The 3 Quick Wins
What's Actually Been Measured, Not Projected
If your team is still moving data by hand between systems, building the same report every month, or waiting on IT to build a simple internal tool, there's a good chance the fix already exists inside the Microsoft licenses you're paying for. Power Platform is built for exactly this: letting the people closest to a problem fix it, without writing code or waiting in a dev queue.
1. Stop Moving Data by Hand
Power Automate. The most common first automation is the most boring one: a flow that moves data between two systems, sends an approval request, or triggers a follow-up task automatically instead of someone remembering to do it. Organizations using Power Automate saw workflow development run 20% faster for professional developers, and employees in high-impact use cases got back 200 hours a year each, roughly a 10% productivity lift, by removing manual, repetitive steps from their day. Some of that came from retiring older, separately-licensed automation tools once Power Automate covered the same ground.
Source: Forrester Consulting, "The Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Power Automate," commissioned by Microsoft, July 2024
2. Build the Internal Tool Nobody Wants to Wait For
Power Apps. Every team has a spreadsheet-turned-tracker that's outgrown email and Excel: an intake form, an approvals log, a simple lookup tool. Power Apps is built for exactly that gap, a working internal app without a formal dev project behind it. In the same study, professional developers built apps 50% faster using Power Apps versus traditional development, and employees using apps built for high-impact use cases gained 250 hours a year back, again a two-digit productivity swing.
Source: Forrester Consulting, "The Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Power Apps," commissioned by Microsoft, 2024
3. Stop Rebuilding the Same Report Every Month
Power BI. If someone on your team still manually assembles a monthly report from three different exports, that's a Power BI problem, not a them problem. In a Forrester-measured deployment, self-service reporting gave individual BI users back 125 hours a year, cut the effort needed from a centralized analytics team by 42%, and sped up quoting and proposal turnaround by over 22% by putting live numbers in front of the people who needed them.
Source: Forrester Consulting, "The Total Economic Impact™ Of Microsoft Power BI," commissioned by Microsoft, April 2020
