Microsoft Power Automate – Process Automation Tool for Everyone

With an increasing number of businesses adopting process automation to achieve tangible cost-savings and enhanced efficiency, automation has become an imperative success factor for the organizations. Thanks to its innovative features, Microsoft Power Automate (earlier known as Microsoft Flow) helps achieve this and more with ease.

The “Total Economic Impact” Study by Forrester shows that the powerful combination of Power Automate with Power Apps facilitates businesses to gain ROI of 362% over three years with 15% of the average improvement in business process efficiencies in the third year.

What is Power Automate?

One of the pillars of Power Platform, Power Automate is Microsoft’s Cloud-based workflow engine that facilitates quick and easy process automation with low code. Formerly known as Microsoft Flow, this business process management software helps organizations to quickly model their processes across connected data sources and enable their business logic for simplified app building. The tool facilitates everyone, irrespective of their technical knowledge and functional area to step-up their productivity by automating and streamlining their workload through easy-to-build workflows.

What Does Power Automate Do?

Through seamless and easy process automation, Power Automate facilitates businesses and their employees to enhance productivity and efficiency by automating menial and time-consuming tasks including file synchronization, getting notifications, collecting data and many more.

• Integrates with other applications hassle-free and seamlesslyPower Automate lets you connect to 200+ data sources through connectors that ensure seamless data flow across the applications. It not only facilitates deep integration with Microsoft products and tools such as OneDrive for Business, SharePoint and Dynamics 365 but also lets you connect to third-party applications like MailChimp, Slack and many more and simplify your daily tasks by automating them. It helps users with and without technical know-how alike.
• Facilitates data access and sharingWith seamless data flow across different apps, this workflow management tool enables accessing and sharing business data across different applications. For instance, you can connect your Outlook and SharePoint by defining a workflow that is triggered every time your colleague sends you a file on your email and shares that file on your SharePoint.
• Aids quick and safe automationPower Automate enables everyone to construct secure workflows quickly and easily with no-code experience. The tool is equipped with ready-to-use templates and recommendations for the apps that can be linked along with the purpose. It can be an added advantage for a new user.Further the tool has own modern RPA (Robotic Process Automation) feature called UI flows. With some coding skills and a point-and-click operation, UI flows transforms manual processes into automated workflows by processing human-driven communication with software frameworks that don’t support API automation.
• Enables custom connectors creationWith Power Automate, you can also create custom connectors by describing the APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) you are trying to connect. This way, you can link Twitter with Power Automate and design a workflow that is activated each time someone tweets about your brand and sends you a notification. These notifications can come handy to track the customer satisfaction rate and Net Promoter Score (NPS) of your brand for potential trend identification and business opportunities.
• Brings intelligence to workflowsThe tool comes with pre-assembled intelligence capabilities with the AI Builder that enables automation of tedious manual tasks by customizing various pre-built models including Form Processing, Object Detection, Prediction and Text Classification. Thus, it helps you define a workflow that can identify various details from the invoices you receive such as the date, the sender and the total invoice amount and logs this data separately on your SharePoint for further decision making. Without this ability, someone would have to go through the individual invoices separately and enter the data manually.
• Helps design logic for your appsThrough a point and click approach, Power Automate helps you design logic for your Power Apps. The tool lets you automate the workflows based on the occurrence of pre-selected events, scheduled time or with the press of a button. These workflows can be fire-and-forget or can also be designed to get the data back to the app to display the information to the users.
• Guides your app users through processesMulti-stage Power Automate workflows help ensure data consistency and keep users on track. One of the examples is a workflow to require approvals before order submission or to have everyone manage customer service requests in the same way.
• Helps boost productivity and efficiencyPower Automate assists you automate manual tasks by building workflows for individual tasks as well as for large scale systems quickly with equal ease and time savings. The tool boosts employee and organizational productivity and efficiency significantly.

Case Study – Power Automate for Field Inspection

The following example illustrates how Power Automate offers businesses with enhanced productivity, efficiency and visibility through its easy to build workflow automation.

This case study demonstrates an application designed for a Facility Field Inspection for safety compliance where a field inspector inspects the assets/fields and suggests corrective and preventive actions to the field engineer through the Field Inspection app. The field engineer carries out the required actions which are verified by the field inspector before approving the asset compliance.

Power Automate comes handy during this process flow to intimate the field engineer and field inspector to carry out their relevant roles and also, keeps the management authority informed about the compliance details in real-time and maintains the information for reporting and analytics.

• Workflow 1

  

  When the field inspector submits the corrective and preventive actions, this workflow will notify the field engineer instantly by sending him an email. It enhances productivity by reducing the time wasted during communication drastically.

  This workflow also sends notifications to the field engineer if the actions are reopened by the field inspector during his review process.

• Workflow 2

  

  When the field engineer carries out relevant rectifications and completes all the assigned tasks and saves his responses, this workflow sends the field inspector an email to notify him that the relevant work is completed against the actions and they are ready for his review.

  The same workflow is also executed when the field engineer resubmits his response against actions reopened by the field inspector as a result of dis-satisfactory rectifications carried out in the initial attempt.

• Workflow 3

  

  When a field inspector submits his responses to a set of questions associated with the asset/field, Power Automate calculates the severity associated with asset compliance. This workflow notifies the management authority immediately on Microsoft Teams for the critical and high severity asset inspection items. It offers the management the needed visibility in real-time and enables it to keep the high-severity field inspection items in check.

Applications of Power Automate

With Power Automate you can automate possibly anything and everything. Some of the common applications include

• Getting notifications on mobile devices
• Automated approval process
• Getting instant alerts for important emails and notifications
• Social media engagement – automated tweeting or publishing a blog post on Facebook
• Keeping track of business leads and contacting potential customers
• Saving email document attachments to SharePoint or OneDrive
• Duplicating email connections to OneDrive Business account
• Gathering your company information and sharing with your group

WaferWire Cloud Technologies can help you maximize your organizational productivity and efficiency by helping you build innovative and secure Power Automate workflows at competitive rates. With our technology niche, experienced professionals and comprehensive Power Automate services, we can be the right technology partners in your business process automation journey. To know more about how best can we help you achieve your business automation goals, contact us today.