Increase Productivity with Microsoft Power Automate

Productivity is the great goal of business. If you’re a Windows 10 or 11 user, you have access to a tool that can easily increase your process efficiency. Here’s what you need to know about Microsoft’s Power Automate.

What is Power Automate?

Power Automate is a powerful cloud-based robotic process automation (RPA) product available to Windows 10 and 11 users. The tool brings intelligent automation to business processes by harnessing the benefits of artificial intelligence to optimise workflows and automate repetitive and time-consuming tasks.

With Power Automate’s RPA you can:

• understand bottlenecks;

• map and analyse processes;

• identify time savings opportunities;

• capture institutional knowledge;

• track important metrics;

• make data-driven decisions;

• empower users to share processes and collaborate;

• break down internal business silos moving data between departmental systems on a schedule.

Power Automate is available online, as a desktop client, or as a mobile application, and for both iOS and Android devices. Best of all, it’s included in your Microsoft cost.

How Does Power Automate Work?

In Power Automate you build time-saving workflows using a low-code or no-code experience. The software offers templates or step-by-step guidance to help create automated workflows.

The secure and scalable technology connects with other Microsoft products, of course. It can also link new and legacy systems and allows users to integrate or create their own connectors.

For example, you might set up a notification in Teams when a new Microsoft Forms response comes in, or when a Microsoft Planner task updates, or configure workflows to move documents between different SharePoint folders, or hand over Excel calculations to the AI.

Don’t trust RPA to do the work on its own? You can set up attended or unattended workflows. Attended workflows need humans to start the task or provide Yes or No feedback at workflow sequence stages.

You might use unattended for mundane, time-consuming tasks. Think of the time saved in accounting with Power Automate:

• printing an invoice hard copy;

• creating a new Outlook task to follow up on that invoice in 30 days;

• forwarding the submitted invoice to the next person in the operations chain.

Is Power Automate right for my business?

RPA can help any business save time and reduce operating costs. Plus, Power Automate doesn’t work solely in the Microsoft environment. You might connect a Customer Relationship Management tool. Then, you could automate appointment scheduling and trigger file sending from OneDrive.

The uses of RPA abound across industries. You could use Power Automate to:

• process forms;

• extract information;

• perform sentiment analysis;

• read business cards;

• classify files;

• create backups;

• convert files;

• track mailboxes;

• automate auditing;

• manage inventory levels.

How can Power Automate make my business more productive?

Here are just a few ways that you can use Power Automate to streamline repetitive tasks and improve your operational processes:

1. Automate File Management
   Use Power Automate to automatically save files to OneDrive or SharePoint, send files to specific people, and manage file versions.

2. Streamline Approvals
   Use Power Automate to create approval workflows for documents, requests, and other business processes. This can help you quickly and efficiently get the approvals you need to move forward with projects and tasks.

3. Automate Data Entry
   Use Power Automate to automatically populate data into forms, spreadsheets, and other systems. This can help reduce errors and save you time.

4. Connect Apps and Services
   Use Power Automate to connect different apps and services together, allowing you to automate data transfer and streamline workflows. For example, you could connect your email and calendar to automatically schedule meetings and send reminders.

5. Create Custom Workflows
   Use Power Automate to create custom workflows that are tailored to your specific job and workflows. This can help you automate tasks and processes that are unique to your role and responsibilities.

Create workflows using templates or design your own with what Microsoft calls “point-and-click simplicity.” By using Power Automate, you can increase your business’ productivity, and turn your attention instead to areas that grow business and boost innovation. Find out more at powerautomate.microsoft.com.