Digitally transform your enterprise with Microsoft Power Automate

Debraj Ghosh, Senior Product Marketing Manager, 21. april 2020

Staying ahead of the hyperautomation curve

Gartner recently identified hyperautomation as one of the top 10 strategic emerging technology trends of 2020. According to Gartner, hyperautomaton is “end-to-end automation beyond robotic process automation (RPA) by combining complementary technologies to augment business processes.” Its emergence as a trend is tied to a combination of business and technology realities. The business reality is the need to remove siloes and seamlessly connect the data and information that an organization has across its different layers and business units. The technology reality is that solutions already exist to enable businesses to connect their data seamlessly. These two effects give rise to hyperautomation. Gartner believes that hyperautomation can be enabled by DigitalOps which they define as “a business process framework designed to simplify, measure, and manage processes across the enterprise.” DigitalOps includes RPA, business process management (BPM), workflow engines, decision management suites, process mining, low-code application platforms (LCAPs), and others. Gartner’s extensive research will help enterprise architects and innovation leaders to:

Define an automation journey
Co-create a strategy to combine DigitalOps tools
Augment business processes with AI

The Microsoft Power Platform perfectly aligns with the emerging need for hyperautomation, and Microsoft Power Automate serves as the critical automation service supporting an organization’s push for hyperautomation. In this month’s blog, we’ll take a look at how Power Automate and Power Platform can help enterprise architects define an automation strategy, leverage DigitalOps, and augment their business with AI.

Defining your automation strategy

Organizations often desire services with a broad and in-depth feature set while also streamlining and reducing the number of vendors and services they deploy. This same strategy applies to an organization’s automation needs. If one service can do three things, it’s better than three services each doing one thing. According to Gartner, automation services must go beyond traditional RPA, extending to complementary technologies to deliver end-to-end automation. An optimal automation service ideally offers multiple automation capabilities and can do each of them well. To this end, Power Automate has been well ahead of the curve. In fact, for years, Power Automate has focused on being a leading digital process automation service. With the launch of RPA capabilities, Power Automate can now automate processes across data from non-API based applications with data from programmatic API-based services whether that data resides on-premises or in the cloud. Power Automate natively integrates with Microsoft Azure, Dynamics 365, and Microsoft 365, offering seamless automation for tools offering powerful compute and cognitive services, enterprise resources planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and productivity. Beyond the Microsoft ecosystem, we have over 300 connectors that enable automation for widely used enterprise applications. Power Automate has been a robust, multi-faceted automation platform from inception and was designed for hyperautomation, well before it became a trend, as seen in Figure 1 below. When deciding on your organization’s automation strategy, make sure to try Power Automate and explore its unparalleled potential. We’re confident Power Automate will fulfill the broad set of requirements and depth that your organization needs to unlock and enjoy the benefits of hyperautomation.

Figure 1. The robust set of capabilities offered with Power Automate.

Combining Power Automate with other DigitalOps tools

The Microsoft Power Platform is a DigitalOps platform. The platform enables anyone in your organization to leverage the benefits of business intelligence and data visualization, low-code application development, seamless automation, and conversational AI as seen in Figure 2 below. These services share AI capabilities, a common database or the the common data service, and more than 300 connectors to help create powerful solutions to many business challenges. Your DigitalOps strategy can begin with the Microsoft Power Platform which is designed specifically to combine the powerful capabilities of multiple services to help create unique solutions. We demonstrated the end-to-end capability of the Power Platform at this year’s Microsoft Business Applications Summit. At the event, we shared a demo of how GSK, the global healthcare company, has fully embraced the Power Platform (0h:59m :1h 3m). This example is just one of many of how the Power Platform empowers today’s organizations with digital technologies to enhance their capabilities and reach with customers. Power Automate is a foundational component of the Power Platform and is embedded in a DigitalOps co-creation strategy. The advantage of Power Automate compared to other automation services is that by design, Power Automate is built for integration to a broader ecosystem of services that leverage automation as one element of a more expansive set of aptitudes. This means your organization has a head start on digital transformation and hyperautomation by choosing Power Automate and the Power Platform.

Figure 2. The Microsoft Power Platform. — Figure 2. The Microsoft Power Platform

Augment business processes with AI

According to Gartner’s research, AI should also be included in a hyperautomation strategy. With Power Automate and the Microsoft Power Platform, AI is a core feature. Not only does the Power Platform include AI, it offers low-code AI, enabling any user to leverage the benefits of AI in their solutions. AI Builder offers a wide variety of pre-built and customizable AI models that can be incorporated into your automated processes or applications. In Figure 3 below, we show how AI Builder’s form processing is able to read and extract relevant information from a customer invoice. This information can then be used in a flow to enhance a business process automation. Learn more about all the different models that are offered with AI Builder and begin imagining the sophistication you can add into your process automations. With AI Builder, Power Automate reinforces its focus on enabling organizations to digitally transform quickly. Additionally, it is perfectly built to support the emerging hyperautomation trend, enabling users to easily embed AI and augment any business process.

Figure 3. AI Builder forms recognizer model reading a customer invoice. The confidence level for identifying the dates is 100 percent.

Enhance your digital transformation with Power Automate

Hopefully you now have a view into how Power Automate and the Power Platform are ahead of the curve for the hyperautomation trend. Be sure to download your copy of Gartner’s report, Move Beyond RPA to Deliver Hyperautomation. Both have been designed to support hyperautomation before it became a clearly identifiable topic or trend. Learn more about Power Automate by joining our growing Power Automate community and participate in discussions, provide insights, and even influence the product roadmap. If you’re not already, begin following the Power Automate blog to get news on the latest updates. To get started on your first flows, learn how to use Power Automate from our tutorials and our video channels hosted by Power Automate engineers who will demonstrate how to create sophisticated flows within a matter of minutes. Get started with Power Automate today!