Article Introduction
For any modern business, being able to speed up processes and boost efficiency can be the difference between succeeding past your competitors and falling behind. Business process automation offers a powerful way to streamline workflows, reduce manual effort, and increase productivity.
With 80% of businesses using automation, now is a great time to see how it can help your organisation. From data entry to document management and employee onboarding, automation can deliver significant value across your operations.
This article highlights the most impactful areas for automation and explains how to get started with Microsoft Power Platform.
What Is Business Process Automation?
Business Process Automation (BPA) involves using technology to automate repeatable, multi-step tasks. It helps businesses streamline operations, reduce errors, and improve consistency.
Business Process Automation has several benefits for your business:
- Repetitive Tasks: The automation of repetitive tasks allows you to free up wasted resources and move them to other, more relevant tasks where they’ll be more effective.
- Efficiency and Productivity: Similarly, employees no longer have to spend time on dull and monotonous tasks and can instead work on tasks that require more creativity.
- Consistency: Automation allows you to be more consistent, removing the possibility of human error and ensuring tasks are completed in the exact same manner, every time.
- Wider Integration: Business Process Automation integrates widely with other technologies and tools, letting you take advantage of other technologies and how they work with the automated parts of your organisation.
Altogether, automation is simply an unmissable part of modern business. Failing to invest in it can result in you missing out on key benefits that only make your business stronger, more efficient, and more productive all around.
How Microsoft Power Platform Can Be Used for Automation
Microsoft’s Power Platform is the pinnacle of automation technology for business. It lets you use automation with a low-code interface. This means you don’t have to wait for a developer to create an automation from the beginning.
The suite of tools offers flexible ways to take advantage of automation technologies for different aspects of your business, making it easier than ever to streamline your business to its fullest efficiency.
Here’s how every aspect of the Power Platform benefits your business:
- Power Automate: Power Automate is the basis of automation within the Power Platform. It lets you create workflows (or ‘flows’) that you can use to connect hundreds of applications and services, both between Microsoft applications and external applications.
- Power Apps: Power Apps is for building applications, which is vital for integrating applications to integrate within your flows. Most importantly, Power Apps helps you create a robust user interface to be able to trigger flows much more easily and efficiently.
- Power BI: While Power BI isn’t directly involved in automation, it can be used within your automation strategies to trigger flows based on specific data alerts, as well as automatically make data reports and insights.
- Copilot Studio: Copilot Studio can automate service and support using artificial intelligence, freeing up resources while being able to give helpful support and solutions to your customers and even your employees.
Areas Where Business Process Automation Delivers Most Value
Manual Data Entry and Duplication
Manual data entry and duplication are monotonous and aren’t a great use of human resources. In the past, this was a necessity as there was no way to make the process of data entry automatic, but with AI and automation tools and workflows, it’s just no longer a necessity.
It also removes the chance of human error and the lack of scalability of manual data entry, while keeping morale high and allowing resources to be used productively.
Email-Based Approval Processes
Email-based approvals are a bottleneck for any business, as they reduce efficiency by often taking time to resolve, while also making it difficult to be able to keep track of everything due to everything being within inboxes.
With automation, you can easily make centralised approval portals for things like reimbursements, time-off requests, and everything else that’d require approval, meaning it’s easier to track and complete than having to rely on emails.
Employee and Customer Onboarding
Employee and customer onboarding is prone to delays and unnecessary manual work, due to the ease of miscommunication and having to track everything manually. Automation removes these problems as you can automate every step of the process, making it easier to ensure every box is checked.
On top of this, automation increases scalability, whereas having to do everything manually while experiencing growth would lead to employees being spread thin to try to ensure onboarding is done correctly for everyone, making it unfeasible.
Notifications, Reminders and Status Updates
Notifications, reminders, and updates can be helpful to improve the productivity and efficiency of your business overall, as they help remind employees about outstanding tasks and things they would’ve otherwise forgotten about.
Altogether, this will help reduce delays by reminding people of tasks and updates to keep things moving, and ensure that your employees are able to be reminded of what they need to do at all times.
Document Management and Version Control
Document management can be difficult to do correctly manually. It’s easy for employees to save documents in places that may be difficult to locate, or for version control to be difficult to keep track of due to multiple copies floating around.
Automation counters all of this by making every process automatic and standardised. This makes it much easier to be able to keep track of files within your organisation as they’ll always be where you expect them to be, as well as tagged and filed appropriately without any chance for error.
How Extech Cloud Can Help Your Business Automate
Automation is no longer optional for businesses that want to grow and remain competitive. By embracing automation, you can unlock new levels of efficiency, consistency and innovation.
At Extech Cloud, we help businesses implement automation using the Microsoft Power Platform. Whether you are just starting out or looking to scale your automation strategy, our experts are here to support you.
Contact Extech Cloud today to learn how we can help you streamline your operations and future-proof your business.
