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By: Janina Criador
- IT Consulting
- May 11, 2023
- Comments 0
Unleashing the Potential of Microsoft Power Platform: A Game-Changer for Business Automation
As businesses continue to grow and evolve, there is an increasing demand for tools and technologies to simplify processes, improve productivity, and enhance overall efficiency. Do you find yourself drowned in your tasks?
If so, this blog post is perfect for you as we explore the core components of Microsoft Power Platform, how it can be used for business process automation, the benefits of using Microsoft Power Platform, and how you can leverage Power Platform Managed services to unleash your full potential. So, let’s dive in and discover how Microsoft Power Platform can transform your business through business process automation!
What is Business Process Automation, and What can it do for My Business?
Business process automation uses technology to simplify and speed up manual tasks to save time and money. Business processes are important to an organization’s work but can inconvenience most. They are time-consuming, costly, and prone to mistakes and delays. Because of this, a business needs to simplify routine tasks whenever possible. If business process automation is done right, it can help you:
- Save time
- Boost employee productivity
- Minimize errors
- Inject standardization
- Improve accountability, transparency, and allow accurate data recording
Embrace the Future of Business Process Automation
Business Process Automation is not about removing the human element from processes; it focuses on identifying and eliminating inefficiencies so your employees can focus on higher-value duties. It involves using software to automate business workflows and processes so that regular tasks can be done quickly and with as little staff interaction as possible. Enter Microsoft Power Platform.
Microsoft defines the Power Platform as a low-code platform that enables businesses to analyze data, interact with applications, and automate business processes. It enables everyone, from professional developers to frontline employees, to contribute to driving improved business outcomes through app development.
Core Components of Microsoft Power Platform
Microsoft’s Power Platform is “more than the sum of its parts.” Let’s look at the “parts” and their function.
Power BI
is one of the core components of Microsoft Power Platform that serves as a business analytics tool. It enables users to analyze and visualize data in reports and dashboards.
• Connects to Microsoft, third-party cloud services, and local data sources
• Can easily change data and add visuals to present it in a way that's easy to understand
• Use natural language to query data and get the result
• Analyzes complex data to enable continuous improvement
Power Automate
Enables business process automation, no matter how simple or complex.
• Use common automation templates that have already been set up.
• By linking apps, you can make your automation.
• Triggers, alerts, automated emails, push notifications, and more can be set up quickly and without coding.
• Saves you time by cutting down on human mistakes through efficient business process automation
Power Apps
Simplifies custom application development and lets people who don't know how to build low-code or no-code apps solve problems in their organization. This core component of Microsoft Power Platform lets you solve urgent business needs, cut costs, or eliminate third-party solutions that only meet half your needs.
• Enable business process automation by making mobile-friendly apps quickly, even if you don't know how to code.
• You can connect and see data from your business apps like Dynamics 365 and Office 365.
• Visualize key data in an intuitive app for easy data entry
Power Pages
ombine low-code features and experiences, making it easy to make and deliver business-focused, data-driven, modern, and secure websites.
• Aids in making low-code apps that work quickly for business process automation
• Runs on Microsoft Azure and promises to protect information with encryption and user roles
• You can change templates with advanced features and sample data to test how they work.
• Design studio for making things, with modules for video, forms, and lists
Power Virtual Agents
Allows you to make chatbots with powerful AI without knowing how to code. These bots can be added to other Microsoft products and used to handle internal and external requests, from simple questions to more complicated ones. It makes business process automation more flexible and up-to-date.
• Adds sophisticated features at each step. It is a flexible tool that drives continuous improvement and is easy to connect to other systems.
• Replaces boring tasks with features and automation searches with more options for guided conversations
What are the Benefits of Using Microsoft Power Platform?
Enables working remotely and collaborating with ease.
Power Platform provides a comprehensive solution for integrating web and mobile applications and enables seamless collaboration among remote teammates through cloud-based systems. This platform is crucial for business process automation by maintaining employee productivity and ensuring that tasks are completed effectively, especially with the growing demand for remote work flexibility. The platform enhances efficiency and reduces organization resource costs by creating workflows that optimize time management.
Leverage the Microsoft landscape
Powerful analysis, act, automate, and iterate combinations include Power BI, PowerApps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents. You considerably simplify routine business tasks and processes by enabling end-to-end capabilities that function harmoniously as a unit within the Microsoft ecosystem.
Ultimately, if your company employs Microsoft products, you presumably employ licences and reap all the benefits of Microsoft Power Platform. So why not use a third-party product instead of purchasing and integrating it?
Self-Service for Simple Adoption and Utilization
In the past, to get the most out of many enterprise business apps, you had to rely on your IT department or people in your department who were good with IT. Before, the technological learning curve of business applications kept finance, marketing, sales, and non-IT workers from getting the most out of their data. They needed help using something like Azure.
The core components of Microsoft Power Platform promote the no-code/low-code approach, which makes it much easier to get useful insights from data, deploy rich applications, build powerful workflows, automate processes, and use AI.
Achieving business process automation is easy because of Power Platform’s drag-and-drop feature. Your end users can adopt and use all features with little (or no) help from your IT staff. It makes it easy for citizen developers to start creating and deploying.
Processes are streamlined, and productivity is increased.
Business process automation is made possible by the Power Platform. Some of the tasks that you can automate are:
- Approval of documents and processes
- Creation of scheduled flows
If everything in your company is done manually, it’s time to make some changes. If you’re the CFO and still do weekly finance jobs by hand in Excel, that’s a red flag. Instead, using Power Automate can save time and reduce busy work.
Enterprise Business Processes on One Platform
In the digital age, data is very important, so it’s important that your company has a single source of truth. To keep it going, you must run it. It means you must:
- Get leaders to agree on a plan from the start.
- Use data owners and managers to make sure people are accountable.
- Be careful around shadow experts.
- Use a change management model to grow.
Whether this is a data warehouse or a tabular data model, how do you use this huge potential across your whole company beyond the traditional “running a report?” Businesses driven by data need a circular approach with business processes to analyze, automate, act, and iterate.
Among the many benefits of using the Microsoft Power Platform is solving this hard problem many organizations must face. It does this by giving any organization, even ones that usually use many different tools, access to an enterprise-grade platform.
Business Process Automation with a Partner
There is much more to Power Platform than we’ve discussed here. Partnering with an expert can help you customize the platform based on your needs to maximize the benefits of using Microsoft Power Platform.
ECF Data’s Power Platform Managed Services are designed to help businesses create custom business solutions that can improve their operational efficiency and productivity. Using Microsoft’s Power Platform, ECF Data’s team of experts can develop low-code or no-code applications, custom workflows, and automate business processes.
ECF Data’s Power Platform Managed Services can also integrate with other Microsoft applications, such as Office 365 and Dynamics 365, to create a seamless and integrated technology ecosystem. With their extensive experience in developing custom solutions using the Power Platform, ECF Data can help businesses unleash the full potential of this powerful tool to transform their operations and drive growth.
