Microsoft Power Platform is a collection of low code tools that can be used to drive digitisation and automation within your organisation. Almost all the typical Office and Microsoft 365 SKU’s gives users access to these powerful features.
The platform consists of the following components:
· Power BI for analytics
· Power Apps for app development
· Power Automate for workflow automation
· Power Virtual Agents for bot development
These features offer a great foundation for tactical digital transformation. Here are 5 must-have Power Platform based solutions any organisation should consider:
1. Employee Onboarding
Solutions assisting human resources are common in Power Platform. Especially generic processes such a onboarding new employees; a challenge any growing business faces. These solution can be extended to manage employees changing roles or supporting employee departure processes.
Using this as the foundation, First Digital also assisted organisations with adding talent management features to the process, offering a simple, effective and complete Joiner, Mover, Leaver (JML) solution. The process automatically posts on social channels such as LinkedIn to advertise the new position, receives candidate CV’s, setting up the interview arrangements, right through to onboarding new employees into the organization. Other features includes equipment approval and provisioning of infrastructure, such as creating a user account, for the new starter.
2. Leave Request Approval
For small to medium sized organisations, adopting a complete human resources solution might be unaffordable, and an overkill. Relying on paper or email to execute a typical leave approval process is there for common. Power Apps offers various free templates for you to use and customize, Leave Request is one of them.
If an existing human resources system is available, Power Apps can integrate with the likes of Sage or SAP HR, for instance, to retrieve and update leave balances. Other sources of data is supported via custom Power Apps connectors.
3. Travel Claim Request
A common found in most organisations. Microsoft makes a Power App template available that can be customized as required, including your own branding, or modifying the approval process to suit your needs.
4. General Document Approval
Most organizations require certain documents to be approved. Using Microsoft Teams’s general approval process, documents can be sent for approval to any other user. The organization will benefit from auditable and trackable approval processes for documents, while user remain within the familiar interface of Teams.
Documents (and any other approval artifacts) are securely stored, versioned and managed within the Office 365 environment to comply to any regulatory or security policy the organization applied to their environment.
Microsoft Teams’ approval subsystem does have certain daily volume limits, which is important to consider in an enterprise environment.
5. Helpdesk & incident ticket Register
First Digital’s ticket register solution can help organisations track any issue or request from electronic submission to resolution. Built on Power Apps, and available directly in the Teams client, a central dashboard for organizing and prioritizing requests are available. The ability to configure SLA based escalation is supported by the solution.
Many organisations have rolled out Office or Microsoft 365, but are only taking advantage of a small number of the available features. Mainly Outlook or Teams. The Power Platform is often overlooked as a great feature of Office 365, or digitising and automating various processes within an organisation.
Please contact First Digital for any further information or assistance on making the most of your Office 365 investment.
Kevin Tshiowa
SharePoint Consultant : Digital Workplace