An Introduction to Microsoft Power Automate
Hello everyone, this is John Straumann and my official title
at Microsoft is a low code Technology Solutions Professional for the Microsoft
South region, although I've renamed myself the Chief Automation Officer. That's
me and my buddy Zak who hangs out with me in office while I'm working every
day. My email is at the bottom of the screen so please do reach out to me at
any time with any questions.
This article will present an overview of Power Automate,
which of course is a part of the power platform. I often tell people I used to
work for an automation vendor with a fantastic automation engine and there's a
lot of great automation engines out there. The big differentiator from
Microsoft and where we provide the most value for our customers is that we have
the entire power platform which is quite literally a strategic digital
transformation platform.
There are five major components, Power Pages, Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, and Power BI. Now power BI's reporting and analytics virtual agents are
chat bots. Power pages are for front facing websites and then power apps, as
you know, are apps either model driven, which are tabular in nature, or canvas
apps which are, as they sound, a blank canvas for our customers to design very
rich and immersive user interfaces. Power automate is our automation platform
and again where Microsoft really differentiate themselves is that this entire
platform is connected.
As you can see in the middle DataVerse is the database that is
the backbone of the entire power platform. It of course is based on Azure SQL
Server, but it's a lot more than just a database. You might know if you deploy
a SQL Server database, it's blank, you have define the database, the tables,
the columns, the relationships, etc. and it really takes a DB Administrator to
properly deploy and maintain. When you deploy
the power platform and DataVerse it comes out-of-the-box with a lot of prebuilt
tables and relationships, standard items and records that we find most of our
customers need, such as Accounts and Contacts.
Dataverse helps our customers get closer to deploying their
solution by possibly saving some deployment work at the outset, and you don't
need to be need to be a database administrator to maintain it. It's literally
drag and drop business users can contribute and manage the DataVerse.
Microsoft also provides Connectors which enable Power Platform
solutions to connect to and interact with other systems. Whether they be
Microsoft products or third party products, there are over 900 connectors today
and the flexibility of the power platform means that if a connector does not
exist for a product that you need to interact with , you can create a Connector
yourself and there's full documentation on the Microsoft website around how to
do that. The big value for our customers with the Power Platform is it's not just
one component, it's not just automation, it's not just apps, it's the entire
platform that comes together to provide fantastic solutions and great ROI and
value for our customers.
Now let's look at Power Automate a bit more in-depth.
As you may know, automation means applying software
automations or what we call software robots or bots to business processes.
Anything that’s task driven, has very discrete steps that can be documented is
a great candidate for automation. We also use the term swivel chair operations
for employees who are maybe entering data in one system and then swing their
chair to enter data in a second system and then maybe even a third or fourth
system.
This is a lot of work for our customers and it's very
tedious and error prone and very time consuming. Microsoft Power Automate can
help by automating some of those processes which frees up our employees to do
important human work, things like creative decision making and relationship
building, things that software robots can't do. The first step is how do we
decide what processes to automate? I always say, if you automate a bad process,
you simply get a faster bad process! We provide a tool called process advisor.
It's included with power automate.
Processor Advisor is a tool included with Power Automate
that lets you analyze your processes and identify bottlenecks and identify
areas maybe where the process isn't designed or running as well as it could be.
The tool can also help discover redundant steps and inefficiencies, and fix
them BEFORE applying Automation to the process. I've worked with customers
where we were building an automation and they give me a process that had 15
steps. When we put it through process advisor and analyze it, customers
sometimes realize they can cut out five or six steps. It’s just a fantastic
tool for analyzing processes and determining which processes are ready for
automation and some that require some more optimization work before they're
automated
The end result is that someday, when you implement a full
digital transformation and are up and running with an automation strategy
across the organization, process advisor can be used to analyze incoming
process requests and determine which ones you want to implement as automations.
So say your organization is sending you 20 ideas for automations a month, after
analyzing them with process advisor maybe your team decides to implement five
of them as automations, the ones will provide the most value for the
organization.
Let’s look at the tools Microsoft provides for building automations.
There are many automation vendors, and some have desktop automation, and some
have cloud, but these are tactical,
somewhat limited products. With the Microsoft Power Platform, our customers get
access to three distinct areas of automations.
We also have tools for helping our customers deploy these
desktop automations and deploy the virtual machines needed to provide the
infrastructure to run them.
Cloud flows are called Digital Process Automation in the
Power Platform, and as the name suggests, these run in the cloud.
We have several interfaces, power automate for web, for
mobile, for Microsoft Teams and the beauty of the cloud flows is that Microsoft
takes care of all the scaling, all of the high availability and disaster
recovery. You don't need to worry about any of that. You simply deploy to the
cloud and we will take care of scaling up or scaling out as your demand for the
process increases. For example, maybe at the end of the month the demand for
the process exponentially increases to process month end reports. The Power
Platform will take care of scaling the process to meet those needs and then
that can be scaled back down when you don't need it anymore after the period of
peak demand ends.
What you see at the bottom of the screen is a notice that
this flow will connect to Planner and Microsoft Teams. That's an example of our
connectors and the beauty of those is that they are authenticated and
authorized right in the power platform and then those credentials are stored as
connectors in the power platform, fully encrypted and hidden from the end
users. So we don't have to do things like I've seen people do with desktop
recordings where they literally expose user credentials in the recording
itself, which is a bad security risk. With our connectors users or Admins
connect once and then it's available to whomever has the rights to see it and
use it in your platform. It is a very secure and easy way to connect to these
applications that you need to interact with.
Another benefit and differentiator with the Microsoft Power
platform is that business process flows or cloud flows can call other flows. For
example, you might have a cloud flow that runs on a schedule every day at 9:00
o'clock and calls a desktop flow that interacts with maybe a Citrix environment
or a mainframe environment that's only accessible on the desktop through an
emulator or something like that. The cloud flow can call the desktop flow every
day, and then the desktop flow can send the results back to the cloud flow and
interact with the target systems. The same is true of a business process flow
maybe when the business process flow gets to a certain step, we want kick off a
cloud flow or a desktop flow to continue processing. These interactions are connected
and secure right out-of-the-box, Microsoft is the only vendor that enables that
kind of complete, end-to-end solution.
AI Builder is a tool that we've made part of the power
automate platform that embeds Azure capabilities for like cognitive services
and computer vision into power automate. The automation designer can literally
drag and drop an AI builder model into your power automate flow and it's
available to you to be used. There are pre-built models for things like invoice
processing, object recognition and sentiment analysis and may others! An
example of sentiment analysis is maybe you get an e-mail from a customer saying
“I'm very angry. I bought your product six months ago and it doesn't work
anymore.” You couple deploy a Power Automate Cloud Automation with AI Builder
sentiment analysis to analyze that e-mail and create a urgent customer service
record in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and then alert the customer service
department. The value to our customers is that instead of a person to monitor a
central mailbox and analyze these emails all day the automation watches the
mailbox for incoming emails, and then automatically analyzes the sentiment, and
sends the results humans so that they can concentrate on fixing the
relationship. AI builder and Azure and power automate literally turn all of our
customers into expert data scientists while abstracting away the need to know
what goes on behind the scenes. Imagine if our customers had to write the
actual code to perform this level of automation and AI Analysis!? That's too
much work for our customers, really all our customers want are the results and
that's what we provide with AI builder and the Power Platform.
All of these tools combine to make the Microsoft Power
Platform the only true HyperAutomation solution on the market today!
Here is a great reference whitepaper: Microsoft Hyper Automation
We’ve explored how the Microsoft Power Platform provides many
fantastic tools to enable our customers to implement organization wide digital
transformation which encompasses dozens of technologies and hundreds of use
cases across different industry sectors.
At Microsoft, we want to help our customers realize Power
automate at scale and enterprise strategic digital transformation and Microsoft
has produced several tools to aid our customers in their automation journey.
Holistic Enterprise Automation Techniques is guidance that's
designed to help you deploy the automation platform and manage the entire
lifecycle of an automation project. Cloud architects, RPA developers, IT
professionals, and business decision makers use these best practices,
documentation, and tools to achieve their Automation adoption goals to empower
our organizations to realize their strategic objectives. The end goal is organization
wide digital transformation, not just tactical deployments of automations..
As you continue on your automation journey, eventually the
organization can create a governance board and a team that has the ability to
analyze the request for processes and present findings to the executive boards
and present ideas for automation to continue to expand the use of automation in
the organization.
To facilitate this, Microsoft provides the automation Coe
Center of Excellence Starter Kit. This is a power app that's downloadable by
our customers and has all kinds of tools for enabling our customers to track
their use of automations and power apps to govern, to provide monitoring and
reporting enterprise readiness.
The end goal is through the use of HEAT and the Enterprise Automation
CoE Starter Kit, the organization
develops a comprehensive plan and strategy to drive innovation and improvement
and bring together like-minded people with similar business goals to share
knowledge and success, while at the same time providing standards, consistency,
and governance to the organization.
It's almost like if you think of the sales funnel report
where some sales opportunities are at various stages in the sales process,
that's what we want to provide with the Automation CoE starter Kit and the Governance Board. The
request for automations come in to the pipeline, and some might be classified
as ready to automate, some as needing optimization, some as not suitable for
automation, etc.
As requests come in to the Governance Board in the pipeline
format you use our tools to analyze them and then provide recommendations as to
what the best process is for automation are. For example, maybe you're getting
20 to 25 requests a month for automations, and by using all of these tools and
the CoE starter kit and Process Advisor,
we can decide on a number of processes that are ready to be automated. The CoE can then give you metrics that can be
presented to the executive team to say, “Our team ahs performed extensive
analysis on the requested processes, and this is the ROI we're going to realize,
whether it's hours returned to the business or freeing up employees so that
they can concentrate on things that require human decision making or data entry error reduction because we all
know that data entry is very error prone. Whatever ROI metric is important to
you, you can implement those with the CoE and the Governance Board to be sure that you
can present to the executives that you're meeting those ROI objectives.
You may have heard the term “Democratizing Automation”. What
we mean by that is the Microsoft Power Platform facilitates the use of fusion
teams. We enable Pro developers, citizen developers, and IT admin to all come
together and form a very powerful and productive team. In the past, business
users might have an idea for an app to
make their lives easier and they bring that to the Pro development team. They would
try to come up with a set of requirements and then the Pro developers go off
and work by themselves for a while. They come back and present their idea and
what they've created to the business group. Well, that's not only a long
process, but it generally adds to a lot of cyclical rewriting of the app as the
Pro developers produce releases and then the business users give their feedback.
Using the Power Platform and our drag and drop and point and
click tools, citizen developers can work hand in hand with Pro developers to
form these fusion teams so that the citizen developers or business users bring
that business subject matter expertise to the application development lifecycle.
This results in a much stronger team, much more productive, much faster to
market and a better product at the end because you're getting a diverse range
of opinions, input, and subject expertise of how the application should run.
Fusion Teams also include IT administration and they can use the central
management of the power platform to provide control and overall governance
across the entire development ecosystem and making sure that the correct
security, compliance and usage is implemented across the organization.
This reference describes fusion teams for Power Apps, and is
also applicable to Power Automate: Microsoft Fusion Development
In the past the idea of Citizen Developers might have made IT Admins and managers nervous, but not with the Power Platform! This screen shows that even though we have no code, low code and code first, which is professional development, all of that is governed securely by the power platform. So whether it's unified administration or checking on the CoE and best practices and usage analytics and activity logging or auditing of changes to data and data loss prevention, all of these things are securely provided by the Microsoft Power platform.
To summarize, let's look at some of the benefits that the Microsoft Power Platform and Power Automate can provide.
More accurate data since Automations don’t make mistakes, if an Automation and AI
Builder is tasked to process an invoice, it will process exactly what's written on the
invoice and enter that information exactly into data entry systems. If there's
a mistake on the invoice, such as someone wrote ABC instead of 123, we can implement
error handling to detect that and provide for those error conditions and report
those errors back to the system administrators.
The fact is, if a human is sitting typing in the information
from 500 invoices a day, they're going to make mistakes and that's just all
there is to it. We're only human. The more we type, the more we do, the more
tired we get and we start to make mistakes. Automations don't make mistakes.
They don't take breaks. They don't go on vacation. They don't take lunch. They
can work 24/7, which of course results in faster output and lower costs. More
importantly, it frees up more time for innovation and strategy by our human
workers which results in improved employee satisfaction. A lot of the FUD, (fear,
uncertainty, and doubt) we hear from potential customers is that automations
are going to replace employees. Our view of automation is that it augments and
improves our human workforce in that we move humans out of the roles that are lacking
in creative thought and challenge and into roles where they can provide that
creative feedback and ideas and build relationships, things that only humans
can do. Standardized processes, making
sure that every process that's implemented across the business is according to
your best practices and your organizations tried and true business processes
that result in success, can also greatly improve overall business operations,
efficiency, and profitability.
Hopefully this article has helped illustrate the tremendous
benefits the Power Platform and Automation can provide for our customers in
helping achieve strategic digital transformation to provide outstanding ROI and productivity for our customers in one
centrally managed, governed, and monitored platform.
Thanks for reading and for some videos that showcase use
cases for Power Automate, please see my You Tube channel: Johnz Power Automate YouTube Channel
Power Automate Learning Resources
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/desktop-flows/introduction
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/overview-cloud
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/use-ai-builder
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/business-process-flows-overview
https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/microsoft-powerapps-learning-resources/
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/browse/?expanded=power-platform&products=power-automate
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