In the digital era, leveraging Business Process Management is the key to achieving optimized business outcomes. Simply put, BPM enables organizations to optimize, enhance, and streamline business processes. Many organizations are implementing BPM software within their infrastructure to automate workflows and eliminate time-consuming and tedious tasks.
Understanding the importance of automation, Microsoft launched a tool called Microsoft Flow in 2016. Later, it was renamed Power Automate. It has been estimated that around 350,000 non-technical enterprises use Power Automate for workflow automation. Power Automate users can write their own instructions using a scripting language ‘PowerShell’ to automate the workflows.
Introduction to Power Automate
In general, Power Automate is a Cloud or online-based workflow automation tool built by the Microsoft community. By using this Cloud-based tool, business users can apply actions or triggers and form chain reactions within a workflow. This way, manual, repetitive, and time-intensive tasks can be completed with minimal intervention. Users can also build automated workflows between core enterprise applications using Power Automate to consolidate files, gather data, and acquire notifications.
Being an advanced automation tool, Power Automate supports integrations with around 300+ out-of-the-box applications and data sources like Salesforce, Google Sheets, SharePoint, Twitter, OneDrive, and Dynamics 365. Enterprises can implement Power Automate within their infrastructure by teaming up with the right Microsoft Power Automate consultants.
Benefits of Using Power Automate
- Effective App Integration – Power Automate allows business users to integrate workflows directly into several applications they use, via built-in connectors. A connector links two different applications. This way, an app can transfer data to another application seamlessly. Hence, it eliminates the manual exchange process.
- Enhanced Data Accessibility – As stated before, connectors help easily transfer data from one application to another. Therefore, users can create a flow between two or more connectors and form a consolidated IT ecosystem using Power Automate. This way in-house workforce can extract data from one app and share it easily with other teams/colleagues.
- Develop Custom Integrations – Microsoft Flow’s workflow engine allows professionals to create custom integrations and automated processes across Office 365 and third-party platforms without the support of developers. Similarly, the automation flows built using Power Automate can avoid security hacks including data loss prevention (DLP) and other potential security vulnerabilities.
- Improves Efficiency – Using Power Automate, enterprises can automate repetitive tasks in multi-step workflows. Also, when enterprises create an app in PowerApps, they can integrate it with Power Automate to run multiple tasks during the event time. This way, organizations can save time effectively.
- Protect Workflow – Power Automate allows users to rapidly and securely connect to Cloud-based and on-premise data services. It safeguards workflows even if users have no knowledge of encryption. Hence, with intuitive data loss prevention policies, Power Automate users can prevent sensitive workflow data from leaving their environment.
3 Ways Businesses Can Use Power Automate
Data Processing Automation
Data entry and processing has always been a crucial as well as a tiresome task performed in almost every industry. Many organizations hire experts to perform manual data entry and processing. However, manual processing is prone to errors, results in the loss of precise data, and can cost enterprises a great deal of time and money. This is where ‘Virtual Agents’ comes in! By using Power Automate’s Virtual Agents option, enterprises can build and deploy intelligent data processing bots.
These bots execute the data entry tasks automatically. The resultant data will be more accurate and free from errors than data processed manually by human personnel. Overall, data processing bots can accomplish repetitive entry tasks without any inaccuracies and with a greater level of precision. Besides, the bots can be scalable, since Power Automate gives enterprises the option to add or remove new bots, based on the evolving workloads. Hence, automating data-entry processes using virtual bots is easier and more effective than employing a professional for the same task.
Customer Service Automation
Teams that repeatedly deal with customers can significantly benefit from Power Automate. Users can build Cloud flow for customer service using Power Automate. This helps in optimizing customer service workflow by lessening back-office and managerial workloads. Cloud flow speeds up customer service by gathering and consolidating data across various systems, automatically upgrading client records, and resolving service requests.
By allocating regular, time-consuming tasks, like customer service request processing to Cloud flow, enterprises can free up their customer support team to focus on customer engagement rather than performing manual labor. Organizations can partner with the right Microsoft Power Automate solutions provider to develop customer service flow. Implementing customer service flow also allows enterprises to unveil new service models for their end-users and improve productivity.
Payroll Automation
This is one of the most manual and repetitive workflows handled by HR professionals. Traditional payroll management involves huge volumes of data entry that can often result in critical errors. Besides, ever-changing tax laws, reporting needs, and system rules can make payroll management a challenging process for HR managers.
Creating Cloud flows can streamline payroll processes with its ability to collect and unite the data among several systems including accounts department, employee management, time tracking, and ledger management. With this flow creation, HR professionals can track the employee’s working duration and make modifications based on shift regulations. Consequently, flows can produce reports, which effectively show key metrics such as overtime, number of registered hours, timeout, and absent hours. Overall, Cloud flow development helps in simplifying payroll management for enterprises.
Summing Up
Microsoft Power Automate offers endless possibilities to automate regular workflows and processes. Many enterprises have already implemented Power Automate within their ecosystem. The implementation helps in swapping manual data entry processes, accelerating data processing, and enhancing the output of business processes.