Businesses today must undergo strategic transformations to remain competitive, modernize operations and increase agility. A study showed that technology transformations drove business value; more than two-thirds of respondents reported revenue increases, cost savings and employee experience improvements from change efforts.
An investment in platforms that foster rapid innovation – like Microsoft’s Power Platform – is the quickest route to technology transformation. More recently, we have seen an increasing trend toward platforms that simplify business users’ adoption and customization; early adopter strategies for business intelligence products like Power BI or Tableau reflect this shift.
We’ve witnessed those trends expand to low-code/no-code app development for business app development. All it requires is domain knowledge, motivation and an affordable license that business units can pick up without impacting overall budgets; access to data and a couple of hundred dollars annually were all required to build impactful solutions.
Microsoft is an industry leader in analytics, business intelligence, and low-code application platforms. Microsoft recognizes that these products shouldn’t exist as discrete product lines – Power Platform offers businesses more value by supporting citizen developers. Developing Power Apps applications enhances your business productivity and efficiency.
What Is Power Automate?
Most are familiar with the tedious data collection for marketing research that requires manual processing and transference of survey responses. Yet, Power Automate can automatically collect and store information from questionnaires, freeing employees to focus on more meaningful work rather than tedious, repetitive tasks.
Power Automate is designed to address many problems in daily business processes. By automating repetitive manual tasks, organizations can save both time and cost. With no-code/low-code functionality, everyone can create automated process workflows.
Microsoft Power Automate is an incredible way to boost any business’s productivity with its various workflow automation, from Cloud and Desktop flow creation to Business process flow management.
Ways to Drive Business Efficiencies with Power Automate
Power Automate is becoming an indispensable business automation tool, driving greater efficiencies for users around the globe. Automation tools such as Power Automate have quickly earned recognition as powerful efficiency drivers for how users work. Business automation involves replacing humans with computers less than it does, automating repetitive manual tasks to free up more time for more important responsibilities and innovative solutions for users to focus on.
Here are three easy ways to start using Power Automate:
Implement Automated Approval Workflows
Power Automate implementation aims to optimize business processes by streamlining and automating them, increasing efficiency and productivity by orchestrating workflows, integrating data sources and applications, reducing manual tasks and errors and eliminating manual processes altogether.
Approvals are integral to every organization, whether seeking time off for vacation or gathering signatures on reports. Involve your colleagues when necessary in the decision-making process for any process you need approval before moving forward. Create automated approval workflows: Getting Employee Buy-in for projects.
Power Automate is ideal for setting up automated approval workflows for various business scenarios. No more sending multiple emails back and forth or creating Teams group chats when needing signatures or approval – start the process and let Power Automate take over!
To get started creating approval workflows, various approaches are available to you. From using Microsoft templates or customizing existing ones to starting from scratch – both options can be found within Power Automate’s left pane dashboard – Create cloud flow or Template are great starting points.
Your license (basic or premium) will dictate which apps and services can be included as triggers and actions in your flow, with premium licenses providing more connectivity options to third-party apps and services.
Craft a Business Process Flow
Building a business process flow gives users an improved user experience by leading them through business processes towards desired results more easily than consulting training manuals alone. This tool reduces or eliminates mistakes made during operations by users by acting as their guide during the process.
Imagine you want your customer service team to offer high-quality experiences to their clients consistently. You could create a business process model of how their team will oversee this aspect of customer care.
After creating your business process workflow, the Edit Security Roles allows you to ensure only authorized personnel make, modify, or delete your flow.
Use AI in your automated processes.
By leveraging Microsoft Artificial Intelligence (AI) Builder, organizations can incorporate AI technology into their automated processes for easier data gathering and processing. You can do things like reading ID cards or translating audio, processing receipts, and more – add AI Builder into your workflows!
Power Automate provides businesses with a user-friendly solution for beginning their journey towards automation. It offers easy-to-create workflows, business processes and AI to start automating operations and reap the benefits of increased productivity, reduced mistakes and budgets while improving efficiency and compliance.
Benefits of Business Process Automation with Microsoft Power Automate
Microsoft Power Automate offers many advantages to help facilitate your company’s transformation.
Automate and Simplify Everyday Tasks
Every morning, when you log on, routine tasks will likely be waiting to be completed to begin working on important projects. While these tedious duties consume our productive hours and may irritate us, why not automate them? One of the key benefits of Power Automate is streamlining daily/weekly time-consuming tasks so you can dedicate your efforts to more strategic business operations. You can build workflows using standard templates or create custom ones using any application of choice – or both!
Boost Workforce Productivity
Microsoft Power Automate Development Company helps to create time-saving workflows and increase workforce productivity, helping companies improve efficiency. Businesses can optimize workflows with this business process automation tool to achieve an efficient way of working by setting triggers that perform multiple tasks automatically at the occurrence of an event, automating tasks individually or automating large systems or complex workflows with “Logic Apps”.
Quickly Connect, Share, and Access Business Data
Microsoft Power Automate allows for the rapid connection, sharing, and access of business data across applications and systems for immediate data collection, file synchronization, notification/alert enablement and more. You can connect all your software systems/apps using 100+ data source connectors, enabling data analysis/report generation from anywhere around the globe.
Easy Integration with Other Applications
Power Automate is a trigger-based tool that seamlessly integrates workflows across various business apps using Connectors. Connectors facilitate connecting workflows with internal and external apps to automate processes between them; popular examples of Power Automate connectors include Dropbox, Office 365, Dynamics 365, Slack, Google Drive, Twitter Salesforce Mail Chimp and GitHub, as well as creating custom ones via API naming convention.
Microsoft Power Automate capabilities
Below are the capabilities of Microsoft Power Automate:
Robotic Process Automation – UI Flows
RPA (Robotic Process Automation – User Flows) automates manual tasks into automated workflows based on human interactions, providing record and playback capability of human interactions for processes to run automatically. RPA can help when your organization’s legacy applications don’t communicate themselves effectively; RPA provides automation solutions.
UI Flows allow your business to scale across legacy applications and modern services. Through Power Automate’s flexible capabilities, companies can automate modern apps with APIs and legacy ones with incomplete APIs or combine legacy, current, and manual processes into one automation process.
Power Virtual Agents
Today’s businesses are taking full advantage of chatbot technology, with enterprises developing them for various uses and purposes. Microsoft Power Virtual Agents makes building intelligent bots without any training in programming and AI simple – anyone in an organization can now build intelligent chatbots using its intuitive, no-code graphical user interface.
AI Builder
Why add intelligence to your automation processes when automating them? Microsoft offers AI Builder as a solution that makes building intelligent automated processes with artificial intelligence easy. Train and configure AI models within Power Automate to increase efficiency throughout your organization. Use prebuilt AI models or create your models without writing code – increasing efficiency throughout.
Conclusion
Recent years have demonstrated the strategic role that technology can play in driving business success. Power Platform can act as a transformative agent for your organization by unlocking data, automating processes and providing tools that deliver efficiencies for improved results.
However, be mindful that great power comes with great responsibility; when arming your team with such powerful tools, it is necessary to supervise how they’re being utilized closely; otherwise, your transformation tool could cause more harm than good.
Remember, when creating something your team relies on, something could ruin the business if something were to go wrong with that creation. Think Microsoft Teams; your business worked smoothly before adopting it, but now that your team has taken full advantage of its features, what would happen if they went one month, week, or day without its functionality?
Power Platform should be managed like any essential collaboration platform – take steps to maintain control and security so you don’t have to consider what would happen without it.