Dealing with disparate systems and applications is a common frustration many businesses face. It can be time-consuming trying to find specific data only to realise hours later that it was uploaded in a different location. 

The onset of COVID-19 and the current lockdowns has only further exacerbated this situation with an increasing need for connectivity and streamlined processes as employees adapt to flexible work arrangements.

Going through a digital transformation can be challenging, especially if your organisation is still using legacy systems, but it is necessary to adapt to today’s highly technological landscape to keep up with demand and improve your business efficiency. Fortunately, the transition isn’t a difficult one if you utilise the right tools.

Microsoft Power Platform supports businesses in addressing the challenges they face and driving growth forward. It can help you build end-to-end business solutions, create productivity-boosting workflows and analyse data to develop relevant insights for your growth.

In fact, the 2020 Gartner report recognised Microsoft as a Magic Quadrant Leader in enterprise low-code application platforms because it’s able to execute its vision in supporting businesses with products like the Power Platform.

Using Microsoft Power Platform in your company has many benefits, including:

• • Reduction of development costs – Developing customised applications with Power Platform is less expensive than traditional methods, especially since you can use pre-existing templates with low-code tools.
• • Streamlined processes – Digitising and automating paper-based forms and manual workflow reduces the time and effort spent on those processes, allowing you and your staff to focus on higher-priority tasks.
• • Faster collection of data – The Power Platform enables you to collect and access data and input them automatically into visual and meaningful dashboards, allowing you to make informed business in less time.

What is Microsoft Power Platform?

Microsoft Power Platform helps you leverage, analyse and automate data more efficiently. It has a varying range of capabilities to support your business, including business intelligence, apps, automation and virtual agents.

Power BI

Power BI (business intelligence) features a scalable platform that enables you to create a data-driven culture within your organisation so you can quickly discover insights that allow you to make more confident and informed business decisions. 

Instead of utilising multiple solutions that add costs, needless complexity and security risks to your business, Power BI provides self-service analytics on an enterprise scale, allowing you and your staff to generate reports independently.

Power BI also assists you in connecting to and modelling the data you need, which can help you create more memorable and impactful reports personalised with your brand and KPIs. You can even gain AI-powered answers to your business questions (which can be asked in a conversational language) for a richer data experience.

Power BI also features end-to-end data protection so your data is consistently secured even when shared outside your organisation or exported to other formats such as Excel, PowerPoint and PDF.

Power Apps

Power Apps allows you and your team to build professional-quality and low-code applications, giving you the power to develop effective processes and solutions catered to your needs and the challenges your business is facing.

It features prebuilt templates and a straightforward drag-and-drop process, which means everyone in your organisation can build apps with advanced functionalities, regardless of their skill level or knowledge in professional app development. Power Apps also has a quick deployment, allowing a smooth roll out of your customised applications while letting you make continuous improvements as needed.

Power Automate

Power Automate, which was previously known as Microsoft Flow, also features low-code, drag-and-drop tools that allows everyone in your team to easily automate repetitive tasks and processes.This enables you and your staff to focus on business development and core competencies.

Power Automate also features a process advisor, which helps you identify processes that are slowing down your organisation and provides guided recommendations on which ones would be best to automate. This minimises the legwork you and your staff need to do to pinpoint process improvements.

You can further improve your workflow with Power Automate’s AI builder, which maximises artificial intelligence capabilities to help you increase efficiency by:

• • Processing any type form with document automation
• • Extracting data from documents sent through emails
• • Facilitating reviews and approvals using Power Apps
• • Simplifying tasks (e.g. business card reader, category classification, key phrase extraction, etc.)
  

Power Virtual Agents

Power Virtual Agents features an easy-to-use graphic interface that allows you to create and manage chatbots without utilising codes or AI expertise. By developing bots that are tailored to your requirements, you have additional support in resolving common issues and answering frequently asked questions. 

You can easily integrate your chatbots into your day-to-day operations. They can:

• • Find relevant records for your review
• • Conduct personalised conversations
• • Turn over conversations to live agents if needed

Power Virtual Agents enables you to build smarter bots that can initiate conversations using natural language understanding and entity extraction. You can continuously monitor and improve your chatbot’s performance using AI and data-driven insights.

Essentially, Microsoft Power Platform is one platform with many flexible applications. It reduces the effort and time needed to find applications that address business challenges. It’s designed to be customisable and scalable, allowing a business of any size or type to build the solutions they need. 

Why your business should use Microsoft Power Platform

Utilising Microsoft Power Platform lets all your data exist under a unified mode and enables you to use multiple applications together seamlessly and manage all your business processes in one platform.

It also features code-free or low-code tools, allowing all kinds of users (whether they’re skilled in IT or not) to utilise Power Platform applications. This reduces the dependency on third-party software, which can be more expensive and complex to maintain since that can result in disparate systems.

Microsoft Power Platform can be used with other Microsoft products such as Office and Dynamics 365 as well as third-party applications to boost your productivity and minimise disruptions in your workflow.

How Dynamics 365 users can benefit from Microsoft Power Platform

Depending on the licencing they’ve acquired, users of Microsoft Dynamics 365 already have access to Microsoft Power Platform. In fact, using Microsoft Power Platform can further enhance the customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions provided by Dynamics 365. 

Seamless integration is a focal point for Microsoft products so that businesses can get immediate access to the capabilities in Power Platform, whether by visualising their data through graphs or charts, automating their processes, or sharing applications using Power Apps.

They can utilise the Power Portals, which boasts of self-service capabilities that allows users to keep their data on mobile devices and share them securely with people outside of their organisation, be it clients or business partners, effectively making it possible for Dynamics 365 customers to deliver high quality work from the beach.

The architecture of Microsoft solutions is similar to a master-built home, everything is planned out thoughtfully and so each product lines up and works together seamlessly. This is unlike our competitors whose products are more like a “spaghetti factory” in terms of design and functionality. With Microsoft, you can utilise every Dynamics 365 solution at your arsenal and integrate it with the Power Platform.

Microsoft Power Platform enables companies to unify their data into one platform, empowering them to act on newly discovered insights more confidently, build customised applications that address specific business challenges, automate time-consuming yet important processes and tasks and create smart chatbots that support the business in achieving its goals.

Take your business to the next level with Microsoft Power Platform and visit the d365.Global website for more information.