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Are You Using Microsoft Products? 6 Reasons Why Power Automate Is Right for You

3 min read
Dec 12, 2022 9:00:00 AM

There are many reasons why organizations are eagerly migrating their RPA estates from expensive and complex legacy RPA tools onto Microsoft Power Automate.

From significant cost savings to powerful capabilities, arguably the most compelling reason to switch to Power Automate is to fully leverage the native integrations with the Microsoft ecosystem (Outlook, Teams, Excel, SharePoint, Power BI, etc.) that most companies are already using.

The benefits of migrating to Microsoft Power Automate extend far beyond making automation more seamless with the rest of Microsoft’s tech stack. These are 6 reasons why Power Automate might be right for you if you’re already using Microsoft products like Office, Azure, or the Power Platform.

#1 - Unlock the potential of the Power Platform to expand automation past RPA

Power Automate is one of the marquee products from the family of low-code solutions that make up the Power Platform. With Power Automate at the core, organizations can broaden process automation to a wider range of the business.

For example, Power Automate can easily be leveraged to take full advantage of the Dataverse as its data source, intelligent automated virtual agents can be built with Power Virtual Agent, and business applications can be delivered with Power Apps. Finally, reporting can be consolidated and provided across all fronts with Power BI.

#2 - Enable a Citizen Development approach to automation

Out of the box, Power Automate comes with a user interface that everyone who’s ever used a Microsoft solution is familiar with. The comfort, intuitiveness, and familiarity with a known UI accelerates the learning curve and opens the door for business folks to easily design and deliver automations on a user-friendly drag-and-drop canvas.

Power Automate also boasts features that come natively with Office and Windows so the average business user can effortlessly automate their own daily activities, further promoting scale on the heels of a truly empowered citizen development approach.

#3 - Add value on existing Microsoft infrastructure

Considering that many automation practices are yet to recover their original investments on infrastructure and development, Power Automate is an opportunity to avoid those infrastructure costs right from the beginning.

The majority of organizations around the world already have existing Microsoft infrastructure as part of their enterprise architecture. Whether it’s just Microsoft Office being used or Azure for cloud computing, Power Automate presents the perfect opportunity to add value to those existing investments.

For example, Power Automate offers direct and native integration with over 25 Azure services that don’t incur any additional costs. The native integration with those services is also what enables real end-to-end automation. Automation opportunities that involve the Office suite of products with services like Azure Active Directory make automation delivery simply easier and quicker to get into production, facilitating scale while accelerating automation deployment.

The same can be said for companies already using Dynamics and Microsoft Teams. Automation practices can rapidly build and deliver automations interacting with those solutions to add value to previous investments and existing architecture.

#4 - Increased security benefits

From a security perspective, Power Automate makes an organization and their automation practice more secure. Automated processes that interact with Azure Active Directory or other Microsoft security solutions enable IT teams to easily control permissions at the data and application levels which also helps ease the burden on support and maintenance.

“From a security and perspective, the biggest piece is Azure AD. We benefit from all the security built into the Microsoft stack, including all of the workflows and apps that we create.” – CRM Head, Forrester Total Economic Impact of Power Automate, 2020 

In addition, automations built using the Microsoft Common Data Service are automatically GDPR-compliant for organizations with any kind of operations in the European Union.

#5 - Centralize data with Power BI

A common challenge for automation practitioners is fully understanding and monitoring the performance of their automations. This is particularly true for organizations without a federated governance system for automation where different business units or areas of the company are running parallel programs or have multiple RPA tools in use.

Microsoft Power Automate alleviates the challenges that disparate automation practices pose with the ability to centralize all data with Power BI (Business Intelligence). The power to also build custom dashboards using multiple datasets that cater to exactly what you want to see and track is an added plus on the way to maximizing returns.

#6 - Make better decisions on when to automate and when not to

To leverage all the benefits that automation promises, organizations sometimes tend to automate whatever they can get their hands on by default. In some cases, however, automation might not be the best option. Understanding when to automate and when to execute on other process modernization options can mitigate potential maintenance headaches down the road.

RPA Process Assessment and Candidate Checklist

When you adopt Microsoft Power Automate and open the door to the rest of the Power Platform, you can make better decisions on when automation makes sense and when it doesn’t. For example, it might be better to build an app instead with Power Apps than to automate.

Considering Microsoft’s enterprise footprint and the benefits organizations can realize by adopting Power Automate, it’s no wonder there is so much interest from RPA programs looking to make the switch, steadily positioning Microsoft to become the all-out leader in the automation space.