15 ways SMEs can be more productive with Microsoft Power Automate

In every business, there are tasks you need to perform regularly, that aren’t complicated but take up someone’s time and attention. For some time, big businesses have been able to pay developers to automate these tasks, helping to free up staff time.

Now, any business can realise the same benefits without any programming, using Microsoft Power Automate. In this article, we show you how you can do this and give 15 real-world examples of how to use Microsoft Power Automate to achieve your goals.

Table of contents

1. What is Microsoft Power Automate
2. Key features of Power Automate
3. 15 Power Automate examples
4. Getting started to Power Automate
5. Next steps

What is Microsoft Power Automate?

Power Automate is a cloud-based service that connects to other applications and allows users to automate tasks that involve one or more of those applications.

It’s part of the Microsoft Power Platform suite of low-code productivity apps. These allow anyone to use advanced business technologies that would previously have only been accessible to big businesses with their own development teams.

Key features of Power Automate include:

• Low-code: you don’t need to be able to code to use the app; most features and functions are point-and-click.
• Automation: using Microsoft Power Automate, you can easily and quickly streamline and automate manual and labour-intensive workflows.
• Integration: you can easily integrate Microsoft Power Automate with hundreds of on-prem and cloud applications, from Microsoft and from third parties.

Automating workflows with Microsoft Power Automate boosts productivity, frees staff from low-value-add labour and cuts rework by reducing manual error. There are also more than 1,000 pre-built templates, which you can use to achieve your goals.

Because it’s cloud-based, there are no installation overheads or maintenance costs. You can get up and running with Microsoft Power Automate instantly.

Microsoft Power Automate gives small and medium-sized businesses the tools they need to be more productive, more cost-efficient, and more agile in a rapidly changing marketplace.

15 Microsoft Power Automate examples of how to make your business more efficient

Sales and customer engagement

1. Sales lead management: free your salespeople from low-value data entry by automatically adding sales leads from emails or web forms to your CRM and then assigning them to a named salesperson for follow-up.
2. Contract renewal reminder: increase renewal rates and cut manual work by integrating with your email client or SharePoint platform to automatically notify clients and internal teams about upcoming contract renewals or expirations.
3. Email automation: improve customer support and accelerate ticket resolution times by using Microsoft Power Automate to send alerts to key stakeholders when you receive emails containing high-value trigger words or from qualified leads.
4. Customer feedback collection: improve upsell and cross-sell rates and overall customer experience by automatically sending satisfaction surveys to customers who interact with you, then use the information to optimise your customer journey.
5. Social media posting: simplify your social media marketing by linking a document or SharePoint containing forthcoming posts to your marketing team’s social accounts for easy, simple, unattended social posting.

Finance and operations

1. Automate invoice processing: cut out time-consuming and error-inducing copy-paste work by using Microsoft Power Automate to automatically extract information from emails and put it into a spreadsheet or leading finance software.
2. Expense approval workflow: improve cash flow and employee satisfaction by automatically routing every expense claim to the right approvers so that claims can be adjudicated and paid faster.
3. Inventory management: cut costs, streamline fulfilment and ensure customer satisfaction, by using Microsoft Power Automate integrated with your inventory management platform, to generate and send low-stock alerts.

Human resources and team management

1. Employee onboarding: create workflows that automatically welcome new employees, assign tasks to relevant teams, notify responsible managers, and track progress through mandatory milestones.
2. Team leave requests: simplify the application process for holiday leave by integrating with your content portal and your email client. When a leave application form is uploaded, the approver is automatically notified.
3. Team notifications: improve productivity and reduce turnaround time by generating automatic notifications in Slack, Teams and other collaboration apps whenever a new lead or customer interaction occurs.
4. Recurring task reminders: keep projects on track, reduce workload for your team members and cut error rates by integrating with your email and calendar app to send recurring reminders for things such as reports or compliance checks.
5. Meeting scheduling: eliminate back and forth by integrating Microsoft Power Automate with Teams and your calendar app, then configuring to find a time when you and the other participants are free, and to populate the meeting invite.

Compliance and document handling

1. Compliance document monitoring: reduce risk and cut the burden on your compliance team by integrating Microsoft Power Automate with email and calendar apps to automatically alert you when it’s time to update key compliance documents.
2. Document approval: cut time to completion in key customer workflows by setting up automatic alerts for approvers whenever a document is uploaded to your content platform, and for the submitter once approval has been granted.

Getting started with Power Automate

You can get started today, for free. Simply download and install the desktop version of the product, which is available to all Windows 10 and 11 users at no extra cost.

To gain complete access to all the platform’s features, however, you need to subscribe to one of the commercial subscriptions to Microsoft 365, as opposed to the Microsoft 365 Family plan.

You can also subscribe to Microsoft Power Automate as a stand-alone application. Pricing starts at £12.30 per user, per month. This allows the user to build basic template-based automated workflows.

More advanced plans include integration with advanced business platforms to automate core enterprise-level workflows and even host virtual machines to build, test, and run automated workflows.

All plans include integration with both Microsoft 365 applications and leading third-party business applications.

Next steps

Texaport is one of the UK’s leading experts in using the Microsoft Power Platform to help businesses achieve their goals.

Our Power Automate services will design and build automated workflows specifically tailored to your needs. We’ll integrate AI assistant Microsoft Copilot into workflows, which will improve your efficiency. And our engineers will be on hand to provide continuous, end-to-end support and management for your workflow automation.

Contact us today to speak to one of our Power Platform experts.