
Bird College
A new Managed Service partner was required, to enhance service quality, improve efficiency, and reduce costs to Bird College.
Everywhere we look these days, automation is making a mark. From Alexa and Google Home in our homes to ‘big data’ and the ‘Internet of things’, smart automation is transforming our world.
Automation of information is not as new as it may seem. Think of traffic lights – an automated way of telling people who can drive and who should wait, implemented a long time ago to allow police to focus on other things. When I was a kid airport departure boards where famous for the clacking noise they made as physical signs were flipped around to give customers the information they needed. It was not digital, but it was automation.
The Microsoft 365 Suite works with tools that make it possible for businesses of any size to automate their processes. That can be something very small – a single button to do a single step – using Power Apps, all the way up to business-wide processes delivered using Dynamics. Depending on the specific need, many of the tools you need are included in your Microsoft 365 licence, and they are all designed to interact smoothly.
One of the most common uses of Power Apps is to manage purchase invoice approval. Starting with a storage solution in SharePoint we first use Power Automate to build out an automated process based on email. When a new invoice is stored in SharePoint, email the relevant manager for approval. They can give approval by clicking a button in the email, and that can trigger further steps such as a status change, moving the file to another folder or even connecting to the finance system and loading the invoice in an approved state.
Going a step further, Power Apps lets us build a user interface, so the manager can see all their outstanding approvals in one place. We can connect action buttons to the Power Automate activities and even allow them to add commentary, perhaps set some field values like a project ID, or leave the invoice for later. With a Power Apps interface, it will be there when you come back, and you won’t have to search Outlook to find it.
When the Director wants to see the state of all the invoices, Power BI can connect to the SharePoint library and produce charts showing who has outstanding invoices, who approved what, total values, and so on. This can either be a free-standing report in the PowerBI portal or embedded into the Power Apps interface.
The strength of automated processes lies in:
In every business there are information processes that are candidates for automation. You’re looking for something where:
That feels like it covers most processes, but there are lots of things that involve creative problem solving, solution design, marketing and so on. These are really hard to automate using tools like Power Automate, Power Apps and Power BI.
It’s time to get automating. What’s your first priority?
Nick Ellis
Digital Transformation Consultant
nellis@select-technology.co.uk
www.linkedin.com/in/nickellis74
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