7 Ways Power Apps Drives Business Efficiency
Power Apps simplifies the process of building custom applications to solve unique business challenges. Here’s how it will help drive business efficiency.
IT professionals in a business often have tremendous pressure to innovate and modernize business processes – often with very limited resources. Power Apps and Power Automate can help alleviate common IT challenges in businesses of any size by accelerating the development of custom applications that can solve unique business challenges. It’s an easy, fast, and cost-efficient way to turn ideas into rich apps and drive business efficiency. Here are 7 benefits of Power Apps and Power Automate you may not be aware of.
What are Power Apps and Power Automate?
Power Apps is a low-code app development platform that enables you to easily build new business apps and extend or customize your existing apps. This platform makes it possible for almost anyone to build web and mobile applications without software development experience. By extending the power of app development beyond the IT department, Power Apps enables anyone from frontline workers to line-of-business employees to innovate, improve business processes, and automate repetitive or manual job functions.
Power Automate is a workflow automation application that streamlines the creation of everything from simple push notifications to complex business processes with defined steps and stages. It’s a trigger-based system that allows employees to create and automate workflows and tasks across multiple applications and services without help from developers.
You can create workflows for repetitive or manual tasks, or scale existing processes efficiently. For example, a common business form might need approval from three different stakeholders before it’s complete. Within your app, you can use Power Automate to trigger a reminder email to the three stakeholders when the form is submitted.
7 Benefits of Power Apps & Power Automate
1. Reduce IT backlog and quickly respond to business needs
IT teams can quickly respond to solution requests by developing applications with Power Apps. The high-productivity, low-code development platform equips IT professionals with tools to rapidly build innovative web and mobile applications that meet the unique, evolving needs of your business. In addition, the enterprise-grade security and built-in governance in Power Apps accelerates organization-wide adoption without creating compliance or security concerns. Productivity increases, while the app development pipeline decreases.
2. Empower entire teams to solve challenges
Streamlining business processes no longer rests solely in the hands of IT professionals. With Power Apps, you’ll accelerate the democratization of app development and empower employees to create their own solutions quickly. That means almost anyone in your business can start using Power Apps to begin exploring how low-code or no-code app development can solve their business challenges. By empowering employees to solve their own problems, IT teams are freed up to focus on more strategic organizational initiatives.
3. Do more within budget, time, and resource constraints
Organizations have limited resources to spend on applications, especially with costly traditional development methods. Even when a use case clearly generates an ROI, it might not rise to the level of urgency. If you can make the development process cheaper, faster, and less labor intensive, many more scenarios become feasible. When app development becomes much more efficient, even niche use cases can become worthwhile and extremely valuable
4. Automate manual business processes
Both Power Apps and Power Automate are designed to work closely with the core apps you already use, so you can easily increase productivity by automating mundane, time-consuming business processes into streamlined workflows. Businesses can use Power Automate to digitize paper-based processes and alleviate the need for manual data entry. Here’s an example of how you could easily create an expense reporting application. Using Power Apps, you’d create a simple app that allows an employee to create and submit an expense report. Then you’d use Power Automate to trigger an email to the appropriate manager for approval. The manager would be notified to approve, reject, or ask for more information. Any of those responses would trigger another email through Power Automate to notify the employee of the expense report status. This low-code application could be built with no coding experience.
5. Work across platforms
Most workers want to use applications anywhere, on any device. Building these types of multi-device, cross-platform experiences from scratch can be a challenge, but the rewards can be significant. If you can translate your business processes into engaging web and mobile experiences, letting users access information the way they want, you’ll drive both adoption and value. With Power Apps, you can build both web and mobile apps fast using a point-and-click approach to design. You can then easily publish those apps to the web, iOS, Android, and Windows 10. Power Apps is designed to be deeply interoperable with Dynamics 365, Power BI, and Office 365.
6. Maintain security and control
The solutions you create in Power Apps are secure because they exist within the compliant Microsoft environment. Your Power Apps business data is stored either in the Common Data Service, Microsoft’s data platform, or in other online and on-premises data sources, such as SharePoint, Excel, Office 365, Dynamics 365, and SQL Server. User identities are managed through Azure Active Directory using a role-based security model, making it easy to control user access to databases. Environments can be incorporated to create boundaries for different security needs. This makes it easy to ensure compliance by grouping apps with similar security requirements. Within Azure Active Directory, you can access full audit logs, usage analytics, data loss prevention, and security and data management. To reduce the need for shadow IT, Azure Active Directory provides the means to enable single sign-on (SSO) to thousands of SaaS applications.
7. Manage technology debt
Companies need to make the most out of the technology they have while reducing the complexity of managing existing systems, some of which may not be built for an agile world. “Technology debt” is a way of thinking about this aging technology, as well as legacy applications, and how IT leaders face almost constant (and often costly) trade-offs between maintenance and new development.
In Summary
Power Apps and Power Automate allow people of varying skill levels to develop custom business applications and streamline workflows and processes. Empower employees to solve their own business problems with intuitive visual tools that don’t require code, while enabling professional developers to focus on complex challenges and evolving business needs by building powerful, custom applications in less time.
Have questions or want to learn more about how Power Apps can transform your business and IT strategy? Contact the Kwixand team for a free consultation. As Power App partners based out of Vancouver, Canada, the team at Kwixand Solutions helps businesses across North America digitally transform and achieve their business goals.
