An Introduction to Microsoft Power Automate
John Straumann
Power Platform Principal Technology Solutions Specialist at Microsoft AKA The Chief Automation Officer for Microsoft South
Hello everyone, this is John Straumann and my official title at Microsoft is a low code Technology Solutions Professional for the Microsoft South region, although I've renamed myself the Chief Automation Officer. That's me and my buddy Zak who hangs out with me in office while I'm working every day. My email is at the bottom of the screen so please do reach out to me at any time with any questions.
This article will present an overview of Power Automate, which of course is a part of the power platform. I often tell people I used to work for an automation vendor who has a fantastic automation engine and there's a lot of great automation engines out there. The big differentiator from Microsoft and where we provide the most value for our customers is that we have the entire power platform which is quite literally a strategic digital transformation platform.
There are five major components in the Power Platform, Power Pages, Power Apps, Power Virtual agents, Power BI and of course Power Automate! Power BI is for reporting and analytics and Power Virtual Agents are chat bots. Power Pages are for public facing websites and can surface Power Platform data, and then Power Apps are apps either model driven, which are tabular in nature, or canvas apps which are, as they sound, a blank canvas for our customers to design very rich and immersive user interfaces. Power automate is our automation platform and again where Microsoft really differentiate themselves is that this entire platform is connected.
As you can see in the middle DataVerse is the database that is the backbone of the entire power platform. It of course is based on Azure SQL Server, but it's a lot more than just a database. You might know if you deploy a SQL Server database, it's blank, you have define the database, the tables, the columns, the relationships, etc. and it really takes a DB Administrator to properly deploy and maintain. ?When you deploy the power platform and DataVerse it comes out-of-the-box with a lot of prebuilt tables and relationships, standard items and records that we find most of our customers need, such as Accounts and Contacts.
Dataverse helps our customers get closer to deploying their solution by possibly saving some deployment work at the outset, and you don't need to be need to be a database administrator to maintain it. It's literally drag and drop business users can contribute and manage the DataVerse.
Microsoft also provides Connectors which enable Power Platform solutions to connect to and interact with other systems. Whether they be Microsoft products or third party products, there are over 900 connectors today and the flexibility of the power platform means that if a connector does not exist for a product that you need to interact with , you can create a Connector yourself and there's full documentation on the Microsoft website around how to do that. The big value for our customers with the Power Platform is it's not just one component, it's not just automation, it's not just apps, it's the entire platform that comes together to provide fantastic solutions and great ROI and value for our customers.
Now let's look at Power Automate a bit more in-depth.
As you may know, automation means applying software automations or what we call software robots or bots to business processes. Anything that’s task driven, has very discrete steps that can be documented is a great candidate for automation. We also use the term swivel chair operations for employees who are maybe entering data in one system and then swing their chair to enter data in a second system and then maybe even a third or fourth system.
This is a lot of work for our customers and it's very tedious and error prone and very time consuming. Microsoft Power Automate can help by automating some of those processes which frees up our employees to do important human work, things like creative decision making and relationship building, things that software robots can't do. The first step is how do we decide what processes to automate? I always say, if you automate a bad process, you simply get a faster bad process! We provide a tool called process advisor. It's included with power automate.
Processor Advisor is a tool included with Power Automate that lets you analyze your processes and identify bottlenecks and identify areas maybe where the process isn't designed or running as well as it could be. The tool can also help discover redundant steps and inefficiencies, and fix them BEFORE applying Automation to the process. I've worked with customers where we were building an automation and they give me a process that had 15 steps. When we put it through process advisor and analyze it, customers sometimes realize they can cut out five or six steps. It’s just a fantastic tool for analyzing processes and determining which processes are ready for automation and some that require some more optimization work before they're automated
The end result is that someday, when you implement a full digital transformation and are up and running with an automation strategy across the organization, process advisor can be used to analyze incoming process requests and determine which ones you want to implement as automations. So say your organization is sending you 20 ideas for automations a month, after analyzing them with process advisor maybe your team decides to implement five of them as automations, the ones will provide the most value for the organization. ?
Let’s look at the tools Microsoft provides for building automations. There are many automation vendors, and some have desktop automation, and some have cloud,?but these are tactical, somewhat limited products. With the Microsoft Power Platform, our customers get access to three distinct areas of automations.
First are desktop flows which as the name suggests run on the desktop, we call that robotic process automation. They can be attended, which means kicked off and/or interacted by a human or unattended which means the automation runs on a desktop without a human. It completes a task and then maybe updates a third party system or sends back a report.
This is our RPA design tool example of a desktop flow and this is literally a drag and drop interface, the flow designer can drag and drop actions from the toolbox on the left to build automations.
We also have tools for helping our customers deploy these desktop automations and deploy the virtual machines needed to provide the infrastructure to run them.
Cloud flows are called Digital Process Automation in the Power Platform, and as the name suggests, these run in the cloud.
We have several interfaces, power automate for web, for mobile, for Microsoft Teams and the beauty of the cloud flows is that Microsoft takes care of all the scaling, all of the high availability and disaster recovery. You don't need to worry about any of that. You simply deploy to the cloud and we will take care of scaling up or scaling out as your demand for the process increases. For example, maybe at the end of the month the demand for the process exponentially increases to process month end reports. The Power Platform will take care of scaling the process to meet those needs and then that can be scaled back down when you don't need it anymore after the period of peak demand ends.
What you see at the bottom of the screen is a notice that this flow will connect to Planner and Microsoft Teams. That's an example of our connectors and the beauty of those is that they are authenticated and authorized right in the power platform and then those credentials are stored as connectors in the power platform, fully encrypted and hidden from the end users. So we don't have to do things like I've seen people do with desktop recordings where they literally expose user credentials in the recording itself, which is a bad security risk. With our connectors users or Admins connect once and then it's available to whomever has the rights to see it and use it in your platform. It is a very secure and easy way to connect to these applications that you need to interact with.
Last, we have business process flows and these run in the context of Power Apps model driven apps. If you've ever seen a demonstration of or you have Dynamics 365, if you look at the opportunities record, you'll notice there's a bunch of steps across the top of the opportunity like make contact, qualify the opportunity, reach out to the customer, ensure there's a need and ensure there's budget that is a business process flow. They only run within the context of model driven apps and they really help with standardization of business processes.
If you think of a typical sales team, VP Of Sales, Sales managers, sales people on the on the road, and you ask them what their sales process is, a lot of times you'll get different answers from those different people. What a business process flow can help an organization do is implement a consistent best practice for sales in your organization. It's not power automates interpretation of what your sales process is, it's actually your sales process that you've developed over time and that your organization knows leads to success.
Another benefit and differentiator with the Microsoft Power platform is that business process flows or cloud flows can call other flows. For example, you might have a cloud flow that runs on a schedule every day at 9:00 o'clock and calls a desktop flow that interacts with maybe a Citrix environment or a mainframe environment that's only accessible on the desktop through an emulator or something like that. The cloud flow can call the desktop flow every day, and then the desktop flow can send the results back to the cloud flow and interact with the target systems. The same is true of a business process flow maybe when the business process flow gets to a certain step, we want kick off a cloud flow or a desktop flow to continue processing. These interactions are connected and secure right out-of-the-box, Microsoft is the only vendor that enables that kind of complete, end-to-end solution.
As you’ve probably seen in the news Microsoft has made enormous investments in artificial intelligence and machine learning, and Microsoft Azure has tons of capabilities for machine learning and artificial intelligence. This is another big differentiator with Microsoft. If you use one of the other automation engines they might be very good at automation. But what if you need to interact with the CRM? Well then you need a third party product. What if you need to interact with a database or a spreadsheet? Again you need a third party product? The same is true of artificial intelligence and machine learning.
If you want to implement those kinds of things in your automations with our competitors, you need a vendor who supplies those services and that means more cost and complexity four the end users, not a great idea! Microsoft is the only vendor with these powerful ML/AI Capabilities already part of our platform solution!
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AI Builder is a tool that we've made part of the power automate platform that embeds Azure capabilities for like cognitive services and computer vision into power automate. The automation designer can literally drag and drop an AI builder model into your power automate flow and it's available to you to be used. There are pre-built models for things like invoice processing, object recognition and sentiment analysis and may others! An example of sentiment analysis is maybe you get an e-mail from a customer saying “I'm very angry. I bought your product six months ago and it doesn't work anymore.” You couple deploy a Power Automate Cloud Automation with AI Builder sentiment analysis to analyze that e-mail and create a urgent customer service record in Dynamics 365 Customer Service and then alert the customer service department. The value to our customers is that instead of a person to monitor a central mailbox and analyze these emails all day the automation watches the mailbox for incoming emails, and then automatically analyzes the sentiment, and sends the results humans so that they can concentrate on fixing the relationship. AI builder and Azure and power automate literally turn all of our customers into expert data scientists while abstracting away the need to know what goes on behind the scenes. Imagine if our customers had to write the actual code to perform this level of automation and AI Analysis!? That's too much work for our customers, really all our customers want are the results and that's what we provide with AI builder and the Power Platform.
All of these tools combine to make the Microsoft Power Platform the only true HyperAutomation solution on the market today!
Here is a great reference whitepaper:
We’ve seen how the Microsoft Power Platform provides many fantastic tools to enable our customers to implement organization wide digital transformation which encompasses dozens of technologies and hundreds of use cases across different industry sectors.
At Microsoft, we want to help our customers realize Power automate at scale and enterprise strategic digital transformation and Microsoft has produced several tools to aid our customers in their automation journey.
Holistic Enterprise Automation Techniques is guidance that's designed to help you deploy the automation platform and manage the entire lifecycle of an automation project. Cloud architects, RPA developers, IT professionals, and business decision makers use these best practices, documentation, and tools to achieve their Automation adoption goals to empower our organizations to realize their strategic objectives. The end goal is organization wide digital transformation, not just tactical deployments of automations..
As you continue on your automation journey, eventually the organization can create a governance board and a team that has the ability to analyze the request for processes and present findings to the executive boards and present ideas for automation to continue to expand the use of automation in the organization.
To facilitate this, Microsoft provides the automation Coe Center of Excellence Starter Kit. This is a power app that's downloadable by our customers and has all kinds of tools for enabling our customers to track their use of automations and power apps to govern, to provide monitoring and reporting enterprise readiness.
The end goal is through the use of HEAT and the Enterprise Automation CoE ?Starter Kit, the organization develops a comprehensive plan and strategy to drive innovation and improvement and bring together like-minded people with similar business goals to share knowledge and success, while at the same time providing standards, consistency, and governance to the organization.
It's almost like if you think of the sales funnel report where some sales opportunities are at various stages in the sales process, that's what we want to provide with the Automation CoE ?starter Kit and the Governance Board. The request for automations come in to the pipeline, and some might be classified as ready to automate, some as needing optimization, some as not suitable for automation, etc.
As requests come in to the Governance Board in the pipeline format you use our tools to analyze them and then provide recommendations as to what the best process is for automation are. For example, maybe you're getting 20 to 25 requests a month for automations, and by using all of these tools and the CoE ?starter kit and Process Advisor, we can decide on a number of processes that are ready to be automated. The CoE ?can then give you metrics that can be presented to the executive team to say, “Our team ahs performed extensive analysis on the requested processes, and this is the ROI we're going to realize, whether it's hours returned to the business or freeing up employees so that they can concentrate on things that require human decision making?or data entry error reduction because we all know that data entry is very error prone. Whatever ROI metric is important to you, you can implement those with the CoE ?and the Governance Board to be sure that you can present to the executives that you're meeting those ROI objectives.
You may have heard the term “Democratizing IT or "Democratizing Automation”. What we mean by that is the Microsoft Power Platform facilitates the use of fusion teams. We enable Pro developers, citizen developers, and IT admin to all come together and form a very powerful and productive team. In the past, business users?might have an idea for an app to make their lives easier and they bring that to the Pro development team. They would try to come up with a set of requirements and then the Pro developers go off and work by themselves for a while. They come back and present their idea and what they've created to the business group. Well, that's not only a long process, but it generally adds to a lot of cyclical rewriting of the app as the Pro developers produce releases and then the business users give their feedback.
Using the Power Platform and our drag and drop and point and click tools, citizen developers can work hand in hand with Pro developers to form these fusion teams so that the citizen developers or business users bring that business subject matter expertise to the application development lifecycle. This results in a much stronger team, much more productive, much faster to market and a better product at the end because you're getting a diverse range of opinions, input, and subject expertise of how the application should run. Fusion Teams also include IT administration and they can use the central management of the power platform to provide control and overall governance across the entire development ecosystem and making sure that the correct security, compliance and usage is implemented across the organization.
This reference describes fusion teams for Power Apps, and is also applicable to Power Automate:https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-apps/guidance/fusion-dev-ebook/
In the past the idea of Citizen Developers might have made IT Admins and managers nervous, but not with the Power Platform! This screen shows that even though we have no code, low code and code first, which is professional development, all of that is governed securely by the power platform. So whether it's unified administration or checking on the CoE and best practices and usage analytics and activity logging or auditing of changes to data and data loss prevention, all of these things are securely provided by the Microsoft Power platform.
This article has presented an introduction to the power and benefits of the Microsoft Power Platform with an emphasis on Power Automate.
Automations don’t make mistakes, if an Automation and AI Builder is tasked to process an invoice, it ?will process exactly what's written on the invoice and enter that information exactly into data entry systems. If there's a mistake on the invoice, such as someone wrote ABC instead of 123, we can implement error handling to detect that and provide for those error conditions and report those errors back to the system administrators.
The fact is, if a human is sitting typing in the information from 500 invoices a day, they're going to make mistakes and that's just all there is to it. We're only human. The more we type, the more we do, the more tired we get and we start to make mistakes. Automations don't make mistakes. They don't take breaks. They don't go on vacation. They don't take lunch. They can work 24/7, which of course results in faster output and lower costs. More importantly, it frees up more time for innovation and strategy by our human workers which results in improved employee satisfaction. A lot of the FUD, (fear, uncertainty, and doubt) we hear from potential customers is that automations are going to replace employees. Our view of automation is that it augments and improves our human workforce in that we move humans out of the roles that are lacking in creative thought and challenge and into roles where they can provide that creative feedback and ideas and build relationships, things that only humans can do. ?Standardized processes, making sure that every process that's implemented across the business is according to your best practices and your organizations tried and true business processes that result in success, can also greatly improve overall business operations, efficiency, and profitability.
Hopefully this article has helped illustrate the tremendous benefits the Power Platform and Automation can provide for our customers in helping achieve strategic digital transformation to provide outstanding ?ROI and productivity for our customers in one centrally managed, governed, and monitored platform.
Thanks for reading and for some videos that showcase use cases for Power Automate, please see my You Tube channel:
Power Automate Learning Resources
LSSBB | Digital Transformation | IIM-Indore | Amateur Power Platform enthusiast | PL900 certified | Power Apps | Power BI
1 年Great introduction for any newbie wanting to learn power automate
Navigating a software-powered world.
1 年Great article John! What a powerful tool.
Principal Solution Architect | Microsoft Copilot Studio | Power CAT
1 年Very thorough overview of Power Automate and the add-ons around!
Senior Power Platform Global Black Belt at Microsoft
1 年Great introduction into a powerful tool!