Zellis is the largest provider of payroll and HR software and managed services to companies in the UK and Ireland, trusted by 42% of FTSE 100 companies. 

In this final blog of our four-part series, we’ll take a look at their flagship product, Zellis HCM Cloud. Read on to discover how your organisation can benefit from AI-powered payroll solutions that drive efficiencies right across your business.

Modern experiences that navigate challenges 

Organisations and employees are still navigating challenging times in the wake of Covid and the ongoing cost-of-living crisis. These macro events have fuelled ongoing legislative change and increased complexity across the board. In today’s fast-moving and often unpredictable world of work, it’s no longer enough to ensure efficient payroll and HR processes. Organisations need the very best AI-driven HCM technology to ensure compliance with complex regulations, unlock data-driven insights, and provide people with modern, digital experiences.  

Zellis has tackled the challenge by providing the most engaging, empowering, and efficient AI-powered HR and payroll solution in the UK and Republic of Ireland markets. 

Delivering award-winning solutions 

Zellis HCM Cloud can help you achieve a lot more than the smooth running of payroll and HR processes. It’s a data-driven, cloud-based, and open HCM software platform, complete with award-winning solutions for payroll, HR, benefits and recognition. Built on Microsoft Azure, Zellis HCM Cloud also connects into the AI-based Microsoft Power Platform – PowerBI for analytics and Power Automate – to create business-wide efficiencies. 

Let’s start with Zellis’ cloud payroll software. It’s automated, accurate and compliant, affording the flexibility and peace of mind that organisations need. You can either use it as a standalone, best-in-class payroll solution, or together with their HR solution. 

Then there’s the HR management software. This empowers your employees, creating process efficiencies via automated AI-driven workflows that free up time for HR to spend on strategic activities. From hire to retire, it supports productivity, enables intelligent reporting, and supports exceptional experiences. 

In addition, the MyView PayNow app is designed to support financial wellbeing. This self-service app, available as an extension to the MyView portal, helps your employees to better understand their pay and benefits, manage their budgeting, choose when to get paid (also known as flexible pay), access free guidance, and save for a rainy day. 

Building innovations of tomorrow 

Leveraging Microsoft technology has enabled Zellis to establish a dedicated Zellis AI Lab to build expertise in AI, exploiting the potential of the Zellis Intelligence Platform combined with Microsoft Azure and OpenAI.  

One of the first products developed in the Zellis AI Lab is a Generative AI-powered chat user interface for use by customers’ colleagues. This is designed to support their engagement and drive HR efficiencies by helping employees to perform HR tasks and understand payslips and employment conditions without needing to raise a ticket.  

This frees up time for the HR and Payroll teams to concentrate on more strategic areas, such as strategy planning by using Zellis AI-driven predictive analytics, instead of spending hours on purely reactive work such as answering employee queries.  

Early indications show that by using AI in this way, customers could reduce the time it takes to respond to employee queries by around 75%.  

Unlock the value of the cloud 

AI software published on the Microsoft marketplace forms a powerful mix of innovation, reliability, security and convenience. If you’re looking for solutions to fuel your cloud transformation and grow your business, it’s the place to shop.   

To move at the speed of business today, many companies prefer buying to building cloud apps. This allows them to offload the associated costs and management onto SaaS partners.  You’re able to use private offers to get exactly what you need, including customised terms and conditions, negotiated pricing, prototypes for proof of concept, and tailor-made solutions.  

Better still, transact in a single, accessible place, reducing procurement complexity, saving time and simplifying billing. Apply 100% of the value of eligible purchases to your organisation’s Azure cloud commitment and get faster time-to-value with solutions that work with your current technology. 

All while enjoying the peace of mind that comes from buying and running solutions on a trusted cloud with industry-leading security.   

Boost your HR and payroll solutions with AI power 

Ready to deploy transformational employee experiences across your organisation? 

Visit the Microsoft marketplace to buy Zellis HCM Cloud now, or contact our team at ISVUK@Microsoft.com.

Other blogs in this series

Blog 1: Driving your AI transformation with the Microsoft marketplace 

Blog 2: Safeguarding your business with AI-powered security solutions 

Blog 3: Optimising business operations through AI-powered solutions 

About the author

James joined Microsoft 15 years ago and has held leadership positions across the Consumer, Enterprise, and the Partner teams at Microsoft. James is currently the ISV Ecosystem Lead and has a passion for people and technology coming together to drive customer success. James has been at the forefront of Cloud & Digital transformation for the last 10 years launching new business models and driving transformation through the Microsoft Partner ecosystem resulting in and contributing to exciting new revenue streams and significantly accelerated growth for Microsoft and Partners.

The post Deliver transformational employee experiences through AI-empowering solutions   appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Today, the pressures are different. The global workforce is shrinking as the population ages. Labour productivity is in the doldrums. And, with a more connected global population, security threats emerge and evolve faster than ever. While human ingenuity and expertise will always be needed to defend against these threats, 87% of leaders see AI as a market advantage.  

Whether you’re looking to improve agility and security in your SAP workloads, wanting to innovate without disrupting core business processes or looking for more control over your SAP migration, the cloud and AI offer a unique opportunity.

Here are five ways the Microsoft Cloud can help you harness the power of AI and extend your SAP capabilities. 

1. Create faster with AI-driven data insights

In a world of deadlines and labour-intensive tasks, innovation and creativity can suffer. By integrating Azure AI services to your SAP data, you can optimise your workflow and empower your employees to create ideas and content faster. Our AI-powered data platforms also help you complete time-consuming tasks with ease, offering instant and intelligent insights that propel your work forward. 

An example is the Microsoft Fabric platform. It delivers data analytics in a software-as-a-service model, with an open, lake-centric data architecture and deep integration with Microsoft 365. Its built-in AI Copilot helps you find out what you need to know using natural language. In addition, it’s built to work across clouds, so you can easily migrate elsewhere in the future. 

Part of the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform is Power BI, relied on by the vast majority of Fortune 500 companies. With easy-to-use AI analysis capabilities and AI-powered data summarisation, it helps you find insights, make decisions and take appropriate action with ease.  

2. Improve collaboration and productivity

To get the most from your employees, they need to be freed from siloed technology, software and business processes. You can enhance employee productivity by integrating and giving access to SAP data in Microsoft 365. 

With Microsoft 365 Copilot, your AI assistant can help you keep work organised and your employees productive. It combines the power of large language models (LLMs) with your data in the Microsoft Graph – your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and more – and the Microsoft 365 apps to turn your words into the most powerful productivity tool on the planet. 

Copilot for Microsoft 365 works alongside your favourite day-to-day office apps. Just a few examples:

• You can be more creative in Microsoft Word, as Copilot writes, edits, summarises and creates alongside you. Rapidly find key information or get a head start by generating (and then re-generating) a full client brief.

• Copilot helps put all the rich capabilities of Microsoft Excel at your fingertips. It will review and edit data with simple prompts, make sheet-wide updates in seconds, and visualise key insights from large data-sets. 

• In Microsoft PowerPoint, you can now quickly summarise an entire presentation deck, or organise your deck into sections. Copilot also makes it easy to transform existing written documents into full decks, complete with speaker notes and sources – all with a few simple, spoken prompts. 

• With Microsoft Outlook and Teams, Copilot lightens the load and provides the gift of clarity. Summarising long email or message threads (with bullet points and all), pulling out different opinions expressed in meetings, and quickly drafting suggested replies and action items, all in real time. So you can unlock the magic of efficient and effective meetings. ​ 

Combining Microsoft Generative AI with SAP’s SuccessFactors and Joule enables new experiences for HR leaders, recruiters, hiring managers and employees. They can now create tailored job descriptions based on SAP SuccessFactors data and external data. Or rapidly generate interview questions based on an applicant’s CV. Using Microsoft Viva Copilot, employees will be able to curate their own learning paths. 

3. Simplify with automation and innovation

When great ideas or highly productive employees are held back by repetitive or labour-intensive business processes, it can stifle progress and creativity. Simplify your business process with AI-driven development and automation, using your SAP data. 

For over a decade, we’ve been progressively unifying the Microsoft Power Platform into a unique, fully integrated and cloud-powered suite. With solutions such as Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Virtual Agents and AI Builder, we’ve reinvented how all makers develop software, further democratising access to innovative business solutions.

Today, all employees have access to the tools they need to create applications, solve problems, automate workflows and analyse data more effectively. With Copilot working as your AI assistant in Power Apps, the development process is more accessible and less repetitive, so your development cycles don’t get slowed down.

Just describe your goal verbally, and Power Apps will use integrated AI to generate code, and even build complete apps. Check out the latest AI and other advances built into Power Apps.

You can also auto-generate working apps and data within seconds from images and design files. Save time, build more complex solutions, and reimagine business applications. Empower anyone across the business to create apps quickly and easily. 

4. Improve developer productivity with Copilot

Working faster and smarter can be crucial when it comes to business competitiveness and innovation. One of the most exciting new capabilities we’ve recently launched with GitHub is a new service we call GitHub Copilot. It can empower developers to save time and energy with AI-generated code, and helps easily integrate AI capabilities into SAP ABAP applications. 

GitHub Copilot provides an AI-pair programmer that works with all of the popular programming languages. This dramatically accelerates developer productivity. Up to 46% of all new code written by developers using Copilot is now fully AI-generated, with developers reporting a 55% productivity boost by using Copilot. 60% to 75% of developers who use GitHub Copilot also say it helps them focus on more satisfying work and enjoy their jobs more. 

5. Stay ahead with AI-driven security

Keeping protected against cyberthreats in today’s security landscape means being able to respond quickly and effectively. With Microsoft Security Copilot, you can do just that. 

Security Copilot combines the most advanced GPT4 model from OpenAI with a Microsoft-developed, security-specific model. It’s powered by Microsoft Security’s unique expertise and scale, sifting through 65 trillion signals daily. So whether you need to detect hidden patterns, harden defences or respond to incidents in your SAP systems, it’ll help you do it better and faster. 

As the first and only generative AI security product to help defend organisations at machine speed and scale, Security Copilot helps you be more effective and efficient while also supporting your teams to solve security challenges. It runs on our security and privacy-compliant hyperscale infrastructure, which is unique to Microsoft and brings the full benefit of being on the Azure cloud platform. And over time, it will work with a growing ecosystem of products from third-party vendors. 

With this comprehensive approach, and all your security capabilities in one place, you’ll benefit from unparalleled simplicity, visibility, automation, and intelligence.  

Extend SAP and innovate on Microsoft Cloud

Redefine what’s possible by integrating AI and Microsoft into your SAP data. It can help empower your employees, accelerate savings in your business, optimise your workload and enhance your productivity.  

To learn how AI can benefit your organisation and how we’ll support you through the change, please contact the authors, Sean Pilkington and Tom Payne, or your Microsoft representatives. 

Find out more

Microsoft Discovery Day: SAP on the Microsoft Cloud

Maximize SAP Investments by Migrating to the Microsoft Cloud: On-demand webinar

Innovate on Your SAP Data with Power Platform Integration: On-demand webinar

About the authors

Sean Pilkington

As the SAP on Azure UK Lead at Microsoft, Sean draws on over 20 years of experience in SAP design and solutioning to help clients visualise how their SAP solutions can be deployed into the Azure cloud. He thrives on demonstrating innovative technology that seamlessly blends with SAP to give customers the best experience, while enabling their business to drive down costs, increase ROI on technology and accelerate their digital transformation.

Tom Payne

As the SAP on Azure Sales Lead at Microsoft, Tom brings a wealth of experience to empowering SAP customers as they embrace cloud transformation with Microsoft Azure. He is adept at simplifying complex technology applications while optimising the customer journey.

The post Embrace the art of the possible: 5 ways Microsoft AI can enhance your SAP workload  appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

This year’s digital edition of Microsoft Ignite has now wrapped up, but don’t worry if you missed it! The high-quality sessions and keynotes from across the two days are available to watch on-demand from the Session Catalogue on the official Ignite website.

2022’s instalment has brought us plenty of news and reveals, so just in case you missed it, let’s walk through some of the key Azure-centric announcements. If you’re looking for announcements on other topics, you can check the Microsoft Ignite 2022 Book of News, which details everything from across the two day stream.

Azure AI

• Numerous updates to Azure Cognitive Services, including Azure Cognitive Service for Language, Azure Cognitive Service for Speech and Computer Vision
• New Azure Form Recogniser and Azure Machine Learning capabilities in preview
• Microsoft Project Bonsai adds AI features

Azure Data

• ​​​​​​​Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform adds integrated Partner Ecosystem
• Azure Cosmos DB adding distributed PostgreSQL support
• ​​​​​​​New machine learning updates in Azure Synapse
• Azure Data Explorer adds new sources for near real-time analytics

Azure Hybrid, Multicloud and Edge

• ​​​​​​New, cloud-like capabilities available for Azure Arc-enabled SQL Server
• ​​​​​​New deployment options for Azure Kubernetes Service enabled by Azure Arc
• New feature release for Azure Stack HCI

Azure Infrastructure

• Azure Automanage is now available for Azure Arc-enabled servers and Azure virtual machines
• ​​​​​​​New Virtual Machine Scale Set and Spot Virtual Machines capabilities
• ​​​​​​​New Azure Monitor capabilities and features
• New features in Azure Networking
• New Windows Server benefits and features

Azure VMWare Solution

• New features for Azure VMware Solution support availability, security

Developer Tools and DevOps

• Azure Kubernetes Fleet Manager simplifies cluster management and organization
• Independent software vendors can now create one-click Kubernetes apps
• ​​​​​​​New Azure Monitor features for app modernization and innovation
• Microsoft Dev Box now in preview
• ​​​​​​​GitHub Advanced Security for Azure DevOps in preview
• Latest version of Visual Studio 2022 now generally available
• Azure App Service updates

Power Platform

• ​​​​​​​Power Automate introducing new way to automate using natural language and AI, and innovations for user engagement, robotic process automation deployment
• Optimise workflows and document processing with AI Builder
• Power Platform Managed Environments features automated low-code governance and security capabilities at scale
• Microsoft Power Pages updates provide enhanced design studio, new templates
• Power BI updates enable self-service data analytics, adds connectivity to OneDrive and SharePoint
• Power Apps updates enable collaboration, fusion development, micro-apps
• Microsoft Dataverse enables developers to connect to external data sources

…and more!

There were so many announcements during Microsoft Ignite 2022 that we can’t do justice to all of them here. If you want to see the full list of announcements, you can do so by Microsoft Ignite 2022 Book of News. This handy website contains everything you need to know from the event, on topics from Microsoft 365 to Security and Windows. Be sure to make use of the contents page, as there’s a lot to go through!

Kathleen Mitford, Corporate Vice President of Azure Marketing, has written an in-depth blog about how Microsoft Azure helps drive agility and optimisation in business. There’s also a great article by Jared Spataro, Corporate Vice President for Microsoft 365, on how you can re-energize your workforce, wherever they’re working.

In case you missed it, there’s also a blog post written by Frank Shaw, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft, introducing this year’s Microsoft Ignite. It contains a lot of interesting information about what topic areas Ignite covers, so it’s a great starting point if you’re looking at exploring particular areas of the Microsoft ecosystem.

Useful Links

• Check out Microsoft Learn TV!
• Check out the sessions you might have missed in the official Ignite website
• Follow the conversation on the #MSIgnite hashtag!

The post A look at the announcements from Microsoft Ignite 2022 appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Hello folks,

I recently came across an issue while working with colleagues on a shared demo environment, which required notification of the entire group should anyone change the local admin password or redeploys said environment with a password of their own. This challenge prompted me to begin investigating Azure Key Vault as a potential solution to address this. Recently, the PowerShell Team announced the general availability of their SecretManagement and SecretStore modules which helps users manage secrets through a common set of cmdlets to interface with the vaults. Administrators can utilise this extensible model, where local and remote vaults can be registered and unregistered for use in accessing and retrieving secrets.

I have recently created a blog post detailing the steps required to harness PowerShell SecretManagement modules in the hopes that others would find the solution helpful.

As always, our team grateful when the community shares input in helping us create technical articles, demo videos and interviews. Active conversations also take place on Twitter via the #AzOps hashtag. Feel free to reach out with any of your questions as our team is always happy to help. 

The post Leveraging PowerShell SecretManagement modules to generalise a shared environment appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Microsoft Power Pages is a secure, enterprise-grade, low-code software as a service (SaaS) platform for creating, hosting, and administering modern external-facing business websites. Whether you’re a low-code maker or a professional developer, Power Pages enables you to rapidly design, configure, and publish websites that seamlessly work across web browsers and devices.

Power Pages provides you with rich, customisable templates, a fluid visual experience through a reimagined design studio, and a new, integrated learning hub to quickly build sites that suit your unique business needs.

Power Pages is the newest member of the Microsoft Power Platform family. With Power Pages, you can build sites by using the same shared business data stored in Microsoft Dataverse that you use for building apps, workflows, intelligent virtual agents, reports, and analytics with other Microsoft Power Platform components in your organisation.

Resources

• Tutorial: Create your first site with Power Pages
  
• Tutorial: Get started with Design Studio
• Power Pages tutorials on Microsoft Docs
• Power Pages overview on Microsoft Docs

Get started with Power Pages

With Microsoft Learn, you can kick off your journey into Power Pages with easy to understand training – and best of all, it’s free! This is the perfect way to work through new software.

• Microsoft Learn: Introduction to Microsoft Power Platform
• Microsoft Docs: Getting Started Videos
• Sign up for a free Power Pages trial

Learn more about Power Pages

Already using Power Pages and want to go further? Whether it’s learning something new within Power Pages or becoming certified, there’s plenty more to explore and discover.

• Tutorial: Display data securely on your site
• Tutorial: Configure authorised access to your site
• Tutorial: Set up page permissions

Further resources

• Getting started with Power Apps
• Passionate about Power Platform – A chat with Marc Trotman
• Sign up for the Monthly TechNet UK IT Pro Newsletter for more!

The post An introduction to Microsoft Power Pages appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

The teams who develop and manage these solutions – developers – are at the heart of the organisation. They’re critical in enabling your organisation to respond to your customer’s needs.

And when it comes to digital innovation, speed is crucial but so is having a structured plan in place. At the same time, innovation is open to everyone. Therefore, organisations need the right tools to create a culture of innovation.

Professional developers can use Visual Studio and GitHub to modernise existing and develop new applications.

You can also empower a new stream of innovation– citizen developers. These employees understand a business process and want to improve on it but might not have the developer expertise. Now with Power Apps, they can use low/no code solutions to build what they need.

Here are six ways to build a customer-centric culture by empowering your developers.

Move to the public cloud

Innovation happens faster in the cloud. Whether you need to modernise existing applications, simplify complex environments or create new apps, you can benefit from the scalability and flexibility of Azure. Developers can build on a secure foundation in any language or foundation, from anywhere.

Simplify complex and distributed environments across multiple clouds and edge environments with Azure Hybrid cloud solutions. Bring Azure management to your entire IT estate and run Azure services anywhere.

As the UK’s leading omnichannel payments business, PayPoint needs to maintain business as usual while managing increasing demand for its services. With Azure, they were able to respond with agility and even develop and deploy new functionality without downtime to customers.

Shorten time-to-market

According to a Gartner survey study, positive customer experiences drive more revenue, higher employee satisfaction and greater customer retention.

Organisations have a strong sense of urgency in going digital. This is driving demand for tools and services that shorten time-to-market and drive those positive customer experiences.

With tools like Azure DevOps and Visual Studio Code, with automation through DevOps Pipelines, GitHub Actions, the ability to streamline business processes with Power Automate and more increases the efficiency of your developer teams. They can then focus on innovating the customer experience.

Reassess investments

Customers increasingly expect products and services that factor in what they care about – be that macro topics like climate impact, or micro impacts such as their experience interacting with your products.

To meet these demands, organisations must find new ways to deliver service at scale. They need to focus on and connect with the customer experience – no matter how many business units, systems, supply chains and processes that customer journey may span. And do this all while reducing costs.

This requires a new way of thinking.

Many organisations are starting by setting a strategic approach and thinking of themselves as a software company first. Then, they’re leveraging digital technology to deliver on their vision.

Solutions built using the Azure platform offer near-instant provisioning of resources. This lowers innovation costs and enables a faster time-to-market. In fact, Forrester found the average cost to develop an application is 74 percent less with Power Apps.

Empower developers

According to McKinsey & Company, organisations with developer velocity experience four to times faster revenue growth, 60 percent higher return to shareholders, and 20 percent higher operating margin.

Unleash the creative energy of developers by leveraging Azure innovation tools. This enables them to build productively, foster secure collaboration, and remove barriers so they can scale faster innovation at lower cost.

Help them build the skills they need to bring ideas to life with certifications and training. Give developers autonomy, decision making and automate back-end processes so they can focus on bringing innovation.

Drive citizen development

Over 86 percent of organisations already struggle to hire developers. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2023, there will be four times as many end-user or citizen developers, compared to experienced developers in enterprises.

Empower the people closest to the problem to become citizen developers and solve problems themselves. With low/no code solutions like Power Apps anyone, regardless of their technical capability, can work together on the same platform to create solutions with a high level of agility.

Heathrow Airport employees have eliminated 75,000 pages of paperwork and reduced data entry by nearly 1,000 hours through the low-code development of 30 apps, helping the airport reduce its costs.

Infuse intelligence

The applications that both developers and citizen developers are building are powering important customer centric business processes. By applying AI and machine learning, organisations can infuse intelligence with real-time personalisation and serve up customised algorithms.

Alder Hey Children’s Hospital, uses Azure’s integrated platform with AI to build an algorithm that predicts bed space utilisation. The data is then available on Power BI so healthcare employees can quickly and simply understand the insights.

Empower developers to build a customer-centric culture

By unleashing the full potential of developers and citizen developers, organisations will enable growth, solve a wide range of business problems, and drive digital modernisation.

According to McKinsey, organisations with a developer mindset have 4 to 5 times higher revenue growth and 55 percent higher innovation.

Build a growth mindset culture where developers can drive innovation from anywhere, powered by a comprehensive portfolio of technology that complements your business needs.

We are the only company that has that full stack that spans across the breadth of both tech adoption and tech capability to build, and ultimately increase your chance of succeeding.

Find out more

Resources for leaders:

Watch the webinar: Unleash your developers to innovate

Take the Developer Velocity Assessment

Imagine digital innovation that makes a difference

Deliver a seamless experience with real impact

Build a growth mindset

Make app building easier

Resources for developer teams:

Explore the Dev Hub

Watch Microsoft Build on demand

Get certified

About the author

Denise leads the the digital and app innovation team, working directly with customers to uncover new opportunities. She has over 20 years’ experience in transformation leadership and business change delivery. With a proven ability to drive growth, innovation and performance turnaround across complex organisations, she has delivered new cloud services, automated processes and ways of working across the largest banking system in the UK.

The post The developer-customer connection: Why dev-centred cultures are customer-centric cultures appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

Power Platform is not a single piece of a software – it’s an entire suite of different tools that help you to build everything from simple to complex solutions. But how do you get your start with something like Power Platform? We spoke to Marc Trotman about his Power Platform journey, and how he’s giving back to a community that supported him along the way.

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Q: Tell us about who you are, and what you’re currently up to!

A: I’m Marc Trotman, and I work for a company called Boss Global Consulting. At the moment I’m actually working with the Centre of Excellence team at HSBC, implementing the CoE toolkit for Power Platform and working on a lot of governance. This has been a big focus of my work in the past year.

We were initially brought in to work on a project, but due to a lack of funding we actually jumped onto their existing dynamic CRM implementation and joined their tech team. I worked on adding functionality for the system that they already had in place, which included writing plugins, custom workflows, JavaScript and configuration of Dynamics. I was even involved in writing an Azure function which would be responsible for the re-certification of users within the bank.

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Q: It’d be great to hear about your career journey. How did you get to where you are now?

A: From my accent, I’m sure you’ve realized that I’m not from England – I’m actually from Barbados, West Indies. I came to the UK in 1994, starting my computing journey with a degree in Computer Systems Engineering at the University of Manchester. I chose computing because, at that point in time, computing was kind of the go-toward. Actually I didn’t even have any kind of experience with computers during my secondary level education, so it was quite an interesting pathway.

Following my graduation in 1998 I went back home to Barbados and started off in web development, working for an offshore company there that was delivering functionality to a company in the US.

After that I worked in Malaysia for five years, and this would be the start of my CRM journey. It was with SalesLogix rather than Microsoft Dynamics, so I was more of a Sage person at that point. I worked for two companies while I was there; NEC Malaysia, and a start-up company called Profitera, where I gained my first introduction to CRM.

When my visa came to an end, I decided I was going back to the UK. On my way back home to Barbados to visit my family, I sent a CV to some recruiters in the UK got an interview while I was in transit! This led to my first job in the UK, working for Panacea on SalesLogix and, later on, Dynamics. A chap called Chris Bridgeman was running the team there, and I’m grateful he was able to take a chance on me. I also met Rhett Clinton, who was a Microsoft MVP, and I learned a lot of my Dynamics knowledge from him.

Following that I joined a company called Outsourcery. At that point in time it was one of the few companies in the UK that actually hosted Dynamics CRM. I worked in a small team of seven people and it was great because it was the first time I worked with more that one colleague with Caribbean or African links – Tricia Sinclair (creator of the Power Platform school), Wayne Alexander and Ona Ojukwu. Until 2016 I mainly did a lot of upgrades from Dynamics 4. I was also creating functionality and solutions for various other industries.

After leaving Outsourcery, I was lucky enough to catch up with Rhett Clinton who was working at Metro Bank. At that point in time they were the poster child for the Power Platform – one of the first banks to really go all-in on cloud. I was really attracted to working there because I’d be able to work with MVPs, as well as with Power Platform. I joined in a senior developer role, adding functionality to their existing system and on Unified Service Desk. I was also involved in creating a Canvas app, developed with help from Microsoft, that let customers see how long they would have to wait to see someone when entering the bank.

Eventually I was promoted into a more senior team manager role where I had the opportunity to mentor junior developers. I created a training program for them to learn Power Platform, and I would have one-on-one sessions with them and create exercises around certain Power Platform topics. This helped upskill people from Junior Developer up to a CRM Developer.

This leads me to my current role at Boss Global Consulting. We’re a small company of technical, highly-skilled people. The past year has seen more of a focus on governance, though I still get opportunities to get hands-on in terms of extending the functionality around the toolkit and even writing PowerShell scripts to pull in information from the tenant around Power BI.

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Q: We’ve seen you speak about Power Platform at events like Dynamics Saturday and Scottish Summit. What is it that makes you so passionate about Power Platform?

A: My interest in it is around the no code, low code ethos and making these types of tools available not only for power developers, but also citizen developers.

I also write a blog – not as often as I should – where I try to put across my knowledge on Power Platform, as well as a Twitter account. There’s a great community out there that I pick up a lot of information from, and it’s great that we get to share knowledge.

But mostly, for me, it’s all about what these tools can do. I did a presentation in 2020 around how the Power Platform could be used in small island states like Barbados, because obviously when the pandemic hit, it was not easy for people to go out and shop, schools weren’t in person and had to go online, etc. Barbados and a number of Caribbean Islands are just not as digital focused, and this could become a turning point.

There are obviously the use cases where people could be ordering groceries online, but there are also things like tracking who leaves and enters the country, and the different licenses people need to apply for. All of these things are done manually using paper forms, and what I presented showed how Power Platform could be used to do it more efficiently.

A model-driven app could be used to track arrivals and departures. For example, if someone entered the country and they were born in Barbados, it would create a contact record to say OK, that’s a citizen. If not, it would create a record showing that they were a visitor, and you’d have a central repository that government organisations could hook into to access personal information about visitors. You could then visualise important Covid-related information and add virtual agents to help answer questions people might have, all through Power Platform.

There was an introduction to Power Platform given at the University of the West Indies in Barbados last year by Dona Sarkar, who spent three months living and working in the country. She also worked with the university to create an introduction to Power Platform for their students. I joined a hackathon they held in a technical advisor position to help students in building solutions.

So yes, I do it for my day job, but I’m also always thinking about how I could actually transfer some of this knowledge and technology back into the Caribbean because we have a quite a skilled working force. Most people are educated up to university level and the opportunities that Power Platform could offer are huge.

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Q: Did you have any role models during your journey? If so, who were they?

A: When I first came to the UK and started at Panacea, I was green. I hadn’t worked in that type of environment before. There I met Martin Draper and Steven Robertson who gave me a lot of information around my role and helped me to develop my skills.

I don’t have role models that made me follow a particular path per se, but the people I’ve met and worked with on my journey have all contributed to where I am at this point in time.

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Q: What are your thoughts on the current level of diversity within the tech industry, and do you think it’s improving with time?

A: Outsourcery was the first company that I worked with where there was more than one person with a black background in my team, but it’s been getting better. Plus in teams like at Metro, they were more diversified because they have a team made up of people from all over the world.

As a black person in technology, I’ve enjoyed working in my other teams. I’ve never felt prejudice against me and everyone I’ve worked with has been supportive and very helpful. I’ve been very lucky.

The lack of black developers has been evident, though. Hopefully with initiatives like the Power Platform school this will start to change, and I’ll be using my own experiences as a mentor to help other people navigate the waters around CRM-related careers.

I met David Fowler, a Partner Software Architect at Microsoft, virtually during the Power Platform hack in Barbados. It turned out he’s also from Barbados, and he’s involved in developing a lot of new .NET technologies. There’s not a lot of visibility of black professionals in these positions, and it’d be great for people starting their CRM journeys to hear more of this type of story. I think it would help to attract people into the industry and into these tech jobs.

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Q: What advice would you give to other people who are looking to get into a role similar to yours?

A: Everyone coming into tech now has access to so many resources that I think it’s really about what you want to specialise in. Whether it’s game development, web development or the Power Platform route, the resources are out there – Microsoft Learn, community groups and YouTube videos are a great place to start.

That said, I think being able to get exposure to different technologies and different industries is very important. It’ll give you direction on areas you want to focus on going forward, as well as give you an appreciation for the bigger picture.

If you’re aiming for a Power Platform role specifically, you’ll definitely want to get yourself involved in the community. It’s very welcoming, and there are many people who will be willing to help and even mentor you. Groups like Power Addicts and The Power Platform School are great places to start.

I think that’s it. Find a good mentor, join a very welcoming community and give back where you can.

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Marc Trotman is an experienced Power Platform Solution Architect who has worked in a number of sectors such as banking, education and non-profit.

He loves introducing organisations and individuals to the potential of the Power Platform, to transform their businesses using best practices and effective governance principles.

Marc lives in Nottingham but was born and raised in Barbados. He loves keeping fit, travelling and is working hard to improve his guitar playing.

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Further reading

• Getting started with Power Apps
• Getting started with the AI Builder in Power Platform
• Using Power BI and Logic Apps​ to analyse social media streams

The post Passionate about Power Platform – A chat with Marc Trotman appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.

For a long time, the exchange of this highly critical medical information has happened via paper-based forms. An ambulance crew would fill out a form and then pass it to the A&E team when they arrived at the hospital. This increasingly outdated system is prone to delays – the information cannot be transmitted in advance – thereby putting the patient’s health at further risk.

Today, these and many other processes can be digitalised and automated simply and effectively with no/low-code apps. Quick, easy to use and develop, these business apps are becoming the answer to healthcare’s constantly evolving requirements.

Together with our partner Akari Solutions, we recently developed an app for an NHS service specialised in treating strokes and managing stroke referrals. Using Microsoft Power Apps, Akari helped them build a solution that allows medical professionals to fill out digital forms with patient data. Then, they share it directly with the specialist centre. As a result, they can follow the patient wherever they are in their treatment journey.

This is only one of many examples of organisations turning to no/low-code applications and automation to manage current and future challenges. It’s also something that we have been actively engaged in over the past few years – helping the NHS improve operational efficiency and patient experience with simple yet cutting-edge technology. Here’s how we’re doing it.

The importance of delivering patient-focussed services

The past two years have been incredibly challenging for the UK healthcare sector, but they’ve also catalysed much needed digital transformation. Faced with new issues such as lockdowns and long-standing ones such as reduced capacity, an ageing population and increasing clinician burnout, the NHS has been forced to rethink many of the ways it operates.

To ensure that healthcare staff spend as much time as possible with their patients, we’ve seen the health service realise the importance of modernising processes, putting greater emphasis on efficiency and resource optimisation, as well as automating manual tasks.

Technology and patient engagement are – now more than ever – intrinsically tied. NHS organisations are increasingly turning to digital solutions to ensure continuity of care and a seamless experience for all.

This digital transformation entails both giving patients greater access to data, but also helping care teams make better use of their time. The importance of thorough record-keeping and the complexity of modern medicine puts pressure on the time that doctors can spend with their patients. In some parts of the NHS, this issue is exacerbated by outdated hardware and by non-interoperable systems. Sometimes, doctors have to log into 20 or more different systems per day. That leaves the workforce under even more pressure and paves the way for further inefficiencies.

Luckily, this is where no/low-code applications and automation technology can help.

Turning the tide with no/low code applications and automation platforms

With business applications like Microsoft’s Power Apps, NHS organisations can create highly cost-effective, quick and simple solutions that can cater to their many needs.

Using these applications, NHS staff can create bespoke solutions using low amounts of coding (or even no coding at all). They’re easy to build, manage and scale. In addition, the drag-and-drop functionalities and pre-built templates simplify the process. As a result, senior-level developers are no longer required to build high-quality, secure apps and automations.

That is game-changing. Not only does it enable faster time-to-deployment compared to traditional software developments. But it also allows people with different experiences to give their input when building the apps. This ultimately creates highly customised solutions that meet their specific needs.

Just imagine how transformational that can be for a healthcare service like the NHS, composed of hundreds of hospitals across the country. Indeed, many of the solutions and processes we’ve already created via Power Platform can be applied to all NHS Trusts.

From time-critical situations to day-to-day patient referral

Power Apps has a transformational potential in many areas of healthcare, particularly when it comes to resource management. For example, our partner ANS recently developed a Power App that helps NHS Trusts equip their frontline staff with the correct personal protective equipment (PPE) kits.

During the pandemic, this provisioning used to happen via a multitude of apps and websites. However, as soon as demand increased dramatically, inefficiencies in the system meant that some hospitals had too much PPE and others not enough. With their new Power App, Trusts can now keep track of PPE availability and order new supplies more effectively.

Another great example is the work we’ve carried out with the London Air Ambulance Charity. This is an advanced trauma team that looks after patients needing emergency medical treatment in the capital, and who are unlikely to survive the journey to hospital by road.

Here again, the team has started using Power Apps to build a range of checklist apps that replace their existing paper-based processes. They’re now also attaching QR codes to their medical bags, which can then be scanned to keep track of equipment.

Beyond emergency response, we’re seeing more and more organisations turn to business apps to automate all kinds of manual process. Our client, an NHS Foundation Trust, is a prime example.

As a mental health organisation, they sometimes refer their patients to other specialists. Previously, these referrals would happen through email or fax. Now, the organisation has created a primary to secondary care referral system – via Power Apps. This system allows them to share patient information in a seamless and secure way. All while reducing the opportunity for mistakes and delays to occur.

Building no/low code apps with Power Platform

After an incredibly challenging period, it’s time for healthcare to look ahead. The past two years have demonstrated the importance of having agile, fast and digital solutions that simplify operations for clinicians, giving them time back to spend with their patients.

So how can you get started with Microsoft Power Platform?

First off, make sure you know what you’re embarking on. We have a lot of resources – from self-paced learning courses to in-person digital events – designed to help you understand the benefits of no/low-code applications and automation platforms.

Once you’ve done all your research, ask yourself: What are some of the day-to-day processes or challenges that could be significantly improved through automation? Which of those are the most impactful and time-sensitive?

These two questions alone will likely already generate ideas for the first few apps and automations that you could create. For whatever comes next, we’re here to help.     

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About the author

Ana is Enterprise Sales Manager for Business Applications in the UK Public Sector. With more than 15 years’ experience in technology, she is a technologist, and evangelist with a specialism Healthcare and Education and is passionate about using technology for good.

The post How no/low code apps power patient engagement and operational efficiency appeared first on Microsoft Industry Blogs - United Kingdom.