Meta Description: This article walks you through the Microsoft Power Platform; find out what it is, how it works, and why businesses need to implement it. What is the Microsoft Power Platform? Companies relying on traditional methods to analyze data find it difficult to remain competitive in the global economy that is fast changing. They need to use data to gain valuable insights to meet customer needs. Competitive companies rely on data and leveraging tools, such as Microsoft Power Platform, to automate processes, provide data-driven solutions, and enhance productivity in ways that have never been possible before. This post will walk you through the Microsoft Power Platform — what it is, how it works, its main components, and why your business needs it.
What is the Microsoft Power Platform? The Microsoft Power Platform is a collective term for Power Automate, PowerApps, and Power BI. The tool provides an easy way for companies to analyze, automate, surface, and manipulate data. In other words, it creates simple workflows across companies, thus freeing up time for other value-added tasks. Understanding How Microsoft Power Platform Works The Power Platform uses a Common Data Model (CDM) to unify a company's data and entities across all processes, enabling interoperability among applications. This model offers one customizable metadata description, simplifying functions like sales and marketing, thus creating robust reports and new applications. Data from Forrester Research Group indicates that employing this tool reduces app development time and empowers developers to build custom apps, thus reducing development costs by up to 74%. What Are the Main Components of the Microsoft Power Platform? 1. Power BI Power BI is an interactive data analytics and visualization tool focused on business intelligence. Its connectors integrate data sources like Excel, SQL Server, or Cosmos DB to collect, visualize essential data, and create analytics dashboards with reports.
Implementing a Power BI project plan from Bennhyoff Products and Services can help you share the reports with anyone in your company and access them on multiple devices. In other words, your team will be able to collaborate easily, identify your company's competitive edge, and make data-driven decisions.
2. PowerApps This product creates and uses custom applications using a low-code approach, allowing businesses to connect their data and work across mobiles and the web. Without PowerApps, businesses use the point-and-click strategy to quickly create applications without coding skills.With PowerApps, your business can be more productive with its data, enabling you to digitize and automate processes quickly. Since the apps are available across platforms, you can make remote updates and share applications among team members.
3. Power Automate Formerly known as Microsoft Flow, Power Automate is an enterprise system that allows companies to synchronize, automate, and integrate workflows between third-party apps or Microsoft services. Power Automate increases productivity and efficiency as automating workflows prevents staff from doing repetitive tasks. The tool has several pre-built app connectors that help companies collate useful data from various sources and get valuable insights. With Power Automate, you and your team can create your automation by linking applications like SharePoint, Outlook, Gmail, Asana, etc., and set up automated email triggers, push notifications, and triggers without coding knowledge.
5 Solid Reasons Why Your Organization Needs Microsoft Power Platform 1. Helps Streamline Processes Task automation is essential for a company's success as repetitive tasks take effort and time. With Microsoft Power Platform, you can enhance productivity by eliminating repetitive tasks and allowing your staff to focus on important tasks in a connected and accessible way. The most significant advantage of task automation is that your staff gets more time to do more productive tasks. That said, some of the most common routine tasks you can automate using this product include:
Document approval
Scheduled flows
Document generation
2. No-code/Low-code Development Traditionally, companies had to rely heavily on their IT staff to develop business applications. The learning curve of developing these business applications limited non-tech-savvy individuals in sales, marketing, and finance from wholly uncovering the insights in their data. The Microsoft Power Platform has a low/ no-code approach, making it easier for non-IT professionals to leverage AI, build powerful workflows, utilize rich apps, and get intelligent insights from data. Individuals get these capabilities using a simple drag-and-drop, which allows developers to build and deploy apps while the end users can use and adopt all features with little or no involvement from the IT staff. 3. Easy Integration with Existing Microsoft Tools As a business, you can use the Microsoft Power Platform independently or combine it with other software to optimize your business and increase efficiency. Since the Microsoft Power Platform is a product of Microsoft, it integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft products. This allows developers to use data from Microsoft apps such as Excel, Outlook, and SharePoint per a company's preferences and needs. The tool also has connectors that can link with other third-party services, such as websites, social media, and niche-specific ERP systems, allowing you to simplify processes and manage company data. 4. Reduces Your Dependency on Third-Party Tools With the Microsoft Power Platform, your business can consolidate automation, development, design, and powerful analytics tools in a single suit. This eliminates the need for software maintenance and licensing, thus minimizing the stress on your IT team and reducing costs. 5. Enhanced Security The compliance and security standards are higher than ever with data privacy regulations in place; companies have to be careful with how they handle data, as it can have severe consequences if a company gets it wrong. However, with the Microsoft Power Platform, you can enhance, automate, and accelerate processes involved in data security. Companies need to control who has access to data to prevent security issues. The Microsoft Power Platform uses multi-factor authentication, integrated identity management, and double encryption to prevent unauthorized access, ensuring companies stick to compliance regulations. You can also use the tool to set reminders for your staff to delete sensitive data after a specific time. Take Advantage of Microsoft Power Platform Using Bennyhoff Products and Services Many businesses are using the Microsoft Power Platform to expand on a larger scale, be more flexible, and be faster. Bennyhoff Products and Services is your trusted partner who can help you implement your inside Power BI, helping you create a blueprint of your data to help you understand the relationship between data sets. Bennyhoff Products and Services goes over your company data and reporting concept to help you implement a plan to aggregate large amounts of data to analyze it and get valuable insights that can help you make data-driven decisions. That's not all — Bennyhoff Products and Services can also help your organization implement a customized strategy for collecting data from various sources into a single database to make it easy to analyze and share with various departments and stakeholders. If you'd like to leverage the power of Microsoft Power Platform to navigate the ever-changing business landscape successfully, check out Bennyhoff Products and Services and get in touch.