The word 'understaffed' has arisen in many of my recent conversations, whether casual or with a client. Many industries, from consumer retail to IT, have felt the impact that low availability has created.
The unemployment rate in Australia has trended downward, but still, we seem to lack the people needed to fill the gaps in our organisations.
‘People’ is the operative word there. When you do not have enough people, there is no point wasting their time on tedious, repetitive tasks that a robot could complete. Microsoft Power Automate fills your talent gaps by becoming your robotic employee and allowing your staff to focus on high-level tasks.
Automate task management
Microsoft 365 Power Automate enables your team to save time by automating task management. You can leverage it to create workflows, assign each task a priority level, notify you when important emails come through, and much more.
- Manages email: Power Automate sorts emails by analysing the content and filing it in the correlating folder. It can also take documents attached to emails and send them to a designated SharePoint location, picked by you so that you can locate them easily later.
- Connects tasks from different business systems: Power Automate brings together apps from third-parties and from the Microsoft suite to bring your tasks together.
- Speeds up approval processes: Approvals often include back-and-forth between two people reviewing and suggesting changes to documents. Power Automate assists you with tracking approvals in the workflow and managing relevant documents.
Power Automate acts as your assistant for managing tasks and reducing the amount of time you spend maintaining workflows and searching for the documents you need to continue working.
Take repetitive tasks away from your human workforce
Every day, your workforce completes small, repetitive tasks that waste their time and cost you money in salaries paid to complete these tasks. You essentially pay someone to spend a combined hour each day sorting emails, updating databases, creating reports, etc.
Power Automate takes repetitive tasks from your human workforce by automating repetitive, rules-based processes. As a result, your staff can focus on value-adding tasks that require human thought.
Power Automate leverages trigger-based workflows, meaning that when one thing occurs, the entire workflow begins. For example, you receive an email with a document attached to it. Power Automate recognises this and carries out the workflow of filing the email and sending the document to a SharePoint folder that you designated.
The low-code design means that everyone can automate data collection, even with little experience in programming workflows, so your staff do not need to wait for the IT department to implement the solution.
Removing tedious tasks from your staff’s to-do list improves efficiency and accuracy across the organisation as you automate tasks that invite human error.
Automatic data collection
Microsoft 365 Power Automate offers a wide range of options for collecting data. With the low-code design, you can program it to collect data from different sources, schedule data collection and manage data collection processes.
It ensures consistency, making it an indispensable tool, especially if data collection is core to your business operations.
For example, you need to deliver a weekly business report to present in a recurring meeting. Each week, you work with the same person to create and deliver the report manually. When that person is not at work one day you need to engage someone else to get the report together.
Power Automate has a feature for Scheduled Flows, which completes a specific task at a particular time. So, each week when you need that report, Power Automate will deliver it to you consistently and on time without the risk of relying on a single person.
It is pertinent to note that Power Automate only completes tasks with specific instructions; it cannot complete processes that may sometimes need changes. Task automation reduces the number of errors people make, which means that you can feel confident in the accuracy of the data collected and leveraged in your business.
Access Power Automate on mobile devices
As hybrid workplaces take the lead, more people continue working anywhere and on various devices. Like many of Microsoft’s applications, you can download Power Automate to your mobile device so you are no longer restricted to your work device.
From your mobile device, you can create workflows and monitor their progress. You can access your workflows and tasks on the go, making it easy to get things done no matter where you are. Additionally, using Power Automate on your mobile device can save you time since you can access your workflows and tasks quickly and easily.
Integration with the Microsoft 365 suite
Microsoft 365 Power Automate is a great way to automate your business processes, but it can be even better when integrated with the rest of the Microsoft 365 suite, such as Outlook, SharePoint, and Teams. When integrating Power Automate with other applications in the Microsoft 365 suite, you can get more out of each application and make your business processes run more smoothly.
Microsoft 365 Power Automate also has a robust API that allows you to connect to virtually any application or data source, making it a powerful tool for automating your business processes. Some of the key integrations include:
- Microsoft Teams integration: With much information about projects and tasks landing in Microsoft Teams, you can manage Power Automate from within Microsoft Teams to better manage tasks and approvals.
- Integration with Power BI: The Power BI platform is Microsoft’s analytics tool for delivering business intelligence. When integrated with Power Automate, you can receive alerts for specific data, create tasks for Power BI and generate reports that you can save to SharePoint or email to the relevant people.
Automate business processes with VISITS
We deliver end-to-end technology deployments. Our passionate team do more than deliver the tech you need; we ensure it aligns with your business goals and drives success.
A technology project does not stop at the rollout. We only count a project as successful after your staff have adopted the platform and understand how to get the most from it.
Take a look at our Project Services page for more.