Is your company challenged by trying to integrate multiple standalone tools successfully without making processes even more complicated and frustrating?
In enterprise and SMB organizations especially, the quest for productivity, efficiency, and driving growth can be all-consuming, but integrating standalone solutions is tricky at best and utterly frustrating at worst.
Microsoft Power Platform is changing the landscape for tool integration. Launched in 2018, Power Platform provides business users with low-code, no-code development, workflow, and business intelligence tools. Benefits include streamlined operations, reduced development costs, minimized reliance on corporate IT, and improved business outcomes.
Power Platform spans Microsoft 365, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Azure, and standalone apps. Its components include Power BI, Power Apps, Power Pages, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents.
Using these revolutionary tools, business users can address the broken processes that are causing bottlenecks and inefficiencies. With Power Platform, those most affected by the issues can make the necessary simple changes. Plus, having the right partner who knows when higher-level skills are needed will keep you on the right path to simplify workflows with affordable solutions.
Gone are the days of needing huge development projects to address dreaded customizations that drain resources!
Read on for a closer look at Power Platform–you’ll be amazed at how it can solve your most complex business problems in less time.
Microsoft Dynamics 365 Power Platform apps and capabilities
Each Power Platform component has its own benefits and integrations for solving different business problems. Before we dive into some specific use cases, here’s an overview of each app, its benefits, and its capabilities:
Power BI: Data visualization and business intelligence to enable informed, confident business decisions with up-to-the-minute analytics.
Benefits: AI-powered data analysis, centralized data, drag-and-drop report canvas, faster decision-making with data safely infused into apps.
Power Apps: Enjoy pre-built templates and drag-and-drop simplicity. Anyone can quickly build custom apps to efficiently turn business ideas into organizational solutions that solve business challenges.
Benefits: Lower costs and faster app building/solutions.
Power Automate: Remove bottlenecks and inefficiencies and automate workflows with less guesswork and guided automations.
Benefits: Everyone can automate business processes for faster results and lower costs.
Power Pages: Use Templates, Design Studio, and Learn Hub to create low-code business websites for delivering vital information and services to your customers.
Benefits: Do more with less, for less. Your teams will be empowered to create websites without requiring highly skilled resources.
Power Virtual Agents: Easily create chatbots to engage with your customers and resolve issues. Experience low-code development with generative AI support for design and responses.
Benefits: Reduced costs, faster turnaround, scalability, continuous improvement, and the ability to deploy across multiple languages and apps.
How Microsoft Power Platform helps solve your business problems in less time
Now that you’re familiar with the Power Platform components and their capabilities, let’s dive into some examples using Power BI, Power Automate, and Power Apps working together to create a comprehensive solution.
A robust data visualization and business intelligence tool, Power BI integrates seamlessly with other Power Platform components. To follow are two use-case examples that demonstrate the possibilities of solving complex issues by working with a few Power Platform components:
1. Creating a Sales Dashboard for a Retail Chain:
Situation: A retail chain with multiple stores across the country wants a consolidated view of its sales, inventory, and customer feedback.
Implementation:
- Data Collection: Data is sourced from various systems - Point of Sale (POS) systems, inventory management software, and customer feedback forms on the company website.
- Power Automate: Use Microsoft Power Automate to automate the process of regularly gathering and syncing data from different sources into a common data source, such as the Dataverse or an Azure SQL Database.
- Power BI:
- Data Modeling: Using Power BI Desktop, establish data relationships and create measures to calculate metrics like monthly sales, year-over-year growth, top-performing stores, etc.
- Visualization: Design an interactive dashboard that provides insights at both a national and store level. This could include charts showing monthly sales trends, heat maps of sales by region, and even sentiment analysis of customer feedback.
- Power Apps: You could also create an app, enabling store managers to manually input daily sales or provide qualitative insights that are reflected in the Power BI dashboard.
Outcome: Senior management can use the Power BI dashboard for strategic decision-making, while store managers can monitor their performance and gather insights into customer preferences.
2. Collect HR Analytics for Employee Retention:
Situation: A multinational corporation wants to understand employee turnover and identify potential reasons for high attrition in certain departments.
Implementation:
- Data Collection: HR collects data from its Human Resource Management System (HRMS) that includes details like employee demographics, tenure, performance ratings, training history, and exit interviews.
- Power BI:
- Data Modeling: Establish relationships between different data tables and create measures to calculate attrition rate, average tenure, correlation between training and retention, etc.
- Visualization: Design a dashboard that provides a holistic view of employee retention. It could include breakdowns by department, age group, tenure, and other attributes. A visual showing patterns in exit interview feedback can be valuable.
- Power Automate: Set up automated email alerts using Power Automate. For instance, if a department's monthly attrition rate goes above a certain threshold, an alert is sent to the HR manager for that department.
- Power Apps: Design an app that allows managers to provide additional qualitative feedback about team dynamics, which can be factored into the analytics.
Outcome: HR can develop targeted strategies to improve retention, and department managers can take proactive measures to address potential issues before they escalate.
These examples demonstrate how Power BI, combined with other Microsoft Power Platform tools, can provide end-to-end solutions for data-driven decision-making in different business contexts.
Knowing when to “do it yourself” for simple projects and when to tap into the resources of a knowledgeable Microsoft partner like TrellisPoint who understands ERP data complexities, saves you time, and ensures you meet your objectives.
Wondering if the Power Platform could solve inefficiencies for your business? Contact us today for a free consultation.
About the author:
TrellisPoint helps businesses grow with our expert optimization of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Power Platform suite.
Our customers understand there is no substitute for 20+ years of deep experience transforming and personalizing departments like Sales, Marketing, Project Operations, and Customer Service - all backed by cutting-edge decision-making analytics.
