Recently, the significant benefits, results, and capabilities of the Microsoft Power Platform are causing organizations to seriously think about how they can adopt and leverage Microsoft’s digital transformation-focused suite of products.
From Microsoft Power Apps to build business applications in a low-code platform to Power Automate to accelerate and improve business process automation, companies are eager to start using the Power Platform. Whether their main objective is the democratization of software development and automation delivery through a citizen development approach or realizing greater efficiency to reduce costs, the interest is exponentially growing.
One way to implement the Microsoft Power Platform and immediately start taking advantage of all the benefits it promises is to turn to a Microsoft MVP (Most Valuable Professional) for help.
What is a Microsoft MVP?
A Microsoft MVP or Most Valuable Professional is a Microsoft technology expert with an extensive knowledge of Microsoft products and services. They bring together different platforms, products, and solutions to solve real-world business challenges and are always willing to share their knowledge with the rest of the Microsoft community.
There is a global community of over 4,000 Microsoft MVPs across 90 countries. They get early access to Microsoft products and have direct lines of communication with Microsoft’s product teams.
To become a Microsoft MVP, you must be nominated and referred into the program by another Most Valuable Professional or a Microsoft full-time employee (FTE).
How Does a Microsoft MVP Help Improve Your RPA Practice?
Microsoft MVPs are Microsoft technology experts. They can help you with any number of the solutions Microsoft offers, including all solutions in the Power Platform suite of products. They can help you build and launch business apps with Power Apps, implement robust, self-service analytics with Power BI, create chatbots with Virtual Agent, or even design compelling websites with Power Pages. Since we at Blueprint mainly focus on automation, that’s what we want to highlight here.
With RPA and intelligent automation in mind, Microsoft MVPs can help you implement Microsoft Power Automate to enable a citizen development approach to automation delivery while reducing the total cost of ownership for RPA and achieving scale.
Specifically, they can help you take advantage of the existing investments you’ve made on Microsoft products in your enterprise architecture, whether that be limited to Microsoft Office or more expansive to include other Microsoft solutions like Dynamics 365 and Azure. The extensibility of the Microsoft ecosystem with Power Automate is significant and laden with benefits. For example, Power Automate can open Excel with one click. In another RPA tool, you would have to code up to as many as 10 actions to achieve the same.
In another similar case, a Microsoft MVP was able to help an organization fill PDFs in 45 minutes with Power Automate, shaving that execution time down from 6 hours that it took a competing legacy RPA tool to complete the same actions.
Not only do Microsoft MVPs help improve, accelerate, and scale automation delivery with Power Automate, they’re also able to help you make better business decisions due to their extensive knowledge of the Microsoft Power Platform. With their expert insight, they can advise when it makes sense to automate a business process with Power Automate, or if another process modernizing strategy and solution makes more business sense. For example, they might recommend building an application with Power Apps instead of automation, saving unwanted inefficiencies and maintenance headaches down the line, and prioritizing business value delivered.
How to Find a Microsoft MVP?
To find a Microsoft MVP, Microsoft offers a directory of all their prestigious Most Valuable Professionals here that can be filtered based on keywords or even country/region.
Another option is to contract the services of a Global Services Integrator that already has Microsoft MVPs in their team or solution experts. A prime example and Blueprint partner is Hitachi Solutions that boasts more Microsoft Power Platform MVPs than any North American partner.
