A survey of knowledge workers in the United States found that 44% of employees at SMBs do not feel highly efficient at work. It makes sense when you consider how much of the average workday is spent performing rote tasks.
When one of your employees is entering data into one system and moving it to another, they’re using time that could be better spent on more role-specific tasks. The same goes for managing invoices and other basic documents: Every minute spent editing an invoice is a minute not spent actually fulfilling it.
Wasted time isn’t the only negative side effect of manual office tasks. A study by Harvard Business Review found that workers toggled between applications an average of 1,200 times per day, and that each switch was cognitively taxing. More mental strain inevitably leads to more mistakes—and if you’ve ever written a work email at 5 p.m. and noticed many more typos than usual, that shouldn’t be surprising.
When that mental strain is repeated on a daily basis, the long-term effects can be disastrous. According to the University of Wolverhampton, repetitive work can not only make workers bored, but depressed. Needless to say, depression generally does not make people more productive!
So, how can your company curb the ill effects of tedious busy work? Using technology to automate time-consuming, error-prone, and depression-inducing tasks can go a long way—and Power Automate, which is part of Microsoft Power Platform, allows you to do just that.
Use Power Automation to quickly and easily build automated workflows between your apps and services.
How Power Automate Reduces the Strain of Repetitive Tasks
When it comes to reducing manual work, Power Automate is the crown jewel of Power Platform.
Here are some examples of how it works:
- Automate repetitive tasks. Let’s say you want to collect customer feedback and use it to improve your processes. In the past, someone would have had to collect that feedback, enter it into a database, and then sift to find any useful takeaways. But with Power Automate, that feedback could be automatically collected and aggregated into a central repository—where Power BI could help you analyze it in short order.
- Trigger-based workflows. On the sales side, you could set up a workflow that automatically takes information about new leads captured from your website form, updates your sales database, and notifies your reps to follow up.
- Automated data entry. Power Automate can benefit your finance team, as well. If the idea of reading monthly statement PDFs and manually inputting the data into accounting software fills them with dread, they could instead use Desktop Flows to automatically reconcile them. Not only will it reduce the process from several hours to a matter of minutes, it’ll also be more accurate, too. And then your team will be free to focus on more complex (and interesting!) financial analyses. Data entry, file transfers, and routine communications can all be handled by Power Automate.
- Streamlined approvals. Approvals processes for things like expenses and leave requests can be made far more efficient.
- Automated and multichannel notifications. Notifications can automatically alert team members and stakeholders about project updates, deadlines, and status changes across channels, including email and SMS.
Power Automate then helps you scale automation across the organization and provides visibility for greater security and governance.
How AI is Built into Power Automate
Power Automate now includes AI-powered tools to help you work even faster. AI features include:
- AI authoring, which allows you to create, edit and extend process automation with natural language in Copilot.
- AI insights, which can uncover new automation opportunities for you within Power Automate.
- AI processing, which applies built-in AI models to automate repetitive work on documents.
- AI generation, which allows you to turn your raw data into engaging content with the help of GPT.
A Powerful Suite of Productivity Tools
Combined with the other tools in Power Platform, everyone in your organization could become more productive. Power Platform includes:
- Power Apps, a platform for building custom apps for your business with little-to-no coding knowledge required.
- Power BI, a business analytics tool that lets you visualize data and share useful insights across your organization and in your app or website.
- Power Virtual Agents, a tool for creating AI-powered chatbots that can interact with customers across channels. And as with Power Apps, you don’t need to know how to code.
These tools are built to work together. The Microsoft Dataverse provides a unified data model that ensures consistent, easily exchanged data, which means that you can build a Power App that uses insights from Power BI or a Virtual Agent that can trigger an automated workflow to get started on a customer service ticket.
Power Platform also integrates smoothly with other services like Dynamics 365, SharePoint, Office 365, and even third-party applications. And if your company uses specialized or proprietary systems for specific business needs, Power Platform also supports custom API connections that allow for a healthy, user-friendly software ecosystem to flourish.
Start Automating with a True Implementation Partner
If you’re not sure how to get started with Power Platform and Power Automate, Enavate can help. As a top-tier Microsoft Partner, we know how to implement and optimize Power Platform to best serve your business and ensure widespread adoption. To learn more, contact us today.
