The Power Platform is one of Microsoft’s flagships today, and it’s not hard to explain why. The tools that make up the suite help companies take an important step towards innovation and digital transformation. But how exactly does this work?
Microsoft’s suite is made up of four applications that, on their own, meet specific business needs and already bring many benefits, but together they are a powerful platform for building the basic pillars of a company’s digital transformation.
Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, and, more recently, Power Virtual Agents, allow non-technical users to gain autonomy to develop modern solutions that meet their needs. After all, who better than the user themselves to know how a new application can optimize their workflow?
That’s what Power Platform is all about; serving users where they need it most. Below is a quick introduction to get you acquainted with the platform and how it can help your company!
What is Microsoft Power Platform?
Microsoft Power Platform is an application suite consisting of four distinct ools:
- Power Apps: A no-code, low code app development platform
- Power Automate: A template-based application that allows you to build workflows and automate tasks
- Power BI: A real-time data analysis tool to build indightful reports
- Power Virtual Agents: An application that allows you to build chatbots based on Artificial Intelligence in a simple and intuitive way
The main idea behind the Microsoft Power Platform is to empower the business user by providing tools that are simple, intuitive, and capable of delivering robust business solutions without requiring the involvement of developers or IT specialists.
All of the platform’s tools are based on a low-coding model that allows users at all technical levels to work on top of data, build applications, or use AI to solve problems.
With Power Platform, company departments gain independence from IT. On the one hand, they can solve their own problems faster and, in most cases, more efficiently, since they know exactly how their pains can be solved. On the other hand, IT professionals are freed up for more strategic tasks that are aligned with overall business objectives.
What are the 4 Pillars of Microsoft Power Platform?
Each of the Microsoft Power Platform’s tools is built upon 4 pillars, which are fundamental to any company’s innovation and digital transformation strategies: (1) data analytics, (2) process automation, (3) application development, and (4) virtual customer service.
Below, we talk a bit about each of these pillars.
1. Data Analysis
The ingredients for any company’s success lie within it. The data your company generates can inform and drive the business towards success — the big issue is that there is so much information generated these days that it can be difficult to “dig” through it to find what is actually valuable.
That’s exactly what Power BI enables; mining your data so that the important insights can be found. Ultimately, Microsoft Power BI enables you to achieve three main business goals:
- Understand who your customer is and what they want in order to deliver products and services that exactly meet their needs
- Identify bottlenecks in business processes to increase internal productivity
- To make accurate projections of financial costs to optimize spending
2. Process Automation
Every department in a company has tasks that can be automated. In general, these are those repetitive, tedious, and bureaucratic tasks that do not bring much value to the process as a whole but are necessary to keep things running.
Power Automate allows you to automate these tasks by creating simple workflows that must be followed through to completion. These flows can be automated and triggered without the need for a command, just at the touch of a button.
They can even be scheduled to happen at certain times or whenever a trigger is pulled in the process. Whatever the choice, everything is created in an intuitive and simple interface, with no knowledge of code development required.
3. Application Development
Today’s world is based on applications. They make every kind of task simpler: from ordering a transport car to finding a room to rent for one night. In the business world, it would be no different.
You can think of different applications yourself that, if built, would make your activities in the company simpler and faster. However, developing such systems used to be an expensive process and relied on specialized professionals who usually do not have much time. Well, not anymore.
Power Apps is the no code, low code development tool from Power Platform. It enables employees themselves, within their own departments, to develop the applications they need without being dependent on company IT.
This unburdens IT and optimizes the employee experience, as they can build exactly what they need when they need it.
4. Virtual Customer Service
Today’s consumer wants to be served well — and what they want at the time and place they prefer. However, human agents have physical limitations, and keeping a service team available around the clock can be expensive and stressful.
Power Virtual Agents is the latest addition to the Power Platform. It allows you to create chatbots based on Artificial Intelligence so that your company has an efficient and always-available workforce.
The bots can serve as a first response so that your customer never goes unanswered. They also solve the simplest demands and can direct the more complex ones to exactly the professional who will be able to solve them.
How Can I Implement Power Platform in My business?
Without a doubt, the Power Platform can bring many benefits to your organization and put you on the path to the future. It can contribute to accelerating the process of innovation and digital transformation in companies, allowing the rapid creation of prototypes, or MVPs (Minimum Viable Product), testing and validation in a real environment, course correction, and even scaling the solutions developed.
However, to really succeed, platform adoption must follow a learning curve.
In addition, the various moving parts that make up the Power Platform can bring a certain level of complexity to its use, requiring the company to have the support of specialized professionals to reduce the learning curve and develop enterprise-wide solutions at scale, without losing application governance.
Imagine having a team of experts to accelerate innovation initiatives and promote digital transformation with technologies already available in your company. PowerSquads by Prosperi is exactly that. A squad of experts in Microsoft technologies is at your disposal to make the most of the platform’s potential.
You choose the challenge, the profile needed for the challenge, and our experts develop with your team the solutions. Contact us and find out how we can help you on your journey.