Microsoft Business Applications Virtual Launch Event Recap for Power Automate

We are excited to wrap up another exciting event, where we announced what’s upcoming in Microsoft Power Platform 2021 release wave 1 for Robotics Process Automate in Power Automate. Below is a summary of the Power Automate updates covered in this event. You can read about all announcements in the launch event blog post and watch this event on-demand here.

Automate tasks with Power Automate Desktop for Windows 10—no additional cost.

Power Automate Desktop is now available to Windows 10 users at no additional cost. Windows 10 users can harness the power of low-code RPA by downloading Power Automate Desktop, and it will be included in Windows Insider Preview builds in the coming weeks. Read more about the capabilities in this blog.

Recognized as a leader by Forrester and visionary by Gartner in Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

Over the past year, Microsoft Power Automate doubled down on its investments in the robotic process automation (RPA) space, acquiring Softomotive, announcing the general availability of Microsoft Power Automate Desktop, and making Power Automate Desktop available to Windows 10 users at no additional cost.

These investments are paying off and Microsoft Power Automate has been recognized as a Leader in The Forrester Wave™: Robotic Process Automation, Q1 2021.

This is building upon the momentum where Microsoft was named a Visionary for its Power Automate solution in the 2020 Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation

Disclaimer: This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

Real world customer stories

There are over 350,000 organizations using Power Automate each month to automate their processes. In this event we are highlighting 2 customers on how they are using Robotics Process Automation in Power Automate to solve their business needs.

First, we look at how The Coca-Cola Company is leveraging Power Platform. Read more about their use-case in this blog and watch the video as well.

Second, we look at how Coca-Cola UNITED is streamlining their order management process for replacing the freestyle cartridges in the beverage vending machines using RPA, AI Builder and many other components of Power Automate.

This was a complex 11-step process that required a dedicated customer relationship management (CRM) agent to take the order and manually push it through the system, scanning the invoice and walking it to the Accounts Payable department. Supplier, customer, and material numbers had to be cross-referenced with internal numbers in Coca Cola United’s SAP instance, and the order then had to be created in the supplier’s system. Purchase orders (POs) for the cartridges and invoices were exchanged by email.

figure manual_freestyle_cartridge_replacement_before_rpa

Figure: Manual Freestyle cartridge replacement before Power Automate RPA

Read the case study and watch the on-demand video.

Coca Cola United streamlines order management using Power Automate RPA

Enhanced governance for IT pros and RPA COE’s

A key aspect to driving accelerated innovation thru low code is great collaboration between the business and IT. We are announcing a host of new capabilities around Detailed in this deep dive post, new governance capabilities enable fine-grained Data Loss Prevention, including tenant isolation, ability to control data access at connector action level, custom connector enhancements, and data exfiltration controls. Read more about these new and enhanced manageability and governance capabilities.

We have shared our learnings from customers to help them better manage the lifecycle of an automation project. Whether you are an automation or RPA or professional developer looking to develop automation solutions or Automation COE (Center of Excellence) looking to enable and govern automation/ RPA adoption at scale, these resources are for you. Read more about HEAT – Holistic Enterprise Automation Techniques for RPA and more

Start automating today!

We hope you are excited by the announcements at the Microsoft Business Applications Launch Event, and we look forward to what you will be automating with Power Automate.