Why Businesses Should Use Power Automate for Digitizing Processes

At present, organizations require digital solutions that are efficient, fast, and easy to operate. Though cloud solutions offer enhanced productivity and cost-related benefits, migrating to the cloud can create computing challenges for businesses. According to reports, several organizations adopt a hybrid on-premise-cloud approach for migrating 20 to 30% of their data or workload. But, advanced-cloud approaches perplex the application landscape and make it even more complex for business users to migrate data between legacy software and cloud applications.

Therefore, Power Automate for Desktop set out to remove these barriers and go one step further by allowing business users, teams, and departments to modernize repetitive processes they perform regularly. Organizations are often faced with the choice of whether to operate with legacy software alone or entirely migrate to the cloud infrastructure. Since neither option seems like a practical solution, Microsoft Power Automate helps to overcome inefficiencies and improve business performance.

What is Power Automate for Desktop?

Microsoft Power Automate for desktop extends Power Automate existing Robotic Process Automation features, allowing businesses of all sizes to streamline all repetitive desktop processes. Users can automate even easier and faster with Power Automate Desktop, as it provides a powerful drag-and-drop interface to record automated desktop flows, and build, create, and connect apps.

It enables teams to modernize Excel files/folders, traditional apps as well as new desktop and web applications. Power Automate for Desktop uses ‘UI Flows’ capability to interact with the machines. UI Flows help automate repetitive processes in Windows and Web applications. This functionality records and reproduces user interface actions such as clicks, input, keyboard, etc. All of this is possible in Power Automate without the need to write a single line of code. However, to design automation, systematize a manual process, and advance an existing business process flow, organizations should partner with the right Microsoft Power Automate consulting company for optimal functioning of workflows.

Key Functionalities of Microsoft Power Automate Desktop

1. Drag-and-Drop Builder – Power Automate Desktop’s visual drag-and-drop designer simplifies the practice of creating flows by making them easy to use, organize, and modify.

2. Web and Desktop Flow Recording – PA Desktop allows designing workflows logically using desktop and web recording functionality. This feature helps users to build a desktop flow by recording UI actions such as a mouse, keyboard, and other input movements in real-time.

3. Availability of 400+ Pre-Built Actions – Users can have a directory with hundreds of pre-built actions within Power Automate Desktop to get started faster. These pre-built actions help teams to connect to a range of systems, including on-premise applications, SAP, websites, and even legacy systems.

4. Automatic Error Supervision – It is one of the intelligent and extremely valuable features of Power Automate Desktop as it helps teams to identify errors in a flow by sending information automatically to the registered email or via a Flowbot message. Accordingly, teams can implement appropriate logic to proactively handle the error situations in a flow.

5. Integrated Log Analytics And Flow Monitoring – If a complex issue occurs, Power Automate’s built-in flow monitoring feature will help troubleshoot such issues. This feature can consolidate platform and application log data, as well as customized log information from VMs, GKE infrastructure, and other services inside and outside of Power Automate. Businesses can acquire greater performance, security, business insights, and troubleshooting with Log Analytics.

6. Legacy System Transformation – RPA is an important addition to Power Automate allowing businesses to integrate their on-premise apps with MS Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform environment in the cloud.

What Businesses can do with Power Automate for Desktop

While automating business operations using Power Automate offers several benefits, the key advantage is that companies can focus on crucial milestones such as service delivery, market expansion, go-to-market strategy, and other significant objectives.

From calendar updates, data scraping, and Twitter inquiries to automatic email notifications and Google Drive access, Microsoft Power Automate helps the workforce by reducing workloads. It also provides a bot framework known as Power Virtual Agents. By partnering with the right Power Automate Service provider, businesses can seek assistance from the experts to customize bots and deploy them as powerful front-end experiences driven by Power Automate workflows.

Let’s discuss some of the real-time use cases of Power Automate below:

Set Notifications

Power Automate for Desktop allows business leaders or managers to integrate with SharePoint, which in turn allows them to effortlessly convey notifications in the DATETIME functions of SharePoint. With notification flows, users can set up particular email reminders for a specific number of days and can also conduct online surveys for the workforce using Power Automate SharePoint Integration.

Calendar lists synchronized with SharePoint also provide an alert feature for teams that send automatic email notices. With Power Automate for Desktop, project supervisors can therefore form email reminders that help them remain organized and stay on top of vital processes influencing sales or other important business functions.

Integrate Multiple Data Sources

Beyond transferring data around, Power Automate Desktop can centralize automated workflows and help the workforce to connect with their business data anytime, irrespective of their location. Besides, PA for Desktop supports seamless integration with Dynamics 365, OneDrive, and SharePoint, which consecutively helps companies to enhance team collaboration and productivity. It also supports automation together with the apps that businesses use for regular, day-to-day processes.

Power Automate for Desktop lets employees connect with more than 300 data sources including SQL Server, Microsoft 365, Dropbox, SharePoint, Twitter, Facebook, OneDrive for Business, etc. Therefore, giving the workforce easy access to information from the several platforms where business typically collects and stores data. This is highly beneficial for marketing teams to conduct user sentiment analysis. For example, marketing managers can fix a trigger to capture all tweets on Twitter that mention their company name and can transfer them to an SQL database for opinion mining. This helps them to understand how the audience views their brand in the market.

Exchange Business Data

Microsoft Power Automate Desktop also enables the workforce to transfer business information by setting up workflows to exchange files from one location to another. This process can be executed using scheduled flows or instant flows. Also, users can copy files and paste them into another application. For example, when there’s a new file included in Dropbox or OneDrive for Business, an automated workflow can instantly send a copy of the file to SharePoint. This acts as a better data backup mechanism for businesses. Besides, exchanging data from one app to another using connectors modernizes the transferring process and allows for easier access to crucial data.

Integrating Common Data Model (CDM) with Power Automate Desktop helps organizations store and organize business entities. Users can set up flows to collect information from data sources and keep it in CDM, enabling users to access and leverage data. Power Automate Desktop’s business applications are massive, it allows businesses to connect to over 230 different services or any publicly available API and manage data from both cloud and on-premises sources. It’s significant to understand that these connections remain secure, and that data is protected by related policies concerning data loss.

Automate Tasks

On top of time-intensive business processes such as training, onboarding, and sales motion, businesses can build workflows in Power Automate Desktop for individual routine tasks as well. In the same way as back-end operations, streamlining these types of everyday tasks help save businesses time and efforts, allowing the workforce to focus more on efficient and productive developments. For instance, Power Automate Desktop offers a template that allows employees to receive a notification or an alert whenever they receive a high-priority email, with a notice to respond.

Wrapping Up

Microsoft took innovative action to launch Power Automate. It is an effective automation platform to organize complex processes into a coherent structure. Power Automate for Desktop reduces the burden of regular tasks from the workers’ shoulders. When it comes to tech-savvy enterprises, Power Automate for Desktop is the right tool to use.