Tag: power automate

My company, Innovatix Technology Partners, previously known as Macrosoft, Inc., has a growing line of business supporting our mid-sized clients in building process automation applications, utilizing mainly the Microsoft Power Automate suite of tools. [1] When we start our work with a new client, the focus of the business case we work with the client to put together to justify the investment usually centers on the dollars that can be saved via the automation application. That is, the automation of processes will lead to significant dollar cost savings which is undoubtedly a prime factor to consider. But what I find most interesting and compelling is that once automation processes start to take hold in a company, there is a whole other dimension of benefits that accrue to the company besides the direct dollar benefits outlined in the business case. These are often hard to quantify but, in my opinion, often play a significant impact on a company and its employees and customers and can in themselves change and improve the future trajectory of a company. And that is my topic for this byline note.  1.   Order from chaos Let’s face it, most companies have at least some parts of their business where certain processes and data flows are disconnected and disjointed, with lots of unnecessary manual inputs. For example, messy processes: going from laptop spreadsheets to python scripts on various servers, to the web to extract and update information, to different UIs for business users to manually update information during the flow, and to startup and monitor the various process steps. Yes, these complex processes can become bottlenecks that lead to lost time and revenue (which will be captured in the business case), perhaps more importantly, they will also inevitably lead to employee morale and customer satisfaction issues. In other words, a messy and unproductive set of processes and data flows probably grew up over an extended period and is now very difficult for business people in your company to navigate and fully understand. Generally, this also leads to suboptimal performance and regular falls in dealing with the company’s clients. That is the perfect arena for a showcase application of process automation. Surely, a good implementation of process automation in this area of a company’s business will lead to a concise dollar payback period. However, I believe, the positive impact of process automation will have on both employees and customers. Employees will no longer be chasing their tails through a set of segmented, disjointed processes and data flows, often having to manually input lots of data already in the system, and in that process, there are higher chances of making humane mistakes. This is not a positive and edifying environment for employees to work, spending much of their time fighting fires. The benefits include fewer falls and higher compliance to quality and on-time delivery of services and products on the customer side. Thus, there will be improvements in efficiency and control spread to every facet of this process area – from increased productivity and compliance to better customer experience and market performance. 2.   Single point of process management Another less tangible, but highly important benefit of implementing MS Power Automate across various business processes within your company is that it provides a single point of process management, a single dashboard for managing all the scripts and data flows. This benefit is related to my discussion in point #1 above, but I highlight it separately here as it provides the gateway for a company to broaden and deepen automation activities across a much large set of processes within a company. Business teams and managers will be able to check on the status of all ongoing work easily and regularly within the processes covered by the automation platform. They will be able to track and compare current versus prior performance easily through the data charts available within the dashboard. I believe this to be a major benefit to employee morale, giving workers and managers alike much greater time to devote to higher value-added and more engaging tasks, including: Thus, there can be significant consolidation and synchronization of processes within MS Power Automate and it will be easy to maintain and update all these processes within the centralized location. Microsoft Power Automate will provide a single site to organize and manage these complete processes in a single orchestration for instance.  3.   Standardization of business processes One of the inevitable positive outcomes of implementing MS Power Automate successfully within a set of company processes is the standardization of those business processes. Business teams will gain a much better firsthand of all the activities, the status of all operations, and an understanding of what needs to be done next. Here are some of the things I have in mind for this benefit, and again these things are generally not easy to quantify in a dollar sense for including the business case: 4.   A company can combine multiple business processes with a Power Automate solution. This leads to higher productivity throughout the company, not just for a single isolated process. The goal of process automation is to ultimately envelop a broad array of a company’s business processes. And keep in mind – all these processes can be handled within a single instance of Microsoft Power Automate. Then, when 10-20 processes are encompassed within the automation platform, a company will see the true lasting benefits of automation, especially those intangible benefits that I am talking about in this paper. There will be no turning back at that point – the time and cost benefits will be compelling and so will the benefits I am talking about in this paper. Yes, implementing a single showcase application is an excellent way to start, to build positive momentum within a new company but that should be followed up quickly by a series of additional automation implementations within other business processes. In our work with clients, we review a broad subset of the client’s current business processes, and, working with