The Power Automate Process Mining solution helps the organization get the full lifecycle visibility into their processes, understand the inefficiencies and targeted improvements to drive via process alignments and automation. Microsoft’s Process Mining offering is easy to use with powerful features including rework detectors, root cause analysis, custom reporting, and seamless integration and automation.  The power of Copilot and general ease of use of the platform allow the team to not only scale across all of its processes quickly, but also augments the products owner toolkit to drive process optimization as a critical lever for accelerating digital transformation.

Given the large coverage of the customer base, Marketing execution is inherently complex, involving multiple roles and activities. By focusing on the demand generation process step, the MCAPS team was able to delve into the nested processes and uncover areas for improvement.

By utilizing Power Automate Process Mining, the team gathered event log data, transformed it using Power Query, and completed data attribution. The resulting process map was then analyzed with the help of Copilot, which provided insights and identified bottlenecks that could be addressed through automation.

The analysis revealed that the average duration of this process component was ~60 days, with five different variants spanning across 33 activities. Notably, 20% of the cases required rework activities, indicating a significant area for potential optimization. Roles such as event lead marketing Operations and Integrated Marketing Manager were found to be the most involved in the process, contributing to 80% of the executional activities. By zooming in on individual activities, the team discovered that the intake for content creation averaged 8 days to complete, accounting for about 10% of the total time spent in the process.

With the insights provided by Copilot, the team identified the review loop as the longest-running activity and a major bottleneck. But Copilot didn’t stop there; it went a step further by leveraging Power Automate to automate the process steps, providing improvement suggestions along the way.

The team chose to create digital process flows, and Copilot seamlessly handed it off to Power Automate with a prompt to build the automation. As the flows were built out, Power Automate Copilot continued to refine then until they were ready to be published.

Through iterative process mining and the acceleration provided by Copilot’s automation recommendations, the team projects an outcome of reducing the timeline from 12 weeks to 8 weeks.

“With the recommendations using Power Automate with Process Mining, we project accelerated time in our demand generation process from twelve to eight weeks. Copilot has given us a lot of confidence as it allows us to scale process simplification as the tip of the spear for our digital transformation!”

Sandeep Bhanot, Corporate Vice President within Microsoft Customer & Partner Solutions.

By embracing Process Mining with AI-powered Copilots, businesses can achieve greater efficiency and agility, paving the way for innovation and success.

The post Transforming digital processes with AI: A Power Automate Process Mining Case Study at Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS) appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

How Copilot is democratizing process mining

Identifying opportunities for automation or adoption of transformative technology, like generative AI, can be difficult without first understanding your process or having a clear way to prioritize investments. Power Automate Process Mining enables organizations to identify their inefficiencies and accelerate the digital transformation of their processes.

Now with Copilot in Power Automate Process Mining, reaching these insights is quick and easy, empowering everyone in your organization to make data-driven decisions. Copilot in Power Automate Process Mining helps you discover processes from your event logs and map attributes to the required data schema. Uncovering your top insights now only requires a quick exchange with Copilot, which iteratively works with you to answer questions on your data, and surfaces automatization or optimization recommendations. Copilot even surfaces one-click suggestions of other Copilots, passing along context of your process goals to get to automations and solutions faster.

Generative AI is transformational, and with Power Automate Process Mining, organizations can quickly pinpoint where to apply it first, second, and subsequently for maximum ROI. Having  Copilot in Power Automate Process Mining enables users to reduce time to value in achieving process excellence in their organization. It does this by first identifying the process and subsequently helping with data ingestion, uncovering the top process insights into the inefficiencies with provided one-click suggestions of other Copilot-assisted automations and solutions. The entire flow is powered by low-code and AI to drastically reduce both time and skills needed to tackle complex processes in your organization.

Watch Copilot in Power Automate Process Mining in action

The following video demonstrates the end-to-end use of Copilot in Power Automate Process Mining starting from process discovery to uncovering top areas for optimization, and handoff to other copilots to optimize processes.

• Copilot in Power Automate Process Mining uses large language models to recognize attributes and data in your event log to aid with process identification and automapping to the required data schema. In our example, a procure-to-pay (P2P) process is identified directly from the event log stored in Azure Data Lake. Copilot then guides in mapping these attributes for analysis. Once the process is analyzed, Copilot can accelerate your journey by providing top insights on the bottlenecks and inefficiencies in the process. Without having to analyze the visual process map or variants, and without digging deep into the root cause analysis, you can identify process bottlenecks and the most important facts about your current process. Traditionally, it could take process analysts weeks or months to define a process, depict it, and then identify opportunities for automation. In our P2P process example, not only did Copilot identify that the longest variant of the process is a week longer than the second-longest variant, indicating that it is a high ROI area for optimization, but Copilot also flagged a compliance issue of purchase orders being created without purchase requisitions in place.

• Copilot then identifies other Copilot experiences in your enterprise that can help deploy solutions and automations to achieve process excellence. In our P2P process example, Copilot has offered two suggestions to solve the bottleneck of purchase orders being created with purchase requisitions and causing churn for the business:
  • A Power Automate cloud flow that will send a Microsoft Teams alert any time this compliance issue arises which can be implemented by using Copilot in Power Automate.
  • An update to an existing Microsoft Power Apps app, created by using the P2P enterprise application template, to include a list of at-risk purchase orders that can be implemented using Copilot in Power Apps.

With the native integration of Power Automate Process Mining with Microsoft Power BI, users can track how implementation of optimizations impact process efficiency and other essential business metrics through custom Power BI reports and dashboards. These key performance indicators may be integrated as Goals in Power BI scorecards. Unlocking other powerful AI features like Power BI Q&A via natural language capability in Power BI enables business users across the organization to get answers from their data quickly.

Get started with Copilot

If you already have a Power Automate license, check out Copilot in Power Automate Process Mining preview by logging into the Power Automate portal. You can also try Power Automate Process Mining for free with the Power Automate trial license.

The preview of Power Automate Process Mining Copilot is available in the US and will roll out to other countries over the next several weeks.

Power Automate Process Mining is available for sale via all channels and in all regions where Microsoft Power Platform is currently sold. Please contact your Microsoft sales representative. For licensing information, please visit Overview of process mining and task mining in Power Automate.

The post Microsoft announces preview of new Copilot capabilities in Power Automate Process Mining appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

1. Define and measure the business challenges of the process you want to analyze or improve.
2. Leverage AI to analyze and generate insights to create solutions and automation.
3. Deliver return on investment (ROI) through action against the insights and establish continuous monitoring and improvement of your processes.

The introduction of process and task mining in Power Automate enables our customers to control their end-to-end automation lifecycle with a single solution. It also comes at a time when companies are seeking ways to improve their business processes, save costs, and do more with less. Customers can effectively do so by acting on insights from Power Automate Process Mining to create optimization solutions using other applications in the Microsoft ecosystem or solutions that they already use today.

Try entitlements for Process Mining for free with the Power Automate trial license.

How Power Automate Process Mining works

Event logs from multiple enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), human resources (HR), and other systems of records, as well as task recordings can be ingested into Power Automate Process Mining. This data is analyzed, and a process model with details of the inner workings of the process is made available to draw insights on and zoom into root causes of the inefficiencies. Recommendations and next best actions to address these inefficiencies are made available to implement along with business intelligence (BI) tools to continually monitor process performance. Optimizations can be continually made, as suggested by Process Mining, to achieve process excellence for both the process at hand as well as other processes, setting up a process excellence flywheel in your organization.

Power Automate Process Mining capabilities

Get an “x-ray” like visibility into how a process is being executed within your organization. A visual process map gives you insights into the ideal and non-ideal processes, what average durations of the activities are, the number of activities that have been reworked, and more.

Get insights and directions for opportunities to automate and deploy solutions for using generative AI where available.

Track how your processes are performing with optimizations in place and continually bring improvements.

Watch it in action in this video with voiceover:

Act quickly on Power Automate Process Mining insights with the assistance of AI

With AI copilot capabilities now available in Microsoft Power Platform and Power Automate, our customers are experiencing first-hand how dramatically AI can accelerate the work of pro-developers and how easily non-developers can be engaged in building solutions across your organization. It has never been easier to act quickly on insights provided by Power Automate Process Mining so your teams can optimize resources, improve customer experiences, and focus on innovation.

Keep on the lookout for more news on copilot capabilities coming to Power Automate and Process Mining. In the meantime, if you missed us at Microsoft Inspire 2023, you can see our latest Microsoft Power Platform and Power Automate copilot features in action in this session delivered by our Vice President of Power Apps, Ryan Cunningham, “Accelerate and scale innovation with AI and the Power Platform.”

Availability

Power Automate Process Mining is available for sale via all channels and in all regions that Power Platform is currently sold in. Please contact your Microsoft sales representative. For licensing information, please visit Overview of process mining and task mining in Power Automate. 

Get started with Power Automate Process Mining

We have several resources for you to get started with Power Automate Process Mining, including:

• Product documentation
• Power Automate Process Mining Microsoft Learn training
• Sample data (click to download)

The Power Automate trial license includes entitlements for Process Mining for you to try for free.

The post Microsoft Power Automate Process Mining is generally available appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Equinor, a forward thinking energy company based in Norway, has forecasted the estimated annual value from a solution delivered by their DigiTEAM and citizen developers at more than 500 million NOK. As of the currency exchange rate on November 16^th, 500 million NOK equals to more than 49 million US Dollars. These savings do not include the Power Platform projects delivered by their IT Team.

The company is on a journey to net-zero emissions through optimizing its oil and gas portfolio, accelerating growth in renewables, and pioneering developments in carbon capture and hydrogen. Given the significant changes required in operations to move to renewable energy, the technology leadership at Equinor turned to Power Platform to enable rapid development of enterprise-level solutions that would deliver immediate business value.

“The business impact and benefits of the resulting Power Platform solutions truly speak for themselves, so our focus is to promote them effectively.” -Rebecca Brekke: Center for Enablement Task Lead

The teams at Equinor have digitally transformed multiple use cases including those in the logistics and supply chain area.

Svein Inge Heggøy, Discipline Responsible Logistics and crane operator at Equinor, had no prior Power Platform experience and built a “Crane and Lifting” Power Apps app. This app enabled users to easily make crane lift requests, a process that had historically been ad hoc and decentralized with requests coming via email using Excel or SharePoint lists, and via phone calls and handwritten notes. Hans Martin Berge, who has an engineering background and is a Task Lead at Equinor’s DigiTEAM, partnered with Svein Inge to integrate Dataverse and replace SharePoint for data storage so it could be scaled and deployed to other Equinor installations. Now, crane lift operations run more efficiently and effectively with a centralized tool to manage requests.

Another example is the “Oil Country Tubular Goods (OCTG) Dashboard” solution that started out as single Power App utilizing AI Builder capabilities to automatically count pipes in photos uploaded by users from tablets and mobile phones. The solution expanded to centralize the critical data in the supply chain in Dataverse with orders’ creation and updates via a Power Apps app, automated notifications and reminders on pending/delayed/confirmed orders via Power Automate and visualization of logistical trends, risks, and areas for improvement in Power BI.

Read more about how Equinor approached and implemented governance, provided training and best practice guidance on Power Platform and, are furthering fusion development in their organization.

“Power Platform’s low-code technology fosters better innovative relationships between business experts and IT experts and avoids the ‘shadow IT’ pitfall many organizations operate within.” -Per Kåre Foss: Vice President Enterprise Infrastructure Platforms 

The post Equinor embraces Power Platform to increase process efficiency while cutting costs appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The offer is available now through March 31st, 2023. To purchase, speak with your Microsoft representative, or contact a Microsoft specialist or CSP partner from the Power Apps pricing page. Click on Contact Sales.

The post Do more with less, with Power Apps. Now at 25% off appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

So, how does a maker get started?
For the model driven app that you want to make available on your users’ devices for offline use, you must take these four core steps:

1. Enable for offline the entities that your app uses. Most of the standard entities are already setup for offline but you’ll want to make sure that any custom entities are enabled for mobile offline synchronization. You can do this in your app settings on make.powerapps.com

2. In the Power Platform Admin center, create a mobile offline profile that determines exactly what data is stored on a users’ mobile device

3. Add users that can access the app offline to the profile

4. Enable the model driven app for ‘mobile offline’ and assign the profile to your app

The detailed step by step instructions are available here.

Several enhancements have been made to both the configuration experience and synchronization infrastructure to the mobile offline capabilities that were available in Dynamics 365. These enhancements are rolling out to all regions in November.

The configuration is streamlined for makers and administrators within the Power Platform Admin Center with intuitive creation and maintenance of offline profiles. Filters on exactly what data should be synchronized to users’ devices can now be done via expressions.

Synchronization capabilities have also been enhanced yielding to an overall faster and better experience for users on their mobile phones:

• Sync intervals can be set to as frequent as every 5 mins to ensure that the users are working with the latest updates from CDS
• Sync intervals can be adjusted per entity so that makers and administrators have the flexibility to increase sync intervals for entities that are updated infrequently. This yields to faster overall syncs for the users

More details on end user experiences are available here.

We are working on bringing continuous innovation to this space for both makers (ability to add multiple users to the offline profile, offline profile configuration in make.powerapps.com) and users (offline first apps such that users are always working from the local cache with syncs in the background for fast completion of tasks regardless of network connectivity, on demand ‘sync now’ button) on our roadmap. Stay tuned!

Feedback/questions? Please let us know in the comments.

The post Mobile Offline for Power Apps appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We receive feedback from multiple sources – the Ideas forum, comments on help docs and blogs, 1-1s, conferences and webinars, and surveys. For instance, you may have seen this survey prompt come up while using the Flow (or another) product.

But, let’s face it – some of this valuable feedback gets lost in email or due to lack of follow-up from a hallway conversation. What we realized on the Flow product team was that the feedback needs to be tracked in Visual Studio and thus, available every time we triage our bugs. However, opening bugs in Visual Studio is tedious – copy/pasting user comments, ensuring the bug is assigned to the correct team. Of course, we wrote some flows to get around this boring task! 

Let’s go back to the survey prompt above. The rating and comment that you provide enables us to understand if you’re enjoying using the product, and if you find something particularly good or bad. For example, a recent comment from a user was on a flow that is helping them sync their clients’ expenses to the cloud without any manual action. Another comment was about a bug with one of the templates that was caused by a recent change, and the fix is being rolled out shortly. Yes, we read through every single comment! And yes, we get a lot of comments 🙂

All the comments are stored in a SQL database. We tag every comment from a list of pre-defined tags so that we can start to understand the positive and negative sentiments emerging from the feedback. Examples of tags include ‘Useful’ (the comment about automatically syncing client expenses to the cloud was tagged as ‘Useful’) and ‘Missing Features’ (some users have asked for the ability to copy and paste sub sections of a flow into a new flow). The comment about the bug in a template was tagged with ‘Open Bug’.

A flow automatically files a bug in Visual Studio and assigns it to the Flow engineering team every time a comment is tagged with ‘Open Bug’. Now, an engineer can investigate the specific issue that the user who provided the comment ran into. Let’s take a look! 

On a daily basis, the flow executes a sql query that returns a result set with all comments that were tagged with ‘Open Bug’ in the last 24 hours. For each comment, a bug is opened in Visual Studio and an email is sent to the team with the link to the bug. 

The SQL view that returns the rows of comments tagged with ‘Open Bug’ was created by an engineer.

A bug is created in Visual Studio in the team’s path with details about the user’s comments and flows so that the engineer has the necessary data to begin the investigation.

An email is also sent to the team notifying them of a new bug that needs attention.

You can create similar flows to automate follow-ups on user comments no matter where they’re stored – in SQL, SharePoint, or Excel. You can also create multiple flows that perform different actions based on which class of user the feedback is coming from – for example, feedback from your MVP users may be logged as a higher priority bug with a broadcast to the Teams/Slack channel or comments from sales and account managers are tracked in a SharePoint list for the product managers to take a look at. Let us know in the comments section or on Twitter if you plan to create a flow to automate some of these boring but very important tasks! 

The post Intermediate | Flow of the Week: Addressing User Feedback with Flow appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We, on the product team, often hear from many of you about how incredibly powerful Flow is. The ability to execute different actions based on conditions and switch case, or define behaviors for each value from a previous step, can lead to very useful workflows. Some of you, however, have told us that the designer is can be time-consuming to navigate and you prefer to use our simplified one-click templates instead.

Since we want all of our templates to be available to everyone, we’ve created a “diet” designer. This version of the designer presents just the fields that required to create a flow, which simplifies the experience. You don’t have to browse through pre-populated fields of a step or even pre-filled steps if you don’t want to. Of course, if you want to add additional steps and change the configuration in a specific step, you can always pull up the full designer to make your changes before (or after) creating the flow.

Let’s take a look at the new simplified designer.

Say that you want to send yourself an email if a new SharePoint list item is created. We have a template for that.

Set up your connections if they haven’t already been set up, and click Continue.

Instead of being taken to the full designer, you’ll see the diet designer, where you can select the SharePoint site and list name from the drop-down menus.

Now, if you’d like to send the email to someone else or change the body of the email, you can always click on Edit in advanced mode, which will take you to the full designer where you have more options to customize.

After selecting the SharePoint site and list, click on Create flow. And that’s it! You’re done!

We’ve enabled the diet designer for a few templates so far. You can create new events on Google Calendar from Office 365 calendar or copy files to OneDrive for Business when they’re added to OneDrive. Let us know in the comments below, on Twitter, or in the Microsoft Flow Community what other templates you’d like us to enable with the diet designer. As always, we’d love your feedback to further improve this experience!

​Thanks for reading!

The post A diet you can love! Introducing the new “diet” flow designer appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

A request that we’ve repeatedly heard from our users (you!) is the ability to duplicate or make a copy of your flow. This request is also one of the top voted ideas in our idea forum (Did you know that you can submit new ideas and vote on ideas submitted by other users?).

The ability to make a copy of your flow is often useful when you want to create a flow similar to something you’ve already created. Or, if you want to maintain a draft of your working flow as you work on adding more functionality.

Here’s how:

1. Go to your My flows page. Click on the More (…) menu item next to the flow that you want to create a copy of. Click on the Save As command.
   
2. You’ll have the option to provide a new name for the flow if you’d like.
   

That’s it! The new copy of the flow will be disabled by default so, when you’re ready turn it on by flipping the toggle switch.

Let us know how you plan to use this new functionality in the comments!

Improved support page and two new services

This week we have a few other updates available. First, we have improvements to the Flow support page. We will always show the latest service status at the top of page, so you can check here to see if there are any ongoing issues with Flow or any particular service. Below that, we have added the ability to Search for support. This will find content across the Documentation, Community or Blog. Also, we have highlighted top questions on the support page so you may be able to get answers to your questions without even leaving the page.

Second, we are announcing support for Toodledo. Toodledo is a powerful online productivity tool. Manage your to-do list by creating and updating tasks.

Last, but definitely not least, we are adding support for Zendesk! Zendesk builds software for better customer relationships. With multiple products in its portfolio, Zendesk provides a customer service and support ticketing platform that gives businesses the ability to handle customer calls, emails, and other technical inquiries from a unified interface.

The post Make a copy of your flow appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Sign Up

First things first, you need to sign up for the product in order to start using it. You can do so by clicking Sign Up for free on the top right hand corner of the website, and provide an email address from your work or school.

If you’ve used an online Microsoft product (such as Office 365 or Power BI) with your email address, simply click on Sign in.

You are unable to use your personal email to use Microsoft Flow at this time. If you’d really prefer to use your personal email or are unable to use a work or school email, let me know why in the comments.

Find a template you like

We have a gallery full of templates that may interest you. Click on Browse on the top of the website to view all the templates available.

You can also search for a specific task that you are looking to accomplish – for instance, you may be looking for a workflow to go through your email, or you could search for a service that you are interested in creating a flow for – for instance, you may be interested in SharePoint.

Create your own flow

Let’s say you are tired of searching through your email for attachments, and find a template that backs up all of the attachments that your team receives onto Sharepoint.  You’ve found exactly the template to help you with this problem. Click on Use this flow.

Sign into the services that the template needs with your credentials. For this template, you need to connect to two services – Office 365 and Sharepoint.

Click Continue after you are done connecting to the services.

Next, you will need to provide required parameters as required by this template. This template requires you to provide your team’s email address and the Sharepoint site where you would like to store the attachments. It’s always a good idea for you to look through the steps in detail in case you want to change any of the default parameters.

Click on the first step, and also click on … to see more advanced parameters. In the designer, you can easily distinguish between the different steps of the flow by the names of the triggers and the actions and the services that they are associated with.

In addition to providing your team’s email address in the To line, you could also update the folder that you receive the attachments in, or the importance of the email in this step.

Click on the next step to save the attached file from your email to a folder on your team’s Sharepoint site. Provide your team’s sharepoint site url and the folder path where you’d like to store the email attachments. Note that you can browse to the folder path by clicking on …

You could also choose to modify the flow by adding additional steps or conditions. Just click the plus sign, and click on Add an action. A new custom step will open up in the designer.

A new custom step will open up in the designer.

Let’s say you also want your team to get a notification in Slack about a new item being created on the team’s Sharepoint folder.

Search for Slack and choose the trigger to Post Message. You’ll have to connect to the Slack service by signing in.

Provide the channel name where your team gets notifications, and a custom message.

At the bottom of the site, update the name of flow if you’d like, and click on Create Flow.

Once the flow is created, our backend engine will continuously monitor for the flow trigger to fire. In this case, the trigger is when your team receives an email with an attachment.

That’s it – you’re done! You’ll notice that attachments are automatically backed up in your team’s Sharepoint site folder and your team is notified on your Slack channel of new files.

Testing your newly created flow

For the folks who want to dig into the workings of our flow engine a bit more:

Test your new flow out by sending your team an email with an attachment. Once the email arrives in your mailbox, you can see if the attachment was successfully copied over to Sharepoint in the flow history.

Go to My Flows in the header and click on the information icon next to the flow name that you just created.

You’ll see the history of all the runs for this flow in this view and whether the specific run has failed or succeeded.

You can click on each of these rows to further investigate exactly what data was passed along the various steps of the flow. We also have a detailed blog post on testing and debugging flows if you are interested in this topic.

I would love to hear back on if you had a great experience getting started with your first flow. Please leave a comment on this blog post or join in on our community forum. Look forward to hearing from you!

The post Getting started with a Microsoft Flow template appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.