How Power Automate increases business efficiency

Global competition and economic uncertainty is increasing every year. That said, there will still be opportunities to grow and thrive for those organisations able to respond faster and more efficiently to the demands of their customers. With the help of Microsoft 365 Support this can increase your chances of improving business efficiency.

The barriers to business efficiency

Numerous potential hurdles prevent businesses from achieving greater efficiency:

• Lack of formalised processes where tasks are completed in an ad-hoc manner.
• Too many disparate systems where employees must switch between applications and screens to access and process information.
• Too much manual effort where people have to be involved in very low-level, repetitive processes to complete a task.
• Too much human error where manual processes allow small errors (like typos) to creep in, compromising the process and its results.
• A lack of transparency where the use of disparate, disconnected systems interrupts the flow of information and prevents stakeholders from gaining an end-to-end view of their processes and operations.

Usually, these issues arise because IT systems have grown exponentially. You add a new application or function to fulfil a specific task, but there is minimal interaction between them all. Inefficiency is unintentional, but it is built into the system. With Microsoft 365 you are able to integrate apps which are linked to one another and remove the inefficiency of cluttered apps.

How Microsoft Business Automate can assist you

Microsoft Business Automate is a cloud-based service that can connect your various systems together. As well as other Microsoft applications (Microsoft 365, Teams, Dynamics etc), Power Automate links to third party services like, Adobe Creative Cloud, Dropbox, and Twitter.

Once connected, you can then use the various built-in tools to begin building and automating workflows that operate across them all with the help of Microsoft 365 support.

So information entered into one screen can be automatically copied into another system, reducing the risk of a mis keyed data entry. Or when a new purchase order is raised, the relevant line manager is contacted automatically for approval. The potential is limitless, but by recreating your processes in Power Automate, you can begin to automate and accelerate many of the low-level activities between stages within Microsoft 365.

Importantly, Power Automate is simple and intuitive, so anyone can use it. As well as structuring your company-wide processes, individual employees can also build their own workflows to make day-to-day tasks faster and easier to complete. There are also thousands of pre-built templates included with Power Automate that can be used to make building your own workflows even quicker in Microsoft 365.

Smarter processes as standard

Power Automate also allows you to introduce time-saving artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities into your workflows. The system can extract text from images and files, detect and process objects, predict business outcomes and even analyse customer sentiment from text in documents or posts on social media.

Applying AI in this way can save hours of work, generating valuable, actionable insights automatically. People can get to work applying those insights immediately, allowing your business to become more responsive, agile, and efficient.

Conclusion

Microsoft Power Automate is simple, powerful and has the potential to radically transform your operations. And because the potential applications for this technology are virtually limitless, almost every aspect of your business can be made more efficient with the help of Microsoft 365 Support.

At Texaport, we understand the importance of these advancements, and we work with our clients to put a reliable system in place to improve their business efficiency. Our team has a wide range of IT knowledge and remains acquainted with the movements in the IT industry. Find out more here.