What is the Process Map?

The Process Map is designed to enhance process-centric troubleshooting and monitoring in Power Automate by providing increased visibility and efficiency. It offers a detailed, end-to-end view of a process that’s managed by a parent orchestrating flow, showing all of the associated child and desktop flows. The map also recognizes structural flow elements, such as conditions, and displays flows that didn’t execute due to specific conditional logic or upstream errors. This is critical for understanding how a problem in one part of the process can affect other parts and assists in taking appropriate countermeasures to address issues.

Key benefits:

• Accelerated troubleshooting: Quickly identify and resolve issues with an end-to-end, process-centric view that includes contextual information on runs, connections, and design-time aspects.
• Comprehensive visibility: Gain full transparency into your automation processes, including flows that were skipped or missed due to conditional logic or upstream issues.
• Enhanced impact analysis: Understand and analyze how issues affect the entire process, facilitating faster recovery and implement effective countermeasures.
• Stronger collaboration: End-to-end process visibility enables faster, context-rich communication with impacted teams, accelerating recovery and driving continuous improvement.

Key features

• Runs view: Displays the main flow run that orchestrates the process and its child runs, enabling users to track execution, identify issues, and optimize processes.
• Overview view: Provides a design-time process hierarchy view with connected subprocesses, offering quick insights and serving as the future home for aggregated process data and configurations.
• Runs tab integration: We’ve enhanced the flow runs page with new run row hover options. New icons let you create or view process maps for the selected process run and its child runs.

How to get started

This feature is being rolled-out now and you can test it today in the US preview region. Further details are available in the Process Map documentation.

The post Announcing the Process map public preview in Power Automate appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We’ve heard from customers the importance of clearly understanding the health of their enterprise automations through detailed analytics and proactive recommendations. To support this need, there are updates to monitoring and analytics tools in Automation Center and Power Platform Admin Center:

• Monitor cross environments the health of automations in Power Platform Admin Center
• Operate and troubleshoot automations in Automation Center with the hierarchical run history view and copilot generally available
• Increased action log capacity and near-real-time logging for Desktop flows with logs V2
• New advanced desktop flow recommendations

Unveiling Public preview of monitoring Power Automate in Power Platform Admin Center 

Following up on the announcement made at Ignite for Power Apps monitoring in PPAC, we are excited to announce that Power Automate resources are now available in the Monitoring Hub in Public Preview.

The Monitoring Hub is an innovative experience that enables admins to observe and maintain optimal operations by managing changes to production environments, detecting and remediating incidents, and maintaining business continuity.

The Monitoring page brings attention to resources with degraded operational health and highlights which resources have opportunities for improvement.

Thanks to the new Power Automate view in Monitoring Hub, you can now track the success rate of your cloud and desktop flows, the machine wait time in queue of your desktop flows to monitor the scalability of the allocated machines, across environments. There are many more resource types and associated metrics to come in the future.

For automations running in a Managed Environment, contextual recommendations help you enhancing their health and efficiency. The recommendation can be shared in Teams with stakeholders who can then deep dive in Automation center to troubleshoot.

Run history in Automation Center is now generally available

Automation center is a central hub for efficient monitoring and troubleshooting experiences for automation processes across Power Automate at scale. The automation center provides comprehensive visualizations to monitor the health of the automations, quickly detect issues or trends, and troubleshoot problems more efficiently. 

Whether you’re a developer, operator, Center of Excellence team member, or business analyst, the automation center provides a centralized view of the activity of your automations within an environment. It features a user-friendly interface with dashboards that show the health status of flows and work queues, desktop flow activity and for Managed Environment recommendations.

We are excited to announce that the hierarchical flow runs view and copilot are now available in general availability. 

Hierarchical Flow runs view

The runs tab presents a consolidated view of cloud and desktop flow run data displayed in a hierarchical list view. You can easily see at a glance the status of all dependent runs whether they succeeded or failed.

Copilot automation insights

When you are looking for more detailed insights, you can use Copilot to analyze your automation activity. Copilot in Automation Center is able to answer questions about your cloud and desktop flow runs, work queue data and documentation (preview).

Desktop flow logs V2 with near-real-time logging is now generally available

Building on the strong foundations of Desktop flow logs V2, we are pleased to announce the general availability of near real-time logging of desktop flow action logs for logs V2 together with drastically increased action log capacity. This feature provides near-real-time log updates of cloud-initiated desktop flows, which is essential for monitoring long-running flows.

New advanced desktop flow recommendations

Orchestration-based recommendations for desktop flow runs (preview)

You can now receive orchestration-based recommendations when an unattended desktop flow run is queued but can’t start due to a locked or disconnected user session of the same user on the machine. 

The “Desktop flows not running” recommendation shows up in the Automation Center recommendation section. The recommendation provide the details of all the affected desktop flow runs, allowing you to take corrective actions within a 10-minute timeout window.

Repair with Copilot for unattended desktop flow runs (preview)

End of last year we’ve launched the public preview of Repair with Copilot that provides attended and unattended selector repair suggestions through Copilot. If you enabled repair at runtime for unattended runs in the Power Platform admin center, you receive repair requests directly under Recommendations within the Automation Center experience.

Once enabled at both the environment and flow level, you’ll receive recommendations when an unattended cloud flow-initiated desktop flow is at risk of failing due to an error with UI or browser automation actions. This could occur when the intended UI element for interaction cannot be located using one or more preconfigured selectors.

The post Enhanced enterprise automation observability appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

   

• Enabled (default): Suitable for most scenarios where you want to capture desktop flow run action logs as before. It’s useful for troubleshooting, monitoring and auditing purposes, as well as for analyzing the performance of your desktop flows.​
• On run failure: Useful if you want to reduce the amount of log data generated by your desktop flow runs and are not required to capture successful run logs. By logging only when a runtime error occurs, you can minimize the amount of data stored in case you have limited storage capacity and don’t need to audit, retain, monitor or report on successful runs.
• Disabled: Applies to situations where you are not required to and also don’t wish to record desktop flow run action logs at all.

Learn more:

• How to configure or disable desktop flow action logs per environment

The post Enhanced governance control for desktop flow logs appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Key features

Work queues provide enterprise-scale orchestration and management capabilities, enabling complex processes and automations to be broken down into smaller parts and processed independently, resulting in optimized performance and reduced risk of SLA breaches.

Built-in human-in-the-loop and monitoring experiences foster seamless cross-team collaboration between business, operations, and IT, ensuring that everyone is on the same page and working towards common data processing goals that adhere to prioritization and defined SLA’s.

Supported processing types

Whether you want to process work queues through digital process automation (DPA) with cloud flows, robotic process automation (RPA) with desktop flows, or integrations through direct Dataverse API access, we’ve got you covered!

Get started with work queues

Ready to streamline your automations and learn more about work queues? Let’s get started today by visiting our documentation!

The post Microsoft Power Automate work queues are generally available appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

In this article we look at how a team at Komatsu Australia built a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution with Power Automate and AI Builder to automate their manual and repetitive processes for fixing invoices. They went from purchasing licenses to an RPA solution in production within a short span of four weeks.

Like any business, Komatsu Australia sends and receives a high volume of invoices from suppliers each year. For the parts department, a small team that manages over 52,000 invoices annually, fixing invoices was a manual and tedious process that put immense pressure given the size of their team. A solution architect, Eric Cheng, looked towards Power Automate and AI builder to automate this process. He used one supplier as a pioneer RPA use case. The RPA solution saved them 300 hours a year in invoicing for this supplier alone, and they’re now expanding it to cover all suppliers.

In this story:

• Meet Eric
• Business scenario
• Before Power Automate
• Power Automate solution
• Summary of impact
• Solution architecture
• Expanding ROI through the Automation CoE Starter Kit
• Creating value together – citizen development program
• Examples of Power Apps built by a citizen developer
• Looking ahead

Meet Eric

Eric Cheng is a Digital Solutions Architect in the Business Technology and Systems team at Komatsu Australia with over 13 years of experience in developing and architecting solutions using Microsoft technologies. He has been one of the early adopters of Power Platform at Komatsu Australia and his team has built several solutions to date.

Drawing on his experience and knowledge of Power Platform, Eric looked towards Power Automate and AI Builder to automate the invoicing fixing process after having success with another similar use case. The user experience of Power Automate for desktop combined with the learning content from Microsoft Learn made it intuitive for Eric to quickly upskill and start building RPA solutions.

As an initial RPA solution, Eric automated a manual and tedious process where a specific customer required invoices to be submitted through their online third-party system. It required branch managers to spend considerable time each week on this manual process. The solution built using Power Automate for desktop saved hundreds of hours a year. The success of this initial solution led to Eric taking on the task to automate another process that involved a much larger volume of invoices.

Business scenario

The parts department receives a high volume of invoices at all times of the day with over 52,000 invoices annually across 259 Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) and suppliers. A small three-person invoice processing team is responsible for fixing these invoices, a manual process which requires each invoice to be read, matched against the purchase order, and processed into an IBM AS400 mainframe system used for the management of parts orders between Komatsu Australia’s suppliers and distribution centers.

The team works under tremendous pressure daily to ensure the constant stream of invoices are processed as delays could result in purchase order variances or impact downstream processes such as receiving goods or picking of parts in their distribution centers. A pilot for RPA automation was undertaken to help relieve the invoice processing team and reduce delays and impacts.

Before Power Automate

One of the local suppliers in their system was selected as the pilot candidate to automate the invoice fixing process. Prior to automation, the invoicing team would receive over 1,100 PDF invoices for the supplier in an Outlook shared mailbox.

The manual process was as follows:

• The invoice processing team would regularly monitor the mailbox for new invoices and download them as they arrive for processing.
• Each invoice is reviewed, and information is extracted from the header and line items into a new CSV file using Excel.
• A separate Purchase Order report is downloaded to validate the data and a three-way match is performed between the CSV file data and the report data using a series of Excel macros and VLOOKUP functions.
• The CSV file is then uploaded to their IBM AS400 mainframe via a web portal known as eParts. Each invoice is then processed in the mainframe where any additional charges such as tax, packaging and freight are added before it is sent to their warehouse management system for goods receipting which involves matching the received goods against the purchase orders and generating the packing slips for orders to be picked.

The key challenges of this manual repetitive invoice fixing process were:

• Invoices received at all times of the day from the supplier.
• Small processing team of three working under pressure, was difficult to keep up with the invoice processing when a person is away.
• Invoice processing goes through annual peak periods such as end of financial year which further increased the daily volume of invoices received.
• Delays impacted the warehouse management system and downstream processes.
• Prone to human errors in reading invoices and entering the data into system.

Power Automate solution – Invoice fixing automation

Prior to using the Power Platform, Komatsu Australia had already successfully automated over 18 processes using another vendor’s RPA platform. However, the costs of the vendor RPA platform were significant which presented a challenge for automation scalability. Komatsu Australia turned to Power Automate as it was more cost effective and the automation capabilities were richer, especially when combined with the rest of Power Platform which included AI Builder document processing.

To reduce the pressure on the invoice processing team, unattended automation with Power Automate was utilized. Unattended enables a process to be fully automated in the background with Power Automate desktop and cloud flows, without needing human interaction or decision making. This was perfect as it helped eliminate manually monitoring the Outlook shared mailbox for invoices, validating invoices against purchase orders, and entering invoices into their mainframe system to initiate downstream processes.

Within four weeks, Eric developed and went live with the unattended RPA solution. Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) best practices were also followed as several environments were set up for the development, testing, and enterprise deployment of the solution.

The solution utilizes Power Automate and AI Builder to automate the processing of invoices end-to-end with the mainframe system, as follows:

Automation of the invoicing fixing processing with Power Automate.

Power Automate cloud flows

• The cloud flow runs on a schedule and retrieves emails from an Outlook shared mailbox.
• When an email with a matching condition is retrieved, the cloud flow will download the attached invoices as PDF files and send it to the AI Builder document processing model.
• The results returned from the AI Builder document processing model is saved into a SQL database.
• The cloud flow then verifies all invoice data against the purchase order details in an Azure Synapse data lake including details such as supplier number, purchase order line-item numbers, part numbers, etc.
• The cloud flow then triggers a desktop flow to create a CSV file of the invoice data which is loaded into the IBM AS400 mainframe system.
• The cloud flow then triggers a second desktop flow which processes the invoices into the IBM AS400 mainframe system. This includes adding any additional charges such as taxes, freight, packaging, etc.
• Lastly, processed invoices are archived into a separate table in the SQL database for audit history.

AI Builder document processing

• A custom document processing AI model was built, trained, and published.
• A sample size of 10 invoices were used to train the AI model with a 99% accuracy score.

A custom AI builder model was built to analyze and extract data from PDF invoices received and a Power Automate cloud flow saves the extracted data into SQL database which then executes corresponding desktop flows.

Power Automate desktop flow (1)

• The desktop flow queries a SQL database and generates a CSV file in a predefined schema.
• The desktop flow then launches an Edge browser, navigates to and logs into the eParts web portal.
• The desktop flow then browses to the CSV file and uploads the file into the eParts web portal.

Top screenshot – CSV file is uploaded into the eParts web portal, bottom screenshot – Power Automate desktop flow steps for the CSV file upload.

Power Automate desktop flow (2)

• The desktop flow will open a terminal window and logs into our parts mainframe system.
• The desktop flow will traverse across various screens and enter data as part of the invoice fixing process.
• The desktop flow will generate and email an exception report to relevant stakeholders.

Top screenshot – The terminal window of the mainframe system for processing the invoice data, bottom screenshot – Power Automate desktop flow steps for the data entry on the mainframe system.

Summary of impact

By automating the invoice fixing process, Komatsu Australia realized several key benefits:

• Automated 1,200 invoices across 1,190 SKUs and is projected to provide 300 hours of efficiency gain per year for just the one supplier alone.
• Reduced errors by eliminating human data entry.
• Enabled 24/7 invoice processing, including weekends for overseas suppliers.
• Freed up capacity to the processing team of 3, allowing them to focus on monitoring the process and managing exceptions.

The success of the automation for the pioneer local supplier provides a blueprint for the automation of the remaining suppliers of the process. By applying it to their top three OEMs, the savings will be 300 hours per month rather than annually.

“With this one single supplier, we’ve automated over 1,000 invoices annually and realized an efficiency gain of 300 hours per year.”

Solution architecture

The following is a representation of the high-level solution architecture that supports the automation of the invoice fixing process for their parts department. Power Automate for desktop and cloud flows orchestrate the automation end-to-end, with AI Builder performing the extract of the invoice data stored into the SQL database. All invoice data is then verified against the purchase order data in an Azure Synapse data lake which is then generated as a CSV to upload into the eParts portal followed by the processing in the IBM AS400 mainframe system used for the management of parts orders.

High level solution architecture that combines Power Automate and several services in Power Platform and Azure for invoice fixing in the Parts department. .

Expanding ROI through Automation CoE Starter Kit

Prior to the development of the invoice fixing RPA solution, the Business Technology and Systems team sought out to lay the foundation for automation enablement. It was important for Komatsu Australia to have a foundation to build upon to scale their automation with Power Automate for desktop and cloud flows. With the proven success and impact of automation in the invoice processing area, they’re expanding their usage of Power Automate across the organization and exploring reducing the dependency on the existing RPA platform.

Eric and his team have rolled out the Automation Centre of Excellence (CoE) starter kit (preview) to manage and have visibility across the automation development lifecycle. The Automation CoE starter kit has enabled the following:

• Built-in predictive scoring and return on investment analytics enabled the team to quantitatively prioritize the backlog and visualize the health and performance of the automation using a Power BI report.
• The reporting capabilities have helped the team build business use cases for senior management to understand the value delivered to their organization across the automation pipeline.
• Ability to track metrics and monitor the automation in real-time has helped ensure the automation is operating efficiently and without issues.

Prioritized backlog of automation solutions and ROI real-time insights with the Automation CoE Starter Kit.

“Being able to visualize ROI in real time is beneficial as it provides a quantitative justification for each automation. This ability allows senior management to see the value delivered to the business across the automation pipeline.”

Creating value together – citizen development program

As part of a “Creating Value Together” initiative, Eric and his team have started to build their own community of citizen developers at Komatsu Australia. Their first cohort includes eight employees from different areas of the company such as the distribution centre, sales, and operations. These citizen developers have no prior experience developing software solutions. The diversity in business aptitude will help accelerate the development of solutions in alignment with their business processes. They’ve setup a Yammer channel and Teams group where citizen developers are encouraged to interact with each other and learn through discussions. These interactions have helped continue to increase the learning momentum and grow interest in building low-code solutions. All citizen developers are also encouraged to complete certifications to increase their expertise as they start to scale with Power Platform.

Collaboration amongst the citizen developers using Microsoft Teams and Yammer.

Examples of Power Apps built by a citizen developer

Matt Burton, a senior controller in the New Construction Experience team, is in the process of building two apps as part of the Creating Value Together program.

Scanning and identifying equipment attachments

As an industry-leading manufacturer and supplier of equipment, Komatsu Australia receives numerous equipment parts from vendors that need to be delivered across their branches for customer sales. One type of equipment part is Komatsu Genuine Attachments (KGA), such as a quick hitch, bucket, or wear package for excavators and loader machines. When these KGAs are received at the distribution center, the team at the center are required to code “attachment tags” and link these tags to the KGAs for stock management. Matt is developing a Power Apps canvas app using the built-in NFC tag reader capabilities to enable employees to identify the KGAs at their branches when the attachment tags are scanned. Additionally, by scanning the KGAs, it quickly gives visibility of the stock on hand in comparison with the data in their stock management system.

Changing the destination for new equipment

Business Managers needed an effective way to change the inbound port of entry for new equipment before it leaves an OEM site. Matt is developing a mobile app with Power Apps to simply this process and provide Business Managers the flexibility to update destinations from their phones. Upon submission, cloud flows are triggered to notify the Logistics team and request approval. Based on the submission type, two different actions are processed. If the change in destination is local (within the same country) – an email is generated, and the Business Managers are notified. If the change in destination is country-to-country such as from Australia to New Zealand – an email is sent to the person who creates OEM purchase orders to notify them that a change of destination has been approved which requires a new purchase order to be raised for the new country, and the existing purchase order is cancelled in the ERP system. For every change in destination that occurs, each one is logged into SharePoint list to maintain a history of changes.

Looking ahead

Scaling the community across the company

The long-term goal for Komatsu Australia is to roll out their “Creating Value Together” citizen development program with the aim of organically growing their own no-code/low-code developer community. The pilot citizen developers will become champions within their teams to encourage others as the program is rolled out across the company. Eric and his team are committed to having the right mechanisms in place to monitor and support the citizen developers to ensure the growth of their citizen developer program.

“A large part of our citizen development program is to create and foster a community of practice because in the future state, it isn’t IT who is necessarily going to be supporting these solutions, it’s the citizen developers themselves and the business.”

Aligning Power Platform with ALM and monitoring best practices

To support their long-term RPA growth with Power Automate for desktop, Eric and his team are in the process of setting up their solutions with Azure DevOps for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM). ALM is already in place with many of their existing code-first applications and the same best practice is to be applied with their Power Automate RPA solutions. This is to ensure there are approvals and that checkpoints are performed prior to going live with each RPA solution. Another tool they are using is Azure App Insights for monitoring their enterprise application and there are plans on incorporating this with their Power Automate RPA solutions. The long-term goal is to use the Microsoft ecosystem for solution development, monitoring, and governance for digital enablement at Komatsu Australia.

“We can see the capabilities increasing, the maturity of the Power Platform rapidly accelerating – it’s delivering a lot of great value for our organization in terms of efficiencies.”

Related links

• Microsoft Power Platform Automation CoE starter kit
• Komatsu Industries optimizes machinery up-time and predicts remaining useful life of components using Azure Machine Learning
• Komatsu Group’s ‘workplace safety’ approach offers insights, business improvements using Microsoft Teams
• Mining equipment manufacturer helps safeguard vital intellectual property with Microsoft Information Protection
• Smart factory base KOM-MICS visualizes and improves wider production sites with Azure
• Komatsu achieves breakthrough performance gains and savings with Azure SQL Database Managed Instance

The post Komatsu Australia accelerates hyper automation with Power Automate – from licensing to production in 4 weeks appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Today, we are pleased to announce a whitepaper about deploying an automation program in your organization. This guidance has been designed for the Automation CoE (Center of Excellence) or IT admin looking to enable and govern the rollout of Power Automate for RPA (Robotic Process Automation) and other hyperautomation scenarios. This whitepaper outlines key considerations for planning, deploying, and managing an Automation Center of Excellence (CoE) for hyperautomation scenarios in Power Automate.

Following are some of the key benefits of the whitepaper:

• Best practices for Automation CoEs for enterprise deployments
• End-to-end automation lifecycle
• Easy to follow checklist model pointing to external deep-dive content
• Based on industry’s best practices (HEAT)

Get your copy of the whitepaper today (https://aka.ms/autocoeadminwhitepaper)

Highlights from the whitepaper

Overview

HEAT (Holistic Enterprise Automation Techniques)

The architecture represented below shows the various components and services covered in the whitepaper.

Empower

The start of any successful automation project is to ensure that key stakeholders understand the automation capabilities of the platform. In this stage, users new to Power Automate can learn about the automation capabilities in Power Automate.

Discover & Plan

This section begins with guidance on discovering existing processes within your organization that may be well suited for RPA. Next, this section helps you plan your RPA environment including provisioning compute, network, accounts, and security. Finally, this section discusses the licensing and capacity considerations for the common services that will make up your RPA solution.

The figure shows a conceptual diagram of various stakeholders in an Automation CoE program together with what they’re focusing on.

The figure below shows a typical environment strategy for RPA deployments. An RPA solution environment comprises Power Automate environments, Azure resources (resource groups, VMs, storage, Azure Key Vault etc.).

Design

This section begins with a discussion of establishing a consistent set of organization-level policies for your RPA solutions. Next, this section describes the considerations for building high-throughput and scalable RPA solutions. This section also includes a discussion on common components such logging, credential management, and testing. Finally, this section talks about reusing and sharing the RPA solutions you build.

Build & Test

This section dives deeper on planning, building each of the components that attribute to RPA solution, managing on-premises connectivity using direct connectivity, securing sensitive information, custom logging capabilities, and more considerations for building a robust RPA solution. Finally, this section talks about the various aspects of testing the solution.

The figure below shows a typical automation development lifecycle.

Deploy & Manage

This section begins with planning the lifecycle of an RPA solution and deploying it safely to production. This section also talks about administering the deployment process using various tools and using the robust analytics framework to monitor the operational aspects of the solution. Finally, it discusses building reports out of the monitoring data to address any operational challenges proactively and reactively.

The figure below shows a typical ALM process which includes Microsoft Power Platform solutions and Azure resources.

The figure below shows a typical monitoring solution which can be used by makers as well as CoEs to monitor their automations.

Secure & Govern

This section begins with a discussion on establishing a baseline security posture for your organization. It addresses extending the framework around different layers of security: identity management, endpoint, network, infrastructure application and data. This section also discusses building a vast and robust framework to enable proactive and reactive monitoring across your organization with respect to your RPA solutions.

The figure shows different security layers to apply for RPA. This builds on the Zero Trust security model by Microsoft which offers defense in depth layering security. The architecture depicted below elaborates on a model that offers 6 layers of security – Identity, Endpoints, Data, Applications Infrastructure and Network

Nurture

Low code development is the core of RPA automation and promotes involvement of citizen developers. Citizen developers have a key role either in the success of automation platform by either developing or migrating the business process or to work with the technical team as business process experts.

Automation CoEs can help organizations scale by establishing guard rails and establishing patterns for driving consistency and ROI. The figure below outlines some of the benefits an organization can realize by following HEAT methodology.

Real-world implementation example

The following diagram depicts an example of an architecture that combines Power Automate RPA and Azure resources.

This whitepaper was a result of the great collaboration and hard work of a lot of people, inside and outside of Microsoft. In particular, we would like to thank the AIS (Applied Information Sciences) team — Anitha Natarajan, Jonathan Eckman, Lav Gupta, Brent Wodicka, Vishwas Lele — for their great partnership. As an Azure Services Integrator working with the platform since 2009, and a leading partner in Power Platform, their real-world expertise helped us make this whitepaper more actionable for our readers.

Call to action

Get your copy of the whitepaper today (https://aka.ms/autocoeadminwhitepaper)!

Resources

• Automation CoE Blueprint https://aka.ms/autocoeblueprint
• Automation CoE Strategy https://aka.ms/autocoestrategy
• HEAT https://aka.ms/rpapnp
• HEAT video series https://aka.ms/rpapnpvideo
• Automation Admin & Governance Whitepaper https://aka.ms/autocoeadminwhitepaper
• Manage Power Automate for Desktop on Windows https://aka.ms/padonwindowspnp
• Hyperautomation SAP Playbook (https://aka.ms/MicrosoftRPAPlaybookForSAPGUI) & video series (https://aka.ms/AutomateItSAPSeries)
• Automate It video series: https://aka.ms/AutomateIt
• RPA in a Day training: https://aka.ms/RPAinaDayPackage

The post Administer and govern a low-code intelligent automation platform whitepaper: Enterprise deployment for RPA and more in Power Automate appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Today we’re excited to announce the first hyperautomation special video series, which has been designed for fusion teams of IT Pros, Professional and Citizen Automation Developers, who want to learn more about the different SAP integration and automation options available in Power Automate and the broader Power Platform.

The series includes nine episodes that introduces you to several no-code, low-code, and pro-code hyperautomation development techniques, leveraging Power Automate, Process advisor, Power Virtual Agents, Power Apps, Microsoft Dataverse and Microsoft Teams.

Episode highlights

Episode 1: Introduction to SAP automation in Power Automate
In the first episode, we’ll introduce you to the overall Power Platform and the different SAP integration & automation options available in Power Automate.
Episode 2: Uncover process automation opportunities with Process Advisor
		In the second episode, we’ll use Process advisor’s process mining features, to identify process bottlenecks of a fictitious purchase requisition process. The outcome of this analysis will be used to improve the process and to apply automation with the help of Power Automate.
Episode 3: Building SAP automations with the SAP ERP Connector
In the third episode, we’ll build an SAP-connected on-hand inventory lookup chatbot, using Power Virtual Agents, Power Automate and the out-of-the box SAP ERP Connector. In less than 15 minutes you’ll have a fully functionality chatbot which is published to Microsoft Teams, making it available 24/7 through the Microsoft Teams mobiles app.
Episode 4: Building Custom Connectors for SAP OData Endpoints
		In the fourth episode, we’ll build a Custom Connector from scratch that connects to OData endpoints on the SAP ES5 demo system. We then use the Custom Connector in our low-code purchase requisition Power App.
Episode 5: Introduction to SAP GUI based RPA in Power Automate Desktop
In the fifth episode, we’ll discuss the different SAP GUI RPA options in Power Automate Desktop which can range from no-code to pro-code techniques. In the following three episode we will see detailed walkthroughs of each approach.
Episode 6: No-Code RPA with SAP GUI in Power Automate Desktop
		In episode six, we’ll show you how build an SAP GUI automation flow using pure no-code techniques. The use case is aligned to the no-code option you’ll find in the RPA Playbook for SAP GUI automation.
Episode 7: Low-code RPA with SAP GUI in Power Automate Desktop
In episode seven, we’ll show you how to build an SAP GUI automation desktop flow using no-code and low-code techniques. You will learn how to apply custom UI selectors and use regular expressions to extract dynamic data from a string.
Episode 8: Pro-Code RPA with SAP GUI in Power Automate Desktop
		In episode eight, we’ll show you how to use SAP’s own recording engine and use its scripting output to playback the automation from Power Automate Desktop. We’ll used pro-code selector techniques for SAP GUI element identification and leveraging regular expressions to extract number from a string.
Episode 9: Web UI-based RPA with SAP Fiori and Power Automate Desktop
In the ninth and last episode, we’ll showcase Web automation techniques that can be used to automate SAP Fiori based applications in Power Automate Desktop. This will cover advanced Web automation techniques to support dynamic selectors of the SAPUI5 (SAP User Interface for HTML5) user interface.

Call to action

Start watching the full series today and download the latest RPA playbook for SAP GUI based automation with Power Automate to learn more.

Useful links

Power Automate learning resources
https://flow.microsoft.com/blog/power-automate-learning-resources/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVe3CGruiOk&list=PLi9EhCY4z99UlSA7ykeZtSLraL8qlhFeq
Process advisor
https://flow.microsoft.com/process-advisor/
https://flow.microsoft.com/blog/reduce-process-bottlenecks-with-process-advisor-for-power-automate-now-generally-available/
SAP ERP connector
https://powerapps.microsoft.com/blog/general-availability-of-the-sap-erp-connector/
https://powerapps.microsoft.com/blog/connecting-to-an-sap-odata-api-from-a-canvas-app/
https://powerapps.microsoft.com/blog/introducing-the-sap-erp-connector/
https://docs.microsoft.com/connectors/saperp/
https://community.dynamics.com/365/mbas/f/microsoft-business-applications-summit-gallery-2020/391095/sap-surround-options-with-the-power-platform
https://powervirtualagents.microsoft.com/en-us/
Custom connector
https://docs.microsoft.com/power-automate/developer/register-custom-api
https://docs.microsoft.com/powerapps/maker/canvas-apps/register-custom-api
RPA Playbook for SAP GUI and Power Automate
https://flow.microsoft.com/blog/rpa-playbook-for-sap-gui-automation-with-power-automate-api-flows-ui-flows-and-power-automate-desktop/
Regular expressions
https://docs.microsoft.com/power-automate/desktop-flows/actions-reference/text#parsetext
https://docs.microsoft.com/dotnet/standard/base-types/regular-expression-language-quick-reference

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This dashboard can be used across IT Operations, RPA CoE and business users to analyze desktop flow run logs and their performances, in a fully customizable Power BI starter template.

Besides the performance-based analytics, it also provides pro-code script reporting for actions like Invoking Web services, VBScript, PowerShell and even Python giving you the insights needed to control and govern your RPA deployment across the Microsoft Dataverse environment.

No additional Power Platform components are required to deploy the starter template since it directly imports the relevant Microsoft Dataverse tables through its Web API platform. This dashboard is complementary to the very comprehensive dashboard found in our CoE Starter Kit.

A deep-dive walkthrough of a sample dashboard implementation can be watched here on the Automate It YouTube series and a setup video can be found here.

Get your copy of the dashboard today and start analyzing Desktop flow run logs with Power BI.

Dashboard highlights

Overview
The Overview report shows desktop flow run statistics with information such as flows by run mode and status, but also action insights and pro-code scripting usage.
Desktop flows
		The Desktop flow report list all desktop flows within a specific environment with basic statistics. The Pro-Script check mark indicates that there are flow runs that include actions like Run VBScript, PowerShell, Python etc.
Desktop flow runs
The Desktop flow runs report will list all flow runs with their status, run duration, run mode and potential error message. Multiple filters can be applied enabling efficient and powerful flow run monitoring.
Run performance
		The Run performance report shows flow run performances with day-over-day changes. By right-clicking you’ll be able to drill-through to the flow runs of that specific data point (e.g. duration for runs on 2021-1-31).
Control chart
The Control chart report shows flows that occasionally or consistently perform outside of upper and lower control limits. The default control limits have been defined with n-standard deviations and control variability around the mean processing time for a particular day and flow.
Script actions
		The Script actions report provides an overview of all desktop flows that contain at least one scripting action or command line commands. These scripting insights will allow you to further strengthen your security and governance strategies.
Large logs
The Large logs report will list all desktop flow runs that have an action log exceeding 16 MB in log size.
Runs (drill-through)
		The Runs (drill-through) report will be launched when you right click on a row in the Desktop Flow Monitor grid or the Run Perf. Chart report. This report shows all flow runs of a selected flow run.
Run details (drill-through)
The Run details (drill-through) report will be launched when you right click on a row in the Desktop Flow Monitor grid or the Runs (drill-through) report. This report shows the action log history of a selected flow run.
Scripts (drill-through)
		The Runs (drill-through) report will be launched when you right click on a row in the Desktop Flow Monitor grid or the Run Perf. Chart report. This report shows all flow runs of a selected flow run.
Web Service (drill-through)
The Web Service (drill-through) report will be launched when you right click on a row in the Desktop Flow Monitor grid or the Runs (drill-through) report. This report shows action log history that are includes REST API and web service interactivity of a selected flow run.

Get the dashboard

Download the dashboard and start analyzing today.

Disclaimer

Although the underlying features and components used to build the Desktop flow Analytics starter template (such as Dataverse APIs, Power Automate and Power BI) are fully supported, the template itself represents sample implementations of these features and comes without any support. Our customers and community can use and customize these reports to implement monitoring capabilities in their organizations.

This Desktop flow Analytics starter template is provided “as is”, without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and noninfringement. In no event shall the authors or copyright holders be liable for any claim, damages or other liability, whether in an action of contract, tort or otherwise, arising from, out of or in connection with the software or the use or other dealings in the software

The post Advanced Power Automate RPA run log analytics with Power BI and Dataverse appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

In this playbook you will learn how to apply simple to advanced, no-code to pro-code SAP automation techniques, leveraging Power Automate, UI flows and the recently announced public preview of Power Automate Desktop.

Whether you just want to learn about Power Automate’s enterprise automation capabilities or have an upcoming SAP automation project involving Power Automate, this playbook is for you.

Get your copy of the playbook today and start automating SAP GUI-based workloads with Power Automate.

Playbook highlights

Sample Use Case API & RPA based flows
To showcase our API- and UI flow-based automation capabilities, we’ve based the playbook on fictitious, easy-to-follow use cases, allowing you to instantly apply any learnings in your own environment.
Extended sample use case including RPA pre-validation steps
		Here we’re building on the previous sample use case and extend it to include the out-of-the-box SAP ERP (preview) connector for Power Platform. Before starting the RPA-based automation process, we validate first through an API call that the personnel number exists in SAP.
Typical lifecycle of an enterprise RPA bot
Microsoft Power Automate empowers everyone to automate. However, it is important to understand that building sophisticated, robust, and impactful RPA solutions, takes time. And most of this time is spent on production readiness, advanced retry and exception handling.
Low-code automation techniques through Power Automate Desktop Actions
		With the addition of Power Automate Desktop, it is quicker and easier than ever to develop delightful, timesaving low-code SAP GUI automations. Power Automate Desktop enables you to build from very simple to highly sophisticated end-to-end automation solutions.
Pro-code automation through VBScript leveraging SAP’s own scripting engine
SAP’s scripting engine records each mouse click and keystroke as VBScript commands, and stores it in an output file. You can then edit the code in your editor of choice.
Centralized sensitive data and credential store using Azure Key Vault
		While this configuration step is not mandatory to create and run UI flows in Power Automate, we highly recommend using Azure Key Vault as central cloud repository for your secure strings like SAP Passwords, SAP User Names etc.
Basic exception handling with Try-Catch-Finally pattern
The Try-Catch-Finally pattern can be configured through specific action settings under “Configure run after”. In this case, actions within the Catch scope will run only if there’s an exception in the previous Try scope.
The anatomy of an SAP GUI automation script
		The SAP GUI object model consists of many referenceable and assignable GUI components. Most of these have been designed from ground up to mimic user interactions through scripting. Here’s a list of most frequently used GUI components: GuiFrameWindow GuiUserArea GuiTextField GuiComboBox

Get the playbook

Download the RPA SAP Playbook and start automating today.

The post RPA Playbook for SAP GUI Automation with Power Automate: API flows, UI flows, and Power Automate Desktop appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.