Your employees want better apps. Not just the Gen Zers
The big tech companies behind the most popular apps are obsessive about their usability KPIs; if people don't use their apps, they have no right to exist and no turnover. Your employees are now used to the user experience of these consumer apps. They are used to working on the go with optimized and intuitive user interfaces, instead of having to memorize actions or follow written instructions. They prefer not to use apps that don't work well.
Make sure it doesn't become a frustration
But in their work, they have no choice: they have to record their expenses, kilometers or days off, no matter what. It's your job to help them do that. Because when these “daily chores” become a frustration and a source of negative feelings, this is reflected in the motivation of your people and thus in your productivity. Not to mention the wasted time. Recruiting people is difficult, so you're always looking for ways to become more efficient, reduce workload and reduce costs. Smart solutions for common actions can have an enormous impact in this regard.
But then you need the tools to develop them quickly, without affecting the stability of the underlying systems, such as your ERP. And that's where Microsoft Power Platform proves its worth time and time again.
What is Microsoft Power Platform?
Microsoft Power Platform is a collection of low-code tools from Microsoft for rapid application development, data analysis, automation, and integration. The platform consists of Power BI (data analysis and visualization), Power Apps (app development), Power Automate (workflow automation) and Power Virtual Agents (chatbots). Power Platform is part of the Microsoft 365 platform. So you can roll it out at a limited additional cost.
Low-code means that you can develop apps and workflows without starting an IT project. This makes you faster and more agile and saves a lot of money. Because the focus is on the solution and not on the technology underneath it, as a developer, you also need less IT knowledge. As a result, non-IT people (the so-called citizen developers) build solutions.
The platform integrates seamlessly with other Microsoft products such as Office 365, Dynamics 365 and Azure and hundreds of third-party products and services via standard data connectors. This makes it easy to connect data and processes. With Power Platform, you can quickly prototype, test and implement. This allows you to quickly iterate on innovative ideas and integrate all kinds of data, without touching core processes, business data or business model and risking to damage stability.
A chatbot in 10 days
With Microsoft Power Platform, improving your employees' workday doesn't have to be a big project either. For example, spend 10 days creating the first version of a chatbot and testing it. Is it being used? Then you will continue to develop it. Are your people ignoring him? Then you'll spend the next 10 days creating an app and see if they actually use it. This is what low-code innovation looks like. Bring your processes close to your users and make them accessible, while your core processes, for example in an ERP such as PeopleSoft, go ahead and there is no risk to your data and continuity.
For example, we applied this technique in a chatbot for expense reporting.
Which functions do you build where?
The possibilities of Power Platform are almost endless. But not all functions belong in this “innovation layer”. Basic functions, which are part of crucial, mission-critical processes and logic, you'd rather keep them in your core systems. Financial logic, for example, belongs in your ERP.
But you'd rather not build everything that has to do with user interaction there. Power Platform offers far more advanced options for this than a system like PeopleSoft. A good rule of thumb is that you build those things in the core system that should continue even when Power Platform is no longer available. Storing, validating and modifying a declaration clearly belong to that category. Supplementing information with the help of AI and a chatbot is clearly not.
There are also cases where the choice is more difficult to make. The use of OCR (Optical Character Recognition — recognizing text (on an image) is less easy to organize. On the one hand, it is now an integral part of many core financial processes. On the other hand, the Power Platform offers many opportunities to use OCR in innovative, experimental ways. So where you place OCR functionality depends a lot on the project, process, and how you use it.
Artificial intelligence helps you and your employees
When building apps and processes for employees, we like to use AI to automate tedious tasks, such as retyping a receipt. But AI is now also helping us automate processes at a higher level: it tells us which processes we need to automate. Microsoft calls this process mining. This is the technique where AI analyses the log files of your core systems, finds bottlenecks and advises you how to improve the process. With the unveiling of Power Automate Process Mining Microsoft also integrated this feature into the Power Platform. At Microsoft Inspire 2023, the annual event where Microsoft presents the latest developments, the company demonstrated the ability to analyse the logs of an ERP system with their AI assistant Copilot. The AI found the most time-consuming action, made a suggestion for improvement and also designed the first version of the application.
It is clear that this will provide enormous value to companies that want their employees to work more efficiently, pleasantly and faster.
At Blis Digital, we integrate PeopleSoft with Power Platform for solutions that dramatically improve business processes. You can read all about it in the white paper “How PeopleSoft and Power Platform Work Together”.
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