Turn Today’s, “That’s the Way It Is,” Barriers into Tomorrow’s “That’s the Way It Was!” with Microsoft’s Power Platform

Have you ever been in a meeting and someone questions a process, wondering if it could be more efficient, and the response was “Because – that’s how it is.”

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    Have you ever been in a meeting and someone asks a really great question about why a process functions in a particular way; wondering if it could be more efficient, and the end response was: “Because – that’s how it is.”

    You might be short on budget, resources and/or internal programmers, so the conversation is over. Or is it?

    It doesn’t have to be. Microsoft’s Power Platform gives everyone the ability to build business solutions. The Platform enables you to change that old worn out expression into, “That’s how it was.”

    How, you wonder? The answer is simple – #youCANwithCloud.

    The Power Platform Mindset

    Recently during an internal CRM user training, Velosio staffers navigated through this very scenario — lamenting having to manually move data from Sharepoint into new client’s folders for collaboration.

    “Before we knew it, our internal CRM training was a real-world scenario or case study for how Microsoft’s Power Platform could be leveraged to improve our performance,” Amber Williams, Velosio’s Internal Dynamics 365 CRM Project Manager, said.

    “We had a broad audience of team members on the call. We were reviewing some new aspects to our internal Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement implementation. Immediately after the call, an email chain began questioning WHY our workflow had to be ‘that’ way. And oh hey, with Power Platform we can easily address and deliver a streamlined workflow,” she explained.

    In short, Velosio’s CRM meeting morphed into a citizen developer opportunity. A great idea was born by an audience participant, a user of our internal business applications. This resulted in a solution leveraging Microsoft Flow to mitigate the company’s Sharepoint workflow hiccup.

    “We all have our areas of expertise with in-depth knowledge of Microsoft’s offerings and their potential, but we are not all programmers,” Williams said. As we talked through it, we realized we could utilize Microsoft’s Power Platform and capitalize on Microsoft’s concept of citizen developer. “We could solve our workflow problem ourselves without engaging our dev team!” Williams added.

    It’s super empowering. With some vigilance and an open creative problem-solving session with your team, you have the power to solve roadblocks you face with your company’s business applications workflow. You just need a working knowledge of the tools, some familiarization with your problem set, and the motivation to solve it. No coding required.

    How Does Power Platform Work?

    Microsoft’s Power Platform leverages three robust tools — Power BI, Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow. Resourcing the Platform, you can customize and extend your business applications with little to no coding. The data is already there. You just create the connection opening an untapped world of possibility.

    For Velosio, this turned the old “that’s the way it is” into “that’s the way it WAS.” With a little ingenuity, our internal sales team now has a streamlined ability to quickly and efficiently share data.

    Microsoft’s Power Platform and citizen developer design motivations, “#youCANwithCloud.”

    Pass it on!

    #YouCANwithCloud … be a citizen developer!

     

    Velosio is a leader in deploying business applications through the cloud and delivering unparalleled client experiences. One of the largest Microsoft partners in North America, Velosio supports the entire Microsoft Dynamics portfolio, Office 365 family and Azure services. The solutions portfolio includes ERP, CRM, Productivity, Business Intelligence and Power Platform.