Boost efficiency

Record and visualize end-to-end processes using process and task mining with process advisor. It takes the guesswork out of what to automate by providing guided recommendations for creating flows.

Enhance workflows with AI

Make your automations even smarter using AI Builder. Quickly process forms using document automation, plus process approvals, detect images and text, or create with prebuilt models.

What is Power Automate and the value it brings to you

Do you find yourself regularly downloading email attachments and then uploading the file to the database? Power Automate can help. Does the process of getting a new purchase order approved involve you taking a form from desk to get sign off? Power Automate can help. Do you have to log into a website every morning, find the daily numbers, and then save those into another system? Power Automate can help.

Power Automate is all about having computers manage repetitive tasks. Power Automate allows anyone with knowledge of the business process to create a repeatable flow that when triggered, leaps into action and performs the process.

Common scenarios and capabilities of Power Automate:

• Automating of repetitive tasks like moving data from one system to another
• Guiding a user through a process so they can complete the different stages
• Connecting to external data sources via one of the hundreds of connectors or directly via an API
• Automating desktop based and website processes with robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities

Example: a purchase order approval

Approvals are a great process to build in Power Automate. They are often defined yet manual. Check out the following scenario for an example:

A user starts the process by going into a Power Apps app and creating a purchase order request. Once they submit the request, the information is sent to a Power Automate flow.

The flow can be built to evaluate the request and then route the request based on criteria such as submitting user and request amount. The first action could be to send the request to the user’s manager. The manager could be automatically retrieved from Azure AD, avoiding prompting for duplicate information.

Here is the starting point of the flow:

After the manager receives the approval and approves, the flow can then provide conditional logic. Typically, this might be something like: if the purchase order request is greater than $10,000, send it to VP; if not, then automatically approve the purchase order.

Here is an example of what this flow may look like.

As you can see, even the business process has many decision points. Your flow easily handles the decisions without you writing any code.

Work with your data where it lives

When building an app, access to your data is very important. Power Automate offers you choices; through over 600 connectors you can easily connect to data and services across the web and even on-premises. Some common data sources include:

• Microsoft Dataverse
• Salesforce
• Dynamics 365
• Google Drive
• Office 365

You don’t have to choose just one data source either. Microsoft Power Platform easily supports multiple data connections allowing you to bring data together from many platforms into a single automation.

Finally, if your data isn’t retrievable by one of the 600 plus connectors, then Power Automate also allows you to create custom connectors, letting you talk to any data source via a swagger file.

The three types of flows you can create with Power Automate

Power Automate works by creating flows, of which there are three types:

• Cloud flows – These are flows that you build with a trigger and then one or more actions. There are a multitude of triggers and actions available such as the arrival of an email from a specific person, or a mention of your company in social media, thanks to the existing connectors. You’ll see these as My flows and Team flows in Power Automate. The only difference between a My flow and a Team flow is ownership. With a My flow you’re the sole owner, while a Team flow has more than one owner.
• Business process flows – These flows are built to augment the experience when using Model-driven apps and Microsoft Dataverse. Use these to create a guided experience in your Model-driven apps.
• Desktop flows – These robotic process automation (RPA) flows allow you to record yourself performing actions on your desktop or within a web browser. You can then trigger a flow to perform that process for you. You can also pass data in or get data out of the process, letting you automate even “manual” business processes.

Add artificial intelligence to your flow without writing code

Before Microsoft Power Platform, adding functionality such as image or text processing required an advanced computer or coding knowledge. There was code to write, data models to design and train, and a lot of complicated logic. Microsoft Power Platform, however, has “democratized” artificial intelligence by providing a wizard-based interface for building and training your model. This unlocks the power of Azure Machine Learning and Cognitive services without writing a single line of code.