Introduction

As a consultant, I am often asked “When do we use Power Platform?” or “What are the use cases where it makes most sense to use Power Platform?”. The answer is usually some type of permutation of “It depends on your specific scenario.” One of the mistakes I made earlier on in my career was that I didn’t have a framework for solving these types of questions. This resulted in coaching people on an ad-hoc basis, which made it difficult for them to reproduce what they learned. This blog post attempts to solve this problem by outlining some use cases and the appropriate tool to use against those use cases. To make it easier to understand, when talking aboutPower Platform tools I will be focusing on Power Apps, Power Automate and PowerBI as the primary tools . These tools are targeted at business users who don’t have a lot of IT or development experience under their belt, but do have some understanding typically found in a business analyst role.

Given the variety of tools available in the Power Platform, I will address this topic over multiple posts. This first post covers Power Automate and typical automation use cases.

Some Excellent Uses For Power Automate

There are multiple ways to drive productivity and improve business performance in the enterprise through automation. One of them is to integrate multiple standard business applications with each other, but this often involves manual file transfers from one application to another, which increases the risk of data loss or incomplete data exchange between applications.

Sales

Sales process automation tools enable sales teams to spend more time making sales calls, and less time logging deal-related activity.These tools are able to automate repetitive tasks throughout the sales process including quoting products, providing samples/demos and fulfilling orders.

Marketing

With marketing automation, companies can schedule and send out email campaigns, reducing thecost of sending each one manually and allowing for more personal customer correspondence.Marketing efforts can be tied into a customer relationship management(CRM) system and even do things like target customers with automated messages via social media.

HR

Use Power Platform to automate a number of HR-related processes, including job application processing, interview scheduling, employment offers, onboarding and payroll management. Human resource automation solutions are also capable of collecting and analyzing data regarding an organization’s workforce.

Finance

Automating financial planning and accounting functions can free up time for important tasks like analysis, strategy and collaboration with stakeholders. In accounts payable management, data capture is automated, invoices are automatically matched to documents and approvals are automatically routed. This reduces data errors and helps prevent fraud through background controls.

In the next post we will consider uses for PowerApps and PowerBI.