The shift to remote work and a hybrid workplace is the new reality, enterprises need to embrace. As the pace of digital transformation continues to accelerate in the prevailing pandemic, the demand for business applications and process automation is gaining speed.
We are moving in the digital direction and demand for mobile apps is growing 5X faster than the IT department can handle as per Gartner Traditional business applications are unable to fulfill these demands and organizations are struggling to find technical talent to meet this surge in demand.
Low – Code and No – Code applications and tools are gaining speed when it comes to adoption by enterprises to meet their surge in demand.
Low-code or no-code tools have been in fact, quite instrumental in helping businesses respond quickly to COVID-19 by allowing them to build new enterprise applications and automate work quickly.
The rising low-code market could reach $13.8 billion (£9.9bn) this year as the surge in remote application development sparked by COVID-19 continues to play out, according to analyst Gartner
Commitments to low-code development tools from tech giants like Microsoft indicate the market’s potential value. According to Microsoft “all of the major software as service (SaaS) vendors now provide capabilities that incorporate low-code development to some degree. Low-code application platforms (LCAP) – such as Microsoft Power Platform are expected to remain the largest component of the low-code development technology market through 2022, increasing 65% from 2020 to $5.8 billion”
Microsoft’s Power Platform and the Low-Code/No-Code development
In today’s digital world, data is getting generated at an enormous speed. It is vital for enterprises to enhance their ability to collate, analyze and derive data insights quickly to accelerate their business. Microsoft Power Platform is a user-friendly low code – no code platform which is transforming the way businesses are solving their data challenges. It helps to speed up application development and solve business challenges with low-code solutions and custom apps.
What is Power Platform?
Microsoft Power Platform consists of primary applications, such as Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents.
Power Platform is a suite of low-code and no-code digital automation tools that allow you to transform and modernize your business processes, applications and data intelligence to improve business performance. There are four main components to Power Platform:
Power BI – real-time business insights
Power Apps – customized apps to any device
Power Automate – automated processes and workflows
Power Virtual Agents – AI Powered intelligent Chatbots & Agents
Components of the Microsoft Power Platform
Power BI
Microsoft Power BI is a powerful self service business intelligence application, which can seamlessly connect to different data sources and allow its users to analyze data through customized dashboards and reports.
The key advantage of Power BI, is that it’s hosted on the cloud and its very easy to share dashboards and reports across different business users across devices like desktop and mobile. Microsoft Power BI uses smart tools to find and share meaningful insights with hundreds of data visualizations, built-in AI capabilities, tight Excel integration, and prebuilt and custom data connectors.
PowerApps
Power Apps are driving business transformation and helping enterprises globally to reduce their development costs and increase overall efficiency. In fact, with Microsoft Power apps everyone can quickly build and share low-code apps within their team.
PowerApps enables employees to access business data from Outlook, Salesforce, SharePoint, Dropbox, Dynamics 365, OneDrive, PowerPoint, Excel, Twitter and many more.
It is being used extensively to build self-service apps such as onboarding employees, expense claims, helpdesk, sales information capture and processing approvals and requests.
PowerApps helps your team to start building and launching apps with ease using prebuilt templates having drag-and-drop simplicity and offers quick deployment options. Every app is also automatically General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant.
Power Automate
Microsoft Power Automate helps to expand the automation capabilities across desktop, web, and mobile with its Power Automate apps.
It helps to automate common business processes with thousands of prebuilt templates making it even smarter with AI Builder. It helps to quickly process forms using document automation, enhances process approvals, can detect images and text and provides guided recommendations for creating flows and deep insights that take the guesswork out of what to automate.
Through a simple and intuitive interface, users can create automated workflows that can be triggered by insights from Power BI, leveraged via apps built with PowerApps and integrated multiple systems that the Power Platform natively supports. The workflows run completely in the cloud and are fully managed and secured by Microsoft.
Power Virtual Agents
Power Virtual Agents helps to quickly create sophisticated AI-powered chatbots without the need for code or AI expertise and has an easy-to-use graphical interface. It helps to empower employees by giving them the tools to easily build chatbots and quickly automate frequently asked questions and common business processes—at no extra charge—within Microsoft Teams.
Power Virtual agents can easily integrate the chatbots with the products and services you use every day. It has enhanced features which helps to look up records, personalize conversations, hand off conversations to live agents, and even lets you call APIs.
Power Platform Use Cases
# Manual Process Automation
A leading global organization with diverse business portfolio in manufacturing, distribution and retail was being weighed down by inefficient manual and paper-based processes. There was duplication of work across multiple systems, leading to valuable administrative hours being wasted on processing complex forms requiring approval from different stakeholders across locations. The existing workflows and manual forms were unable to give visibility on the entire approval process.
We helped them embark on a digitization journey by leveraging Microsoft Power Platform to automate their processes Forms were digitized using Power Apps, workflows were automated using Power Automate and dashboards and reports were created using Power BI.
Within a single week, the project request approval processes were automated using Power Platform. The data was stored in DataVerse so that it could be easily accessed across the office 365 suite.
# Employee Onboarding Application
Lack of an integrated HR system for employee onboarding was making it difficult for our customer, a leading real estate firm, to deliver services efficiently and effectively. They had non – integrated multiple systems which relied heavily on e-mails and manual reminders to handle the existing operations and employee onboarding process. These systems failed to give timely access to relevant workforce data thereby leading to process inefficiencies.
We helped the client to digitize their operations and employee onboarding process using Power Platform. Custom forms were created using Power Apps hosted on SharePoint and workflows were built using Power Automate. All approvals, email reminders and backend system upgradation were done using Power Automate and RPA. Workflows were also integrated with backend enterprise system using Robotic Process Automation.
Custom reminder templates were created and reminders were automated thereby helping the employees to focus on productive work instead of doing repeated follow ups over e-mail.
Data stored in SharePoint was used to create dashboard for the HR team to manage and track the onboarding processes for further follow up.
# Improving Customer Experience
A global Insurance organization wanted to derive better data insights of their customer entire journey and create applications which could enhance the customer experience Leveraging the Power platform, we delivered a dashboard for the top management which could give a 360 degree view of the different portfolio, programs and projects in their organization.
Dashboards helped them to take data-based strategic decisions for better business outcomes . The dashboards also showcased the RAG(red/amber/green) status on various categories like risk, scope, budget and so on. These insights helped the customer to take corrective actions wherever necessary .
Intutive forms and workflows were created using Power Apps and Power Automate which helped to expedite the onboarding of their new clients . Multiple group wide applications like project management system were created across organization ,enabling a modern workplace experience using connectors in Power Platform .
# Real time customer Insights
A leading bank wanted to take a data driven approach by embracing technologies which could revamp the way they engage with customers and manage their business. They wanted to shift from reactive to proactive data-driven decision-making and empower employees with insights to accelerate business results.
With Power Platform, we helped our customer to get more from their data by deriving real-time insights to make a positive impact to their business. We helped to build secure, flexible, scalable solution that automated the data collection, analysis and reporting process. We helped to build applications using Power BI to monitor the overall business performance and helping business users to access real time data to make informed decisions.
How to get maximum value from the Power Platform
Low-code software development can be a powerful accelerator, driving the digital transformation of an organization! At TeBS, we help to implement Microsoft Power Platform by developing innovative apps and solution for our clients .
As you can see from the use cases and insights shared in this blog, Microsoft Power Platform has brought about a revolution in the application development space. The ease of use and its simplicity allows its user ranging from a business analyst to a professional app developer to build apps without compromising on quality.
We provide our expertise to enterprises who want to leverage the Microsoft Power Platform to quickly create custom business applications. Our consulting services encompasses system audit, design, development, testing and implementation of Power Platform components.
TeBS is a trusted Microsoft gold partner and we have more than a decade of experience in implementing technology solutions. We are one of the most recognized and awarded Microsoft partner in Singapore and have won the award for Business applications- Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement. We bring deep techno functional expertise and have dedicated Microsoft experts who have successfully implemented projects across multiple industry verticals for many fortune 500 customers.
We can help you develop solutions that are built on and optimized for Power Platform. Get in touch with us at [email protected] to discover how we can enable you to quickly innovate and increase scale using tools within the Power Platform.
