One of the conversations we have with our customers is we have heard a bit about the Power Platform, but we do not know what it can do or the types of challenges it can solve. 

This article aims to bridge that gap giving 5 examples of the types of common challenges organisations face that can be solved with the Power Platform. 

Challenge One: Forms – Vacancy Request Form

As organizations look to boost productivity, one of the key areas is to replace paper-based forms or Word templates with an electronic form built on the Power Platform. 

Power Apps is the tool for the job here! 

With Power Apps a new application can be created and added to your Human Resources department site which allows a user to fill in their vacancy request information completing all the information about the role, job description, salary range, who it will be reporting to etc. 

Once they have completed the form, they hit submit and it is then picked up and taken through your vacancy request process. It might be that your HR team can an email or a notification in Microsoft Teams stating that the request has been received. 

The request can then go through an approval process based on which department it is for. The manager of that department can then approve or reject the job request before it is then picked up by the HR team to speak to recruitment agencies. 

Using Microsoft 365, the state of the request and details of it can be captured in Microsoft SharePoint so that your team can keep track of what needs to be done next. 

Challenge Two: Workflow – Contract Expiry Reminders 

Remembering that something needs to be renewed or reviewed is a constant challenge. Particularly when people change jobs and move to different roles. 

One of the examples we have helped with is reminding Operations Managers or Contract Managers when contracts are expiring and need to be renewed. 

Using SharePoint and Power Automate, it is possible to have an expiry date held against a document. The workflow will execute when the expiry date is within 90 days and send an email to the contract management team to start the renewal process. 

The benefit to implementing this type of process is that it saves the team a few hours a month. It provides a central repository for contracts and enables you to manage the previous contracts and includes functionality such as searching for information in contracts. 

 Challenge Three: Management Information – Organisation / Department KPIs 

Management Information is essential for the smooth running of an organisation. Being able to quickly spot issues due to a trend enables a business to react quickly before it becomes an issue. 

A great example of a dashboard is for the Sales and Marketing Team. The dashboard could show the number of leads generated that month, number of open opportunities, number of won opportunities, number of lost opportunities. 

The great thing with Power BI is that you can also integrate it into your Microsoft 365 platform, for example make it available in SharePoint and Teams so that everyone is aware of the situation regardless of where they go to get their information. 

Challenge Four: Self Service with Chatbots 

Chatbots enable your users to have a conversation to get something done. The Chatbot guides the user through a process to achieve a result. For example, it might be that they are based in Sales and need to see whether there is stock of a particular product. A chat bot hosted within Teams would allow the person to ask the chatbot about stock levels for a particular product. 

The user does not have to leave their Microsoft Teams interface and open another application, they can act quickly if they are on the phone. Additionally, Chatbots need not be a one trick pony and multiple capabilities can be rolled into one chat bot to enable self-service for everything sales and marketing. 

At iThink 365 our Sales Team uses a Chat bot to create proposals. This makes sure that the latest version of the proposal is created and fills out all the information about the proposal, adding it to the template without the sales-person remembering how to do it. A task which took 15-20 mins now takes less a minute. 

Other examples of chat bots are holiday request chat bots, or help desk bots which are able to answer frequently asked questions. 

Challenge Five: Artificial Intelligence and Power Automate – Detecting and Extracting Information from Invoices 

The Power Platform has some advanced capabilities including Artificial Intelligence using Machine Learning. AI Builder is the feature, and it allows the creation of machine learning models to examine document content and automatically extract information from those documents. 

A classic use case is invoice processing, imagine an organisation that receives 100s of invoices each month and they need to be categorised and information such as supplier name, invoice number, invoice date, and amount need to be entered into a financial system. 

Research done a few years ago estimated that the average cost of processing an invoice is £10 per invoice. If your organisation is processing a hundred a month then that is £12000 a year! 

Interested to find how the Power Platform could help your organisation? Get in touch by contacting us here.

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