Almost 100 percent of IT decision-makers believe process automation is vital to digital transformation.
That’s a substantial endorsement.
However, with nine out of ten of these decision-makers facing challenges with their most recent automation projects, it may be time to rethink how we can improve the process. Or, better still, simplify it.
This is where Microsoft Power Apps can help.
What is Power Apps?
Power Apps is Microsoft’s scalable, low-code answer to business process automation.
Its intuitive templates and drag-and-drop functionalities cut out the skill, time and inaccessibility barriers imposed by other automation routes. This allows everyone in your business to try their hand at making powerful business applications.
Apps you may choose to create include:
- Employee onboarding workflows
- Holiday request management
- Expense request management
- Inventory tracking
But how exactly can Power Apps enable business process improvement (BPI)?
Facilitating business process improvement with Power Apps
‘Enterprises use BPI to find ways to reduce the time it takes to complete processes, to eliminate waste and friction in those processes, and/or improve the quality of the products or services that are produced through these processes.’ – Mary Pratt, TechTarget
When embarking on your BPI journey, you’ll need to back up your analysis and process improvement mapping with the right automation tool.
With that in mind, here are four ways Power Apps can aid BPI.
1. Save costs and increase ROI
Did you know that it costs 74 percent less to develop an application with Power Apps?
For a Microsoft 365 tool that you can try for free, that’s pretty significant. It means you can create applications for a fraction of the cost and, in turn, champion more BPI projects. But the financial incentives don’t just end there.
The tool can also have substantial ROI benefits in the long term. This is well documented in Microsoft’s ‘The Total Economic Impact Of Power Apps‘ guide.
2. Boost process agility
Eighty-four percent of executives believe innovation is important to their business’s growth strategy.
A key part of this innovation centres around time-to-market. It’s not enough to create a brilliant automated workflow or application if it takes months to develop. By that point, your brilliant idea might be out of date and your employees or customers won’t reap the full benefits.
Fortunately, Power Apps speeds up your business’s process agility by allowing you to create tailored applications in hours instead of months.
3. Democratise innovation
Power Apps is brilliant for your business process improvement efforts because it encourages autonomy.
As the platform is accessible to everyone in your business, you needn’t be bottlenecked by development or code skill shortages. Instead, you can encourage teams members from across departments to create applications themselves, based on their own needs.
This could be as simple as creating automated sales reporting, or an Excel data entry workflow. The world is their oyster.
4. Ensure accuracy and compliance
As Power Apps is part of Microsoft 365, you can connect your applications to data sources across your tool suite (and outside of it, too).
This means you can tap into your valuable business information, champion one single source of truth, and ensure your application’s data is accurate. This is great for maintaining regulatory compliance, too.
Power up your automation game
At Akari, we’re big fans of intelligent automation. With three applications of our own, we know how powerful automation can be – not just for your business processes, but for your people, too.
That’s why we love Power Apps.
Power Apps is a cost-effective, accessible and successful facilitator of business process improvement. It allows you to stay agile when creating automated applications and workflows, as well as scale up your efforts to meet changing business demands.
If you’d like to learn more about Microsoft’s low-code automation tool, please get in touch.
