There is an increased pressure on businesses of all shapes and sizes to innovate. We’re in a landscape of rapidly evolving technology, including AI, which businesses are told to embrace before they get left behind.
There are also mounting challenges facing organisations, including rising costs, customer expectations and difficulties achieving profitability. Innovative solutions can often provide a raft for businesses wishing to weather these storms.
However, innovation is easier said than done. The digital solutions and tech businesses need can be timely to create, expensive and require extensive planning. As such, smaller businesses feel locked out.
But Microsoft Power Platform is changing things. It makes innovation more accessible for businesses, regardless of their size, budget or capacity. It opens possibilities, allowing organisations to effectively implement inventive solutions without barriers.
Plus, the results speak for themselves. 97% of Fortune 500 companies are using Power Platform, and Gartner believe that 65% of problems can be solved with Power Platform.
In this blog, we explore how to get business value from Power Platform, with real-life examples to inspire you.
The core use cases of Power Platform_
There are four core areas where Power Platform can help businesses, driven by the respective tools within the platform.
1. Create bespoke apps to fit business needs
Most out-of-the-box solutions don’t meet exact business needs or integrate well with other business programs. In some cases, the challenge you are looking to address is so bespoke that there may not be a product out there already. In times like this, businesses need tailored solutions.
Power Apps makes it easy for organisations to create their own apps, customised to solve internal issues and gaps. It eases users into app development with a simple interface, allowing them to extend functionality, improve processes and elevate the customer experience.
2. Automate workflows and boost productivity
Automation is a major talking point for businesses, especially given the rise of lean processes and increasing labour gaps.
With Power Automate, users can create automated workflows between applications and services. You can automate repetitive business processes such as communication, data collections and decision approvals.
Better yet, the automation is tailored to your processes, ensuring consistency and accuracy across the business. Tasks are completed faster, with less drain on resource.
3. Make your data work harder
It is common for data points to be isolated within individual teams or left unanalysed.
However, this leads to poorer decision-making and a lack of unity across the business.
Power BI is a business analytics service that delivers data insights, making it easier to share analysis internally and gain actionable outcomes. It uses data visualisations, shared through reports and dashboards to enable fast, informed decisions. These can be shared with anyone across your organisation to bring everyone together.
It also has built-in governance and security, to allow businesses to focus on using data more than managing it.
4. Create customer-facing website
Building external facing websites can take time. However, these websites make it easier to connect with people.
Power Pages excels at building websites for customers, partners or even the general public. This allows them to interact with your business through forms, view data you choose to share and access relevant information.
You can also connect your website to data stored in Microsoft Dataverse. This allows you to display dynamic content, create interactive forms and personalise the user experience.
Better yet, all these Power Platform tools offer user-friendly, low-code functionality, decreasing the cost of development and innovation for your business.
The benefits of Microsoft Power Platform_
By using Power Platform, businesses receive multiple advantages. Below, we list the key ones:
- Increased agility and innovation: Power Platform empowers business users to create custom solutions and increase automation without extensive coding expertise. This allows businesses to adapt and innovate faster to meet changing needs, as well as maintain a competitive edge in a fast-moving world.
- Reduced costs: Developing technological solutions, like apps, websites and automated workflows, traditionally can be expensive and time-consuming. Power Platform’s low-code/no-code approach reduces development costs and streamlines the process, making it more efficient to build and deploy solutions. The solutions you create also boost productivity, saving you money long-term.
- Improved decision-making: By being able to transform data from various sources into clear visuals and reports through Power BI, it’s easier to gain company-wide insight. This empowers businesses to make data-driven decisions based on insights they may not have readily identified before.
- Overcome skills shortages: It can be hard to find and retain digital skills. However, with Power Platform, you don’t need advanced technical resource. Better yet, as the solutions foster productivity, you can overcome other labour shortages in your operations.
- Enhanced productivity and efficiency: By solving internal problems with inventive solutions and automating repetitive tasks, you free up employees to focus on more strategic work. This can significantly improve overall productivity and efficiency across the organisation.
- Increased collaboration: Power Platform facilitates collaboration by allowing teams to share and work on applications and data analysis projects seamlessly. This is especially beneficial in today’s remote and hybrid work environments.
- Scalability: The platform is scalable to fit the needs of any size business, from small startups to large enterprises. It can handle a wide range of workloads, from basic data visualisations to complex enterprise applications. As the solutions created are bespoke, they grow with your organisation’s needs.
- Security and compliance: Power Platform is built with robust security and compliance features in mind. This gives businesses peace of mind, knowing their data is protected. It also keeps you safe against the rising tide of cyber risks.
- Integration with the Microsoft ecosystem: Power Platform integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft products like Office 365 and Azure, making it a natural fit for businesses already invested in the Microsoft ecosystem. You can extend the functionality of the tools you already use for greater collaboration and productivity across your organisation.
Real-life examples of Power Platform helping businesses_
As a Microsoft partner, we’ve seen many inspiring use cases of Power Platform from our customers and the wider world.
Most commonly, we see our customers employing Power Platform to alleviate manual processes within their operations.
One example was an organisation who wanted to streamline administration surrounding their appointments. They had use paper to document and track outcomes, but this was time-consuming. However, a simple Power App was able to digitise the process for faster results.
They’ve also been able to link their NPS metrics to Power BI, allowing them to track the positive response to their new process.
And we’ve seen the benefits at Infinity Group too. We use Power Automate to automate various processes, saving our teams time every day. We also use Power Apps for key things such as lead, expense and time logging.
Other well-known organisations using Power Platform include:
- University of Oxford have used it to create apps that handle course fees, funding applications, assigning colleges, ID cards and email accounts to new students, and childcare services and travel insurance for staff. It allows students to self-serve and frees up admin staff.
- Martin Lee, Citizen Developer at Autoglass, has created over 40 apps using Power Platform for field technicians, call centre agents and beyond. It saves time and makes their jobs easier.
- Allegiant Stadium, the home of the Las Vegas Raiders, use Power BI to create a sustainability dashboard which enables them to control costs while maintaining a pleasant temperature for guests.
- The Brown-Forman Corporation use the robotic process automation capability in Power Automate to streamline their vendor onboarding process. In just seven months, they saved thousands of hours.
These are just some examples of how Power Platform has genuinely helped businesses across industries. But the possibilities are endless, and it’s crucial to find the best use cases for your operations to get value.
How to find your Power Platform use cases_
1. Identify pain points and bottlenecks
When finding the best uses for Power Platform, it’s a good idea to start with your current business processes. This will help you identify areas causing frustration.
Look for examples of repetitive manual tasks, inefficient data collection or analysis, unautomated workflows, siloed data or reliance on outdated systems. These will typically be the areas where innovative Power Platform solutions will work best.
Part of this exercise will require input from employees. Talk to people across your business departments to understand their daily challenges. Ask for suggestions on where automation or data analysis could improve their work.
2. Align use cases with your business goals
It’s crucial not to innovate for the sake of it. For a strategic approach, you must spend time on solutions that will genuinely offer rewards and address internal objectives.
This should include any use cases that promise to improve customer experiences and service, reduce costs, increase efficiency or enhance data visibility.
Remember to always have a specific goal in mind and track results. This will enable you to prove the value of Power Platform, giving you success stories to share internally and warranting the need for innovation.
3. Prioritise based on impact and feasibility
Once you’ve defined your potential Power Platform use cases, you need to choose where to place your attention first. This will allow you to get used to the platform while still delivering tangible benefits.
We recommend first focusing on areas with the biggest potential impact on efficiency or cost savings. This will allow you to generate better rewards, faster.
While Power Platform is easy to use, some things are easier to achieve than others. So, consider the complexity of the process and the level of technical expertise needed for development. This will make it easier to prioritise and allocate the right resource.
4. Start small and scale
When getting used to Power Platform, it’s best to start small. Doing so gives you time to experiment, which can then inspire future uses.
Begin with a pilot project targeting a well-defined, high-impact use case. This allows for learning and refinement before wider implementation.
If the pilot project is successful, it builds momentum and showcases the value of Power Platform. This will make it easier to get buy-in and inspire future use cases.
Find out how Power Platform could help your business_
Power Platform allows any business to benefit from cutting-edge innovation and bespoke solutions to operational challenges.
However, with so many possibilities, it can be hard to pinpoint the best use cases for your business.
Our Power Platform Needs Assessment Workshop will conduct a thorough exploration of your external drivers, pain points and the potential risks you face if you choose not to make any changes.
Our team will delve deep into understanding the challenges that are holding back your productivity and hindering business growth. We’ll also give you a scope of work for any specific solution that could benefit your business, ready to get you started.
