Solve Business Problems, Streamline Processes, Automate Tasks, and Enhance Decision-making – With the Power of Power Apps
By Apratim Ghosh
25th April, 2024
Digital Transformation Solutions
Power Apps
Process Automation
Automation Solutions
In today’s fast-paced global business environment, process automation has become the need of the hour. Automation, when paired with advanced technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics, can play a vital role in transforming businesses and delivering best-in-class products and services to end customers.
Yet, the dependence on legacy systems and manual efforts makes it difficult for organizations to keep up with changing business needs and market fluctuations. Read on to learn more about the challenges organizations face in their day-to-day operations and how Power Apps helps overcome them via intelligent automation.
Common Business Challenges
As businesses look to compete in today’s volatile business environment, they come face-to-face with many challenges that restrict them from achieving their goals.
- Legacy systems: Most organizations continue to operate on a foundation of rigid, inflexible, and unsecured legacy systems. Built using proprietary technologies and offering a rather poor user experience, these systems are complex, and costly to maintain and dilute productivity. They also restrict the organization’s ability to respond to changing market conditions. It is estimated that at least $1.14 trillion is spent on the maintenance of legacy systems.
- Restricted data sharing: When teams work in silos and rely on systems that are poorly integrated, there is restricted data sharing. Outdated technology makes these systems incompatible with newer systems, resulting in poor decision-making.
- Manual efforts: Despite the emergence of automation technologies, the manual overload on the modern workforce is substantial. Employees who are compelled to do most of their tasks manually face several issues, including poor morale, excessive burnout, and the inability to meet business objectives on time. Large financial institutions incur costs upward of $500 million a year by relying on manual customer due diligence processes.
- Over-dependence on IT teams: As technology gets increasingly integrated into the day-to-day workings of any business, there is also an over-dependence on IT teams. From addressing minor user experience issues to building new apps, solving integration problems, system failures, data loss, and more, today’s IT teams are overburdened with several competing priorities, leaving no time for strategic IT work.
- Poor collaboration: With the hybrid work model here to stay, many businesses continue to face challenges in driving effective collaboration. With employees using different tools and working from different time zones, working together on projects and resolving issues in real time doesn’t come easy. According to a recent study, 86% of employees cite the lack of effective communication and collaboration as the main cause of workplace failure.
The Business Case for PowerApps
Automation seems to be the first solution organizations embrace to solve business problems, streamline processes, and enhance decision-making. But in today’s era of volatility and change, simple automation tools are not enough. These tools need to be combined with advanced AI and ML technologies to deliver true business value.
Microsoft Power Apps empowers users to build and leverage apps using the power of AI. As an intelligent automation tool, it allows users to make use of low-code/no-code capabilities and build the apps they need, regardless of their coding capability. By enabling organizations of all types and sizes to quickly build custom applications, Power Apps aids in the automation of workflows, driving high levels of agility, efficiency, and innovation in a fast-paced digital environment.
Power Apps’ AI-enabled development, low-code capabilities, and enterprise-grade governance allow organizations to:
- Simplify development and integration using trusted tools, extend app capabilities to specific tasks and roles, and reduce application development costs by 45%. For example, HR teams can build apps to get real-time visibility into employee data across training, leaves, and attendance, skills, and more.
- Automate complex processes using the power of AI and have Copilot design the app they need. For example, finance teams can curate apps to digitize physical documents, automate the KYC process, and onboard customers quickly and more efficiently.
- Improve workforce productivity via streamlined processes and improve business outcomes, resulting in business benefits of over $14.25 million. For instance, operations teams can use Power Apps to count objects in a warehouse or receive AI-powered insights into real-time inventory.
- Ensure secure data sharing by making the most of advanced security and compliance capabilities. For instance, sales and marketing teams can connect disparate systems and share critical information about customers as they progress through the sales funnel.
Streamlining Power Apps Implementation – The Role of a Partner
Power Apps can help overcome many of the challenges organizations face daily. However, like any other technology implementation, there are many things to keep in mind while embracing Power Apps:
- As a cloud-native system, Power Apps requires organizations to have some level of cloud maturity. Those not completely cloud-based are likely to have a few hurdles in realizing its full potential.
- Power Apps’ ease of use puts the governance and scalability of the apps built by citizen developers a major issue. While this might not be an issue for small or localized implementations, the consequences might be far-reaching for enterprise-wide rollouts.
- Licensing is another issue that comes with adopting Power Apps. Since the costs of embracing Power Apps depend on several factors like team size, existing Office 365 licenses, and capabilities, most organizations struggle with choosing the right plan.
- Configuring Power Apps and ensuring they meet necessary functionality, performance, and availability requirements is another challenge that organizations face.
- When employees who have created apps using Power Apps leave the organization, maintaining and managing these apps becomes difficult.
- While building apps, existing data sources are completely exposed to citizen developers, which increases the risk of data theft, misuse, or breach.
Successful Power Apps adoption requires the right approach and skill sets. A qualified partner can streamline the implementation process, allowing for long-term business benefits.
With a Power Apps partner in tow, organizations can:
- Undergo a detailed discovery session, understand the business case for Power Apps implementation, and address their immediate pain points, both from an IT and business perspective.
- Get a detailed roadmap on how best to maximize value from Power Apps implementation and accentuate enterprise-level delivery.
- Make the right decisions on which users can build apps to minimize the risks of shadow IT and data misuse.
- Build a robust data security strategy, ensuring data is always encrypted and only accessed via strong access control mechanisms.
- Understand and resolve larger business problems via comprehensive process automation, the integration of data-driven decision systems, and the adoption of collaborated enterprise analytics.
- Achieve economies of scale via well-planned integration of Power Apps with various existing enterprise applications.
- Get much-needed assistance on a Power Apps licensing model that makes the most sense for their users and business use case.
As businesses drive efforts in enabling intelligent automation across various processes, Power Apps paves the way for high levels of efficiency, reliability, and agility. Although Power Apps allows organizations to solve business problems, streamline processes, automate tasks, and enhance decision-making, an implementation partner can provide vital guidance and tips for the best results.
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