Microsoft Power Platform

If you haven’t heard of the Microsoft Power Platform (MPP) before, you’ve been missing out! The MPP officially consists of three main applications: Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate. With these applications, Microsoft empowers users with little coding experience to drastically improve their business efficiencies and give them a competitive advantage. I’m constantly amazed at the solutions I can create in a few hours that would take a developer days or weeks to replicate with custom code! Read on below to see what makes each application stand out!

Microsoft Power BI

As a business decision maker, you need a centralized view of your business’s KPIs in order to thrive, but you may be limited by long report runtimes and manual processes to stitch together data from multiple systems and reports. Well, that is where I find Microsoft Power BI can really make a big impact! With Power BI, I can load data from any data source (or multiple!), transform it, and then create dashboards and visualizations which quickly and powerfully provide key information to the business. Power BI dashboards are completely interactive and customizable, so if you want to only see a subset of data, filter on specific attributes, or get fancy with graphs and other visuals, you can do it! If you need to access your information while on the road, you can even view it from your mobile devices! Data is refreshed on a regular basis throughout the day, so it’s always just a click away – without the wait.

  • Build interactive dashboards and reports
  • Create custom data points and metrics
  • Integrate visualizations to easily convey information
  • Connect to hundreds of data sources. View the full list HERE
  • Mobile-friendly

Microsoft Power Apps

Thanks to Microsoft Power Apps, the saying “there’s an app for that” has never been more true! Power Apps enables developers to utilize a ‘low-code’ platform to quickly create and publish clean looking applications for a variety of business cases. If you can dream up a process, it can most likely be built in Power Apps.

I personally find Power Apps great for building applications which capture and store data, which covers a lot!

A couple examples:

  • An app to track user timesheets and store the data in an external database.
  • An expense approval app. At a high level, a user enters their expense and uploads the relevant receipts, a manager receives a notification and approves it, and AP receives the approved expense report so they can reimburse the employee.

I’ve created a number of apps, some I even use on a regular basis myself, and I’d love to help streamline your business by creating a few more.

  • Quickly create and deploy applications within your organization
  • Create external facing applications using Microsoft ‘Portals’
  • Connect your App to a variety of data sources such as SharePoint, SQL Server, Office 365, and more. See a full list of integrations HERE
  • Apps are really limited to your imagination

Microsoft Power Automate

Recently rebranded from Microsoft Flow, Power Automate enables developers to automate a number of business processes. While there are many process-automation platforms out there, I find that Power Automate shines because it is already a part of the Microsoft ecosystem. This makes it almost foolproof to automate business processes which involve other Office 365 programs like Outlook, Excel, One Drive, and more.

In addition to connecting with Microsoft products, Power Automate can also integrate with any legacy desktop or web-based applications by using Robotic Process Automation (RPA). RPA leverages technology to record a series of mouse clicks and keystrokes in addition to process flow logic to automate tasks for almost any platform! This is a truly powerful application, which in the right hands, can really increase productivity at your company.

Almost any business process can be automated but some scenarios include the following:

  • Take information from one system and automatically migrate it to another.
  • Automate the onboarding process for new hires (sending welcome emails, documentation, setting up accounts, etc.).
  • Automatically read invoices, get them approved, and submit them for payment.

If you have repetitive ‘manual’ processes which are eating up employee time, I’d love to discuss how to free them up for higher-value projects.

  • Streamline business process flows with automation
  • Utilize RPA (Robotic Process Automation) to integrate legacy UIs into your automation
  • Free up resources for more business-critical tasks
  • Connect to hundreds of applications. View all of the Power Automate integrations HERE