Microsoft Power Automate
Microsoft Power Automate (part of the Microsoft Power Platform) gives small business a great opportunity to streamline and automate businesses processes that they may otherwise be doing manually, or not at all.
Power Automate is available as part of the Microsoft 365 system, so if you are using Microsoft 365 (Office 365) then this is available for your business to use.
Why automate business processes? The obvious answer is to save time within your business and to remove opportunity for error in repetitive tasks.
However the big often overlooked opportunity is to offer new services or enhance existing business processes with new features or services. These can set yourself apart from other suppliers and give you the opportunity to win new contracts, or build existing client relationships further. This could be by sending marketing emails automatically, or by sending PDF monthly reports to clients. Further examples are below.
As you would expect the Microsoft suite of products is supported by Power Automate including Excel, Word, Outlook, OneDrive, Sharepoint and Dynamics. Outside of the core services provided by Power Automate there are various other connectors for linking to third party packages and systems. Useful connectors that spring to mind include Quickbooks Accounts, Eventbrite, Gmail, Mailchimp and Adobe, but anything with a form of cloud API should be able to exchange data using Power Automate.
Here are some real-world business examples where we have used Power Automate to great effect.
Producing a PDF containing photographs.
In this situation a client produced monthly reports containing numerous photographs taken out on site, by copy/pasting images into a Microsoft Word template. Time consuming and prone to error. A Power Automate job now means a folder of images are automatically inserted into a PDF document alongside other comments from a third-party system. The result is a painful and slow monthly job reduced to nothing by a simple workflow.
Sending emails automatically.
This client wanted notification when jobs were completed, with the email containing pertinent information from the job. This is simply achieved using Microsoft SharePoint and Power Automate and an Outlook connector. Additional data being pulled from a SQL Server database.
Power BI reporting enhancement.
Generating Power BI reports can be time consuming, but Power Automate can be used in the background to prepare and enhance data before reaching Power BI. In this example the client had data to be plotted on maps, but additional address and geo data was added using Power Automate, resulting in much richer BI visuals.
Image size reduction.
A simple one this, a customer collected images from onsite using smart phones but the images received were far too big for adding into their legacy system. Cue a Power Automate process to automatically reduce the image sizes, thus removing a manual and time consuming stage from their client reporting.
PDF document creation.
In this situation different clients required different summary reports, some monthly and some weekly. Using Power Automate this chore is reduced to a simple check and validation exercise, and sending the resulting reports that the system has produced. House of business hours saved.
Loading files automatically
This customer received files daily by email, for then entering into their warehousing system. A slow process prone to error. A Power Automate job now strips the email attachments, transforms the data, and then loads it into their in-house system, resulting in them being able to handle even more jobs for the customer without employing additional resource.
If these requirements sound familiar, maybe I can help, simply contact me here.