5 Reasons To Accelerate Your Business With Power Platforms
iLink Digital
in Blog, Business Intelligence, Cloud, Digital Experience, Low code Engineering, Microsoft
Microsoft Power Platforms is becoming the next-generation business process automation and productivity suite for industry leaders. It is being used by nearly 16 million monthly active users, up by 97% year over year, revolutionizing productivity gains for companies everywhere.
Companies are leveraging Power Platforms to enable data analysis, app creation, and automation without any IT/ Development Teams support. They are using it to build intelligent, low code, cross-platform apps and see them in action. Before we dive deeper, let’s understand what these Power Platforms are.
What are Power Platforms?
Power Platform is a combination of robust products offered by Microsoft to develop and build complex business solutions. These products include- Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps, and Power Virtual Agents.
Power Platform integrates seamlessly with the broader Microsoft cloud (Office 365, and Dynamic 365) and other Microsoft services. It also has hundreds of connectors to bring in other third-party apps and services.
Each component of the Microsoft Power Platform is built upon the Dataverse, known as the Common Data Model. Though each of these components has different functionalities for the enterprise users, they significantly improve business operations when combined to work.
Understanding Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps, and Power Virtual Agents:
- Power BI
Power BI is a self-service analytics tool that helps you make sense out of your data through an interactive, real-time dashboard. It unlocks insights to help you make more informed decisions, drive your business forward, and effectively carry out business operations.
Power BI has connectors that seamlessly integrate with most data sources be it as simple as Excel spreadsheet or as complex as on-premises/cloud-based hybrid data warehouses. It easily extracts data, visualizes important data points, and form analytic dashboards with intelligent reports. You can even share these reports with anyone across your organization and access them remotely across many devices.
As a result, Power BI enables businesses to collaborate easily, identify their market competitiveness, and focus on building the best solution for their challenges. iLink helped a leading American fast-food chain to migrate to Power BI and enable critical decision-making.
Learn more about our Power BI solutions
- Power Automate
Power Automate allows you to create automated workflows between multiple applications and services including Microsoft and other third-party apps. The no-code approach frees up your employees from carrying out repetitive tasks and saving their valuable time. It includes many pre-configured application connectors, helping organizations to collate valuable data from disparate sources and access intelligent insights.
Power Automate also offers capabilities to build custom connectors depending upon the apps and services your business needs. It even provides a large number of templates that can be used immediately or customized to better suit your organization’s business processes.
- Power Apps
Power Apps is a suite of apps, connectors, services, and data platforms that allows you to be more productive with your data. It provides the ability to build rapidly and deploy custom business applications without requiring any specialized technical knowledge. This enables you to digitalize and automate manual business processes in a short time.
Another key benefit is accessibility across all devices. Power Apps empowers you to make updates remotely and share apps within your teams. It can be connected to the data stored in the core data platform and on-premises data sources such as Excel, SQL Server, Microsoft 365, SharePoint, etc.
Learn more about our Power Platform App Offerings Here
- Power Virtual Agents
Power Virtual agents help your employees create sophisticated, AI-powered chatbots using a no-code graphical interface. This means even the most non-technical member of the team can create chatbots without learning the fundamentals of AI or coding.
Power Virtual Agents resolves customer common issues virtually, around the cloud, ensuring a superior customer experience. This ensures a superior customer experience, saving employees time and money as automated chatbots can respond to common inquiries.
Why Use Power Platforms?
Power Platform provides organizations with easy means to analyze, visualize, and manipulate data for insights and automate business processes. These products create easy workflows across organizations, helping to free up time for to focus on more value-added tasks. Earlier, the above processes were the responsibility of IT and development teams, requiring them to outline requirements, submit requests, and then approve. This traditional way would require a lot of time and consume valuable resources along with internal delays.
With Power Platform, businesses can build applications in no code/ low code environment reducing the need for IT in an organization. These products are simple GUI that can be used by any business user or developer. Forrester Research Group found that deploying Microsoft Power Platform’s low-code/no-code environment reduced application development time and empowered developers to create custom applications, reducing development costs by up to 74% and saving workers up to 3.2 hours per week.
The report combined interviews and surveys of 59 companies across industries ranging from various professional services to banking and beverage distribution. The report also projected that using the Microsoft Power Platform for application development, a company could realize an ROI of 188% over three years and payback in less than six months.2
Benefits of Using Power platforms
Microsoft Power Platform simplifies business processes and reduces workloads, below are the five key benefits of using Power Platform.
- Manage all your Business Processes in a Single Platform
With every industry dependent on data, businesses must have a single version of the truth across the organization, be it reporting, planning silos, analyzing, or acting on the data.
Microsoft Power Platform provides a unified dashboard to help you manage all the information even if the data is generated from multiple, disparate tools. It empowers them to automate the processes and iterate on them.
- Allows you to work seamlessly across devices
Power BI, Power Apps, and Power Automate can be accessed individually or collectively on any desktop, tablet, or handheld device. This easily connects you to your remote employees and has them contribute to the organizational data irrespective of their location.
You can also leverage your smart device capabilities like GPS, camera, and signatures to your benefit when using the Microsoft Power Platform apps on them.
- No Coding Knowledge Required
The low code/no-code approach differentiates the Power Apps from other offerings. It allows much faster deployment as compared to traditional app development methods. This means you can design and build applications without any technical experience. This approach empowers business leaders to extract deep insights from the data, develop rich applications, and create a powerful workflow using automation and AI.
It helps them to solve any business challenge without any technical proficiency. Although developers can easily create and deploy applications, end users can adopt and use all the features with minimal IT support.
- Less dependency on third-party tools
Developing apps from a third party can be expensive and time-consuming. Microsoft Power Platform helps you make the most out of your membership by combining sophisticated analytics, design, development, and automation tools.
It eliminates the need for separate software licenses and maintenance, further relieving the stress of your IT personnel. Additionally, its low code approach significantly reduces development time while keeping development costs under control.
- Easy integration with existing Microsoft tools
One of the key benefits of the Power Platforms is that being a Microsoft solution, it integrates smoothly with other Microsoft tools. These end-to-end capabilities allow developers to leverage the data collected from the Microsoft applications i.e. SharePoint, Excel, or any other Office 365 apps, as per your needs and preferences.
It also integrates well with other third-party services with the help of a range of connectors available for Power Apps. This allows you to easily manage enterprise data and simplify business processes.
How to use Power Platform for your organization?
iLink has been helping businesses successfully navigate through changing business landscapes by leveraging Power Platforms for years. Our domain experts have vast knowledge and technical experience in implementing, upgrading, integrating, and customizing Microsoft services that meet specific challenges. Simply put, we help organizations turn business plans into actions. Ready to get started? Get in touch today!
Endnotes
1. https://to-email.com/find-email/ecbcaf7dbc45ba5492c7a19311bb6a22
