Across the world, thousand of businesses are eliminating manual processes, accelerating the speed of work and business, slashing delivery delays, and cutting out time-consuming or paper-reliant processes, all thanks to Power Platform's broad range of automation tools and capabilities. Here's why Power Automate and Power Platform are the best business tools you can adopt in 2022.
In 2022, digital automation has become a mandatory business tool, as the inefficiency, time-waste, and cost of slow, repetitive, or manual labour become clear. According to market research firm IDC, companies lose 20 to 30 percent in revenue every year due to inefficiencies.
Digital automation and robotic automation tools have shown their value in saving organisations vast amounts of time and operating expenses – and perhaps the best among these is Power Automate, a tool that is rapidly becoming integral to great business.
Let's take a look at why and how Power Platform has the ability to completely overhaul your business.
Microsoft Power Platform is a collection of powerful cloud-based applications and workflow engines that combine easily and seamlessly to automate processes and tasks. It allows organisations (even those with limited or no developer capacity) to automate their work and business processes through powerful end-to-end business solutions by connecting to and using a the extensive suite of Microsoft products, including SharePoint, Teams, Office 365, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, Azure, and hundreds of other apps. This dense, low- or no-code approach allows you to move data more efficiently across your organisation and make work easier, faster, or totally automatic, even without dedicated developer resources.
Power Platform is made up of four central tools:
Power Apps allows users to build apps that run on a wide range of websites, operating systems, and devices, in mere hours instead of months. Users can easily connect to data, use Excel-like expressions to add logic, and bring innovation to their work with little effort or development experience.
Power BI is a powerful reporting tools that lets you bring together data from many sources to create interactive, immersive dashboards and reports that provide actionable insights and drive business results.
Power Platform isn't just these 4 tools alone, however. It can connect to a staggeringly large library of connectors to quickly and easily share data across the entirely of your business landscape.
if you have a staff member spending one hour on a repetitive, manual, or time-consuming task that could be automated by software (whether its reconciling spreadsheets or doing data entry) you could be losing tens of thousands of euro a year in lost productivity.
Power Platform's low- and no-code functionality, drag-and-drop design, flexibility, and wide range of connectors and massive library of tools give it the ability to do almost anything a typical office worker or business profession does – but better, faster, and automatically.
Here are just a few real-world business tasks and organisational processes you can get done quickly and automatically with Power Platform:
With the hundreds of available Power Apps connectors that Power Platform has, you can do essentially any work task you can think of.
For decades now, it has been clear to see the business advantages that organisations can get from the Robotic Process Automation and workflow automation that Power Platform and Power Automate allow.
A study of 57 companies commissioned by Forrestor Consulting called The Total Economic Impact™ of Power Automate found that Power Automate has the ability to totally redefine the way your business gets its work done. The study noted multiple positive business outcomes, including significant process acceleration, reduced delays, eliminated manual and paper-dependent processes, staff freed up for more business-critical tasks, and a dramatically faster deployment, delivery, and time-to-market.
Most notable, Power Automate saved companies 26,660 worker-hours per year; and in one single business case, automation delivered another company a three-year return on investment of 199 percent. Finally, surveyed companies reduced time-to-market by as much as 33 percent.
In our own work (which we'll get into below), we've seen companies enjoy a 160% Year 1 ROI on their automation solution after just 20 days of development time.
Power Platform allows government agencies, large public sector organisations, and businesses of all sizes to do everything better. Here's one example of the game-changing automation solutions OpenSky has brought to some of Ireland's largest organisations.
The hospital group received an average of 120-140 post applications each week from the clinical sites in the group, requesting resources for hire in functions such as Nursing, Medical, Support, Admin etc. Each and every post type needed to record particular information about the post (for example, new services, replacement posts, annual leave, sick leave, maternity leave, retirement, promotion, and so on) and each require approval at either the sub-committee level in the group or by the HSE Group Employment Control Committee (GECC).
Before the Hospital Group adopted an automation solution, this process for creating and approving posts at site and group level, was manual and not standardised across the clinical sites. In most cases, departments relied on emails, document attachments, and MS Excel in varying formats, leading to data silos, inconsistent data capture, gaps in post application information or document, and delays in communicating or sharing data. In many instances during the approval stage of the process, further information was required to complete the post application, resulting in a large volume of emails and communications back and forth between the group & clinical sites personnel.
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To resolve the the RCSI HG's data and post approval management issues, OpenSky delivered an automation system called PACS: the Post Application Control System, a unique, custom-built, cloud-based central database and portal, that provides functionality to submit, edit, update & approve post applications, while providing traceability of all application data and related communications made by users in the RCSI clinical sites and the RCSI hospital group.
With this new tool, hospital group HR and hiring managers can fill in required data such as the post funding source, the contract type and duration, the post's grade, department, vacancy type, hours, and other such vital post information, while the new document upload functionality allows them to submit each and every form, document, or piece of information needed by the Hospital group and approving body to process the application. Status-driven workflows bring greater awareness and tracking of applications to all parties, with automatically triggered notifications that keep relevant personnel and users up to date in every step of the post application process. Finally, the RCSI Hospital Group and the HSE GECC can easily administer outcomes of these applications through automatically generated Approval to Hire forms and a suite of automatic post application status reports for every approved post.
Through these RPA features, gaps in clinical site staffing take days or weeks to approve instead of months; this proven success of PACS has led to its adoption at multiple new Hospital Groups and clinical sites, including Ireland East Hospital Group, and the Dublin Midlands Hospital Group, and more to follow.
Since 2004, OpenSky has been delivering high-impact, high-ROI automation solutions to some of Ireland's largest public sectors and government agencies. Our Power Platform solutions will bring limitless convenience, efficiency, and performance to your business, like we've done for so many others for over nearly two decades.
We'll automate your data validation, help you eliminate manual processes and dependencies on paper documents, and much more -- just click below to get in contact to get your free, no-obligation consultation of the value we could bring to your teams, management, and bottom line.
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