Power Automate is one of Microsoft Power Platform’s new low- and no-code tools. It enables small businesses to rapidly improve business processes. Power Automate empowers employees to reconfigure outdated and resource-heavy processes. It makes it incredibly easy for small businesses to transform how they work by building more efficient digital workflows at relatively low costs. But where do you start? How do you figure out what processes you should improve? Here are eight simple business improvement projects that we think most small businesses will benefit from:
Expenses Tracker. Create a Power App that allows employees to log and track their expenses. It could enable managers to approve and manage expense reports too.
Employee Timesheet. Build a simple Power App that employees can use to record their time. Managers could approve and track time entries.
Daily Staff Whereabouts Notification. Use Power Automate to collect a list of staff members who are out of office. It can scrape the data from your HR system and notify the rest of the business by email, text or Teams message.
Email Automation. Automatically send emails to customers or prospects using Power Automate. Base your workflow on triggers, for instance, when a form is submitted or when a new lead is added to your marketing database.
Marketing Dashboard. Create a metrics dashboard in Power BI that reports marketing performance such as website traffic, conversion rates, and ROI.
Inventory Dashboard. Build a Power BI dashboard for an overview of inventory levels, including metrics like stock on hand, stock turnover and reorder points.
Event Registration. With Power Pages you can create a custom web page where users register and access event-related information.
Customer Service Chatbot. Build your own bot using Power Virtual Agents to help answer common questions. You can also signpost users to the correct information source or member of staff.
“Ultimately, it’s not going to be about man versus machine. It is going to be about man with machines.” Satya Nadella. CEO Microsoft.
Without doubt, automation technology opens the door to incredible opportunities for small businesses; streamlining processes, empowering staff and improving customer experience.
Getting into automation early will give you a first mover advantage that you will enjoy for years to come.
If you can quantify the expected returns, you should be able to see the rewards within 12-18 months or sooner. The advantages will include saving time and increasing profitability while creating a modern, more productive and engaging workplace.
Some automations are easy wins. Some of the bigger wins will require bigger projects and more investment. These should probably be reserved for when you’ve enjoyed some success with smaller, minimal risk projects.
Find more helpful tips in our guide, “Process Automations for Small to Mid-Sized Businesses”. It will help you get started with simple business improvement projects. Download your copy here.
