What is Power Automate?

Power Automate (formerly called Microsoft Flow) is a tool developed by Microsoft to help individuals and organizations automate repetitive tasks or business processes.

It is used in the creation of workflows and can connect to about 300 data sources and API to perform these automation processes. The exciting part of this is the flexibility it gives end-users to develop this automation processes without having any prior development/coding skills as it is a no-code/low-code approach. This implies that almost anyone can use this platform.

Sample Scenario for using Power Automate

Every organization has a couple of repetitive processes/tasks they carry out within their organizations. 
An example is a Leave Request, where employees in the organization submit a request to go on leave at a specific period in the year.
This type of process will go through some levels of approvals, and based on the decision of the Approvers, the employee’s request to go on leave is Approved or Rejected.

A simple sample process is described below:

1. The employee submits a request with all necessary information.
2. The employee’s manager receives a notification of the submitted request.
3. The manager takes action (Approve/Reject).
4. Based on the action taken in 3 above, one of the following happens.

• If approved, the employee receives a notification of the approved request.
• If rejected, the employee receives a notification of the rejected request.

With Power Automate, with a few drag and drop (without writing any code), the above process can be automated. 

Note: this is to give an idea of what can be accomplished using Power Automate. Kindly bear in mind that as you explore this tool, you will realize it can do so much more.

Benefits of Power Automate

1. Workflow Automation:
With Power Automate, you can easily create a series of automated actions for the steps in a business process.

2. Improves productivity:
Power Automate helps you save time, become better organized, and work much more effectively.
By automating those repetitive tasks/processes that take a lot of time, employees can work much smarter and focus on other work, which could help improve overall business performance.

3. Seamless integration between various data sources:
Power Automate can connect to several data sources, which can help you can easily share your data across multiple platforms and APIs.
An example is creating a workflow that copies every attachment from your Gmail to a document library on SharePoint.

In one of my subsequent posts, I will be discussing how we can practically use Power Automate to create a simple workflow.