedback-driven UX validation sessions, incorporating insights from actual users to refine interfaces and workflows.

We designed and developed the complete solution using Microsoft PowerApps for the frontend, providing intuitive forms and interfaces that non-technical users found familiar and accessible.

The ASP.NET Core 3.1 Web API backend handles complex business logic, data validation, and integration requirements, while SQL Server with Entity Framework provides robust, scalable data management for stakeholder profiles and visit records.

Our team implemented the role-based access system with granular controls across admin, super user, supervisor, and member roles, ensuring appropriate data security while enabling effective team collaboration.

We also established the team-based task assignment workflows that enable supervisors to allocate stakeholder responsibilities and coordinate engagement activities across field agents.

The measurable success—tracking 5,000+ stakeholders and logging 120,000+ visits—demonstrates how this collaborative, user-centered approach created a platform that genuinely improved JTI's stakeholder engagement effectiveness while providing corporate affairs leadership with unprecedented visibility into relationship management activities.

The Tech Stack

We built the platform using Microsoft PowerApps for the frontend, ASP.NET Core 3.1 Web API for the backend, and SQL Server with Entity Framework for data management.

PowerApps provides rapid development of intuitive forms and interfaces that non-technical corporate affairs team members find accessible, leveraging Microsoft's low-code platform to create responsive, mobile-friendly experiences.

The ASP.NET Core backend delivers robust APIs handling complex business logic including role-based access control, visit logging workflows, stakeholder profile management, and team-based task assignment. SQL Server ensures reliable, scalable data management for 5,000+ stakeholder profiles and 120,000+ visit records with the performance needed for complex queries and reporting.

Entity Framework provides the ORM layer simplifying data access while maintaining type safety and enabling efficient database operations. The monolithic architecture maintains tight integration between frontend forms and backend business logic for operational simplicity and consistent user experience.

Our UX-led agile build process employed rapid prototyping with Balsamiq and Excel for early validation, followed by feedback-driven UX refinement throughout development—ensuring the platform genuinely serves the Corporate Affairs team's relationship management needs while providing the role-based access, visit tracking engine, centralized stakeholder profiles, and team collaboration features that transformed JTI's stakeholder engagement from ad-hoc tracking to systematic, data-driven relationship management.