Microsoft 365 comes with many powerful tools to make people’s work lives better. Power BI gives us insights into data, Outlook makes emails, meetings, and appointments more manageable, and Excel is the defacto tool for complex spreadsheets and other calculations. However, less-known is the power of Microsoft 365 to automate a manual process. Indeed, Power Automate is a fantastic platform for automating all kinds of manual processes, both complex and straightforward.

If you find yourself doing many things manually in your business, here’s what you need to know about Power Automate and how it can help you and your company!

Power Automate: Automate Manual Process Easily

Power Automate can help automate a manual process with a few clicks. One of the impressive aspects of Power Automate is that it can automate new processes and legacy ones.

New processes are ones that Power Automate has support for built-in. An example of this is getting a push notification when you get an email from your boss (one of the many templates for Power Automate). This process connects with your Office 365 Exchange account and waits for an email to arrive. Once it does, it sends a push notification to the Power Automate app on your phone.

This set of actions is a “new process” because it contains components that Power Automate recognizes.

However, there’s also support for “legacy automation” or “RPA (Robotic Process Automation).” Using the desktop application, you can design a custom flow that involves any application and any connector. You can also leverage the power of AI to automate tasks that require some judgment (like, perhaps, finding a phone number from a data screen).

An example of this would be an order that comes in through a website that you need to enter into a legacy desktop accounting system. You could use RPA to get the order info, open the legacy system, copy the relevant data, and save it. No manual typing required!

Power Automate Can Sometimes Be More Efficient Than a Custom Program

Depending on what type of process you want to automate, you may be considering building custom software to do that. For the example above, you might consider creating a web scraper that goes through the online order system, finds all new orders, and then enters them into the legacy system’s database.

However, because Power Automate is so easy to use, it’s rarely more effective or cost-efficient to build this solution from scratch. Instead, leveraging the power of Microsoft to create these solutions is typically the best way to go! Plus, the fact that Power Automate requires little-to-no coding means anyone can use it! Even those who are non-technical can automate their most time-consuming manual processes!

Automation Is Often the Key To Productivity and Morale

Redundancy often reduces morale. Nobody likes doing the same thing over and over again. It quickly becomes boring, which can lead to significant employee turnover.

Instead of being repetitive, consider how to automate manual process by using Power Automate. It’s a fantastic tool that is intuitive and straightforward.

If you’re looking to automate some of your company’s manual processes, please contact us! We’d love to hear from you! We can improve your company’s morale and save your business some money!