Putting it all together

Problems of a Data-driven world

Knowing we live in a data-driven world, it can be difficult, especially for small businesses to catch up and take advantage of the opportunities that data presents. Especially with them lacking the necessary infrastructure to research, experiment, explore and improve how they operate - there is a need for a timely solution to empower them to be able to achieve more.

Because although fundamentally we know that sales data, customer data and employee data should be where we base our decisions on, it's difficult even after recognising that to determine where we can start and how to actually act upon it.

The Power Platform as a Solution

It's for this reason the Power Platform exists, with its four products at the forefront to provide businesses with the power to utilise the data they have access to. Now they can easily create and deploy applications at scale with Power Apps, automate recurring tasks with Power Automate and process, analyse and visualise data using Power BI. With every bump and turn in the road when dealing with data, Microsoft has built the Power Platform to encompass every available need a business may have.

A business example

A flawed system

Consider a business that lends IT equipment out to their employees for general use. Operating with a more "traditional approach", the process to borrow equipment is inefficient and flawed:

1. Physically visit the IT office

2. Ask if they have the equipment that you're after

3. The IT Staff then need to stop whatever they're doing in order to check on the status of that equipment and see if there are any available

4. If it isn't there, you'll have to put down your name and the equipment that you're after so that you can be contacted once it is available (so maybe you'll have to go there several times until it is returned and you can finally borrow it)

5. Sometimes even, the people who have the equipment forget to return it or hold on to it for longer than expected - so the IT Staff will need to constantly chase up those people and frequently remind them to return the equipment

You can see how troublesome this process is as it takes time away from both parties and there's a sense of frustration that can build up simply because of how little power they have due to the nature of the system. It's also noteworthy that the IT Staff do have access to this information, but always have to manually look this up and then transmit it to the person upon request every time someone asks whether they can borrow something - so there is an opportunity for Automation there.

Using the Power Platform

So what can we use the Power Platform to do in order to improve this system?

Firstly, we can look at Power Apps - where we can easily build an application without much trouble and configure it to list all the important information about the equipment storage. This application can show the users (IT Staff and anyone who is interested in borrowing some equipment):

• What equipment options does the office have available

• The status of the equipment that they may be after

• Instructions on how to use the equipment that they're interested in/using at the time

This makes it a lot easier on the IT Staff, taking away the need to continually check the system every time someone has a query, and for any employees who may want to borrow something, they don't need to nag the IT Staff and take time away from their work. Moreover, the process to pick things up from the office just became a lot more streamlined where you now don't need to regularly check in to see if the equipment is there, but instead you can just be notified on your device when it is ready for you to come in.

Power Automate then has a place here for automatically triggering a flow whenever the equipment is ready to send a email notification to the next person in the queue who is interested. Moreover, IT Staff can set up regular reminders to the person who borrowed it to notify them when they need to return the items without having to write up a new email whenever they remember. This way the system takes care of itself and the Staff can continue working on other matters.

Finally, Power BI has the ability to take the data from this system and highlight areas of the system that may need more attention. Having metrics such as which equipment is more popular and used more often can help the IT Staff identify if there is a need to order more stock of that equipment to compensate for the demand. As well as this, perhaps a particular department or user is constantly needing this equipment, so perhaps it would be wise to order a dedicated set of that equipment for them.

Having all this in play can drastically improve the performance of the employees and the IT personnel by transforming the system to use the data that is available already.