Question 24

Explanation

Capabilities of Power Automate

Every business in every industry has repetitive tasks that impact their organization. The process of getting a new purchase order approved might involve taking a form from your desk to get it approved. An employee might need to log into a website every morning to find daily numbers and then save those numbers into another system. Not only can repetitive processes like these be time consuming, but they can also be prone to errors. If someone mis-enters something, it could result in a missed deadline or a financial loss.

Microsoft Power Automate is about having computers manage repetitive tasks. It gives anyone with the knowledge of the business process to create a repeatable flow that when triggered, leaps into action and performs the process.

Common scenarios and capabilities of Power Automate:

• Automating repetitive tasks such as moving data from one system to another.

• Guiding a user through a process so they can complete the different stages. For example, a sales organization might want to guide sellers through the process of selling products to customers.

• Automating desktop based and website processes with robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities. For example, a user working at a bank needs to update the exchange rates daily. That user would utilize RPA to log in to the website from which they get the rates, save the exchange rates to their desktop, and then update them in a company spread sheet.

Microsoft Power Automate works by creating flows. These flows are then used to do things such as interact with different systems, guide users through a process, or make users more productive by automating daily tasks.

There are three primary types of Power Automate flows:

• Business process flows: These flows are used in model-driven apps to help people get work done. They provide a streamlined user experience that leads people through the processes their organization has defined for interactions that need to be advanced to a conclusion of some kind.

• Cloud flows: These are the most used flows. Cloud flows begin with a trigger such as receiving an email from a specific person, or a mention of your company in social media. Once triggered, they also generally include one or more actions such as creating a record in a different system or sending an approval request to someone.

• Desktop flows - These robotic process automation (RPA) flows allow you to record yourself performing actions on your desktop or within a web browser. You can then trigger a flow to perform that process for you. You can also pass data in or get data out of the process, letting you automate even "manual" business processes.

Business process flows

Business process flows are mostly used in model-driven applications to help users get work done. They typically represent a process that a user follows through to completion. They provide a streamlined user experience to provide them with the best way to advance to a conclusion of some kind.

Some common scenarios where organizations might use business process flows are:

• Sales Process: Organizations can create sales focused business process flows that guide sellers through the entire sales process ensuring that they are following the organization proven sales procedures for maximizing their chance of winning the deal.

• Case Resolution: Support centres might create service centred business process flows that guide agents through the process of creating a case, troubleshooting the case, and ultimately resolving the case.

• Event Planning: An event planning company might use a business process flows to ensure that they are not missing a step when they are planning an event. Stages in the process can exist for booking the venue, planning the meal, defining entertainment details and more.

• Selling a home: A real estate company might use a business process flow to assist their agents in getting a home ready for an open house. This might include having stages for capturing inspection details, staging the property, and coordinating with staff to ensure someone is available at the time.

In the image, we can see an example of a business process flow that's used to help guide an agent through the process of fielding an offer from a potential buyer.

During each stage, there is information that needs to be logged. Based on the information captured, the stages of the business process flow might change. For example, since the Counter Offer field is set to yes, the counter offer stage appears. If the Counter Offer field was set to no, the stage would not appear.

Cloud flows

As stated, cloud flows are the most common Power Automate flows. Cloud flows use connectors to interact with different services. Currently there are over 900 prebuilt connectors available. These connectors allow you to interact with data from other Microsoft products and data from non-Microsoft vendors such as Google, Salesforce, Oracle, and more.

There are three main types of cloud flows that you can create:

• Automated flows: These flows are automatically triggered by an event. This might be the arrival of an email from a specific person, or a mention of your company in social media. These are the most used cloud flow.

• Instant flows: These flows are started automatically and are done with the click of a button. You can automate for repetitive tasks from your Desktop or Mobile devices. For example, you might use an instant flow to instantly send a reminder to the team with the push of a button from your mobile device.

• Scheduled: These flows run on a defined schedule. They might be used to fire off daily data uploads to Microsoft SharePoint or a database.

Now that we have explored the types of cloud flows you can create, let’s explore some common scenarios where organizations might use cloud flows.

• Approvals: They can be used to automate approval processes such as invoice approval, time off requests, project sign off, and more.

• Application integration: They can be used to allow an application to interact with another application. For example, a technician in the field might use a dedicated app to request a part. A Power Automate flow could automatically order the part in the company’s inventory system.

• Improve productivity: End users might create personal Power Automate flows to automatically do things such as saving attachments received via email to specific locations like SharePoint or OneDrive for business.

More advanced examples of organizations utilizing Power Automate flows might include:

• Interfacing with a custom Application Programming Interface (API) built by a financial services company to automatically retrieve the most recent loan rates, and then calculate the rate of an individual based on their credit score.

• Create a smart data filing system whereas documents are received, and the content in them are scanned. Based on the type of document it is automatically filed in a specific location and could even be flagged as needed.

Since there are hundreds of templates available to support different scenarios, cloud flows can be easily created by anyone.

Desktop flows

Desktop flows are used to simulate user interaction with an application or a website. Desktop flows are often referred to as Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Think of it as a computer playing back tasks and steps that are otherwise done by an individual. In Power Automate, these types of flows are built using Power Automate for desktop. Desktop flows are different than cloud flows. A cloud flow performs an action based on API calls, whereas a desktop flow is like a macro as it is playing back previously recorded steps in order.

Some of the common scenarios where an organization might use desktop flows are:

• Improve employee productivity: A desktop flow can be created to replicate the actions of an end user who performs repetitive tasks. An example would be interacting with a specific website such as an interest rate site, and then entering that information into another application like an Excel Spreadsheet.

• Interacting with a legacy system: Many organizations are still using home built legacy applications that do not have modern APIs available that could be used by a cloud flow. In these instances, you can still automate the interaction with the legacy application without needing to rebuild the application from the ground up.

• Automating website interaction: Many users need to interact with specific websites daily to enter details or capture information. For security reasons, many companies don't provide access to their APIs to allow you to do direct automation with their platform. A Desktop flow is a great way to mimic the user interaction and provide an automated solution.

• Automate working with terminal emulation software: Many organizations use terminal emulation software such as Citrix to reduce hardware cost. Users log into simulated desktops. Many of these uses perform repetitive tasks. Desktop flows can be used to mimic user keystrokes and automate activity.

There are just some of the many different examples where an organization could use desktop flows. Let’s look at another example. In this example, a real estate company uses a website to see if new properties have any environmental items attached to the property. If any are found, they take a screenshot of the report and log it into Excel. In this video, we show you how a desktop flow could automate this process after a new property is entered into their property management model-driven application.

Desktop flow

Many times, a desktop flow is part of a bigger overall automation solution. For example, an event management company provides different package tiers to their clients to help them with cost savings on their event. This means that clients do not need to pay separately for each service. The event management company pays the vendors on behalf of the client. For example, when they plan a wedding, they will book the venue, hire the caterer, book the entertainment, and even sometimes hire a florist. When the event is complete, each vendor will send them an invoice for the services they provided.

That process is as follows:

• Vendor invoices are received as email attachments in a dedicated email box.

• The invoice attachments are downloaded from the email and scanned to determine what the invoice is for. Details such as the vendor, invoice date, and invoice amount are extracted from the attachment.

• Based on the services provided, each invoice is sent to a specific person to be evaluated and either approved or denied.

• Individuals receive and interact with this request in Microsoft Teams.

• Once the invoice is approved, a new invoice is created in the event management companies legacy invoice application.

• Once entered and an invoice number is generated, a confirmation email that the invoice was processed is sent back to the vendor. This includes the invoice number.

https://www.microsoft.com/videoplayer/embed/RW10CDX

The business value of Power Automate

You now have an overview of Power Automate and how it drives business value. Now we explore how TruGreen is improving customer experience by incorporating chat bots, artificial intelligence, and Microsoft Power Platform.

TruGreen embarks on an all-up digital transformation.

As part of TruGreen's commitment to providing customers with what they need to "live life outside", they teamed up with Microsoft. One step toward that goal was incorporating Microsoft Power Platform, including Power Automate, to provide proactive and predictive services to their customers.

Below you can see an infographic of their digital transformation strategy:

To provide better services, they built a new artificial intelligence enabled virtual agent bot. The virtual agent was built without writing any code. Instead, it used Power Virtual Agents to facilitate handling routine customer requests and to act based on customer intent. To expose and interact with the back-end data required, they used Power Automate.

TruGreen used some of the hundreds of connectors available for Microsoft Power Platform to connect to traditional data sources. Using these capabilities, they had their first prototype running in two days, once again without a single line of code.

In addition, they had systems that didn't have APIs available to the connectors. For these systems, they used desktop flows. With desktop flows, they were able to mimic onscreen actions that customer service associates used to perform manually via robotic process automation (RPA).

Now they have a fully functional virtual agent for interacting with their customers that can act on the customers' intent in a meaningful way. This is just the first step as they continue to drive better customer experiences and more business value using these tools.

To read more about the virtual agents TruGreen has built and what they have planned next, see the full case study here.

Now you have an overview of Power Automate and how TruGreen has used this powerful service. The demo video shows a couple of types of flows and how to get started with Power Automate yourself.

Watch this video to see a demo of Power Automate.

https://www.microsoft.com/videoplayer/embed/RE4mERh