Grant Archibald, Author at Microsoft Power Platform Blog

Introducing Approvals kit

Grant Archibald — Mon, 11 Dec 2023 16:00:05 +0000

One of the key use cases that we see across every industry and every department is approvals. Power Platform allows you to streamline your business by digitalizing the approval experiences.

Today, we are happy to introduce, “Approvals kit” – a kit from Power CAT that will accelerate building your approvals faster than ever – available as a public preview. Approvals kit is a no-code ready-made kit built on top of Power Platform components that allows your organization to configure sophisticated approvals such as conditional branching, delegation, admin overrides and more – all without the need to write a single code – empowering every person in your organization to “do more with less” for your organization’s approval needs.

Approvals Kit Overview

Diagram of an approval workflow example using Contoso Coffee as a fictitious customer.

Approvals Kit Overview – Watch video

What can you do with Approvals Kit?

Approvals kit is template built with over 20 cloud flows and Power Apps app that you can install in any Dataverse environment. By using the approvals kit, you are able to quickly set up the following requirements that are typically required in any approval processes.

– Multi-stage approvals

– Conditional approvals

– Delegation

– Out of office

– Organizational calendar

– Workdays based timeout

– Reassignment

What is the difference between Approvals connector and the Approvals Kit?

Approvals kit is a template that is based on the standard Approvals connector, but takes things to the next level by leveraging the power of Power Apps, Power Automate, and Dataverse. By combining these low code tools together, the Approvals Kit offers you a prepackaged solution to handle common scenarios that save you time to building a custom solution for the equivalent features that the kit provides.

Licenses

One of the key differences when compared to the standard Approvals connector is the Approvals kit is built with premium features. Given these features you will need both Power Apps licenses and Power Automate licenses to support user designing and manage approvals.

End users making approvals will depend on the integration required could use standard seeded licenses or they may also need Power Apps licenses if you elect for a more integrated approval process that displays approval history.

Who is involved with the Approvals Kit?

The Approvals Kit for Power Platform is designed to support multiple people in your organization, including Power Platform administrators, approvals administrators and business users who need to make approval decisions. In summary the key roles are:

Power Platform administrators can create and assign environments and import the approvals kit solution as system administrators or system customizers.

Approvals administrators such as sales directors, and power users can configure the kit to match business requirements and analyze approval processes for improvement opportunities.

Approvers who could be sales managers, and business users can use the kit to streamline their approval workflows and improve efficiency.

Getting Started

Approvals Kit documentation https://aka.ms/ApprovalsKit : Public landing page of the kit, describes what and where approvals kit is along with usage personas and frequently asked questions.

Learn Module https://aka.ms/ApprovalsKit/Learn : Self-guided or instructor led delivery to get started using the approvals kit.

Instructor Guide https://aka.ms/ApprovalsKit/Instructor : New automated setup experience to take a group of learners through the learn module content.

Office Hours https://aka.ms/ApprovalsKit/OfficeHours : Join our regular office hours on the second Monday of each month.

The post Introducing Approvals kit appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Introducing the Automation Kit for Power Platform

Grant Archibald — Tue, 20 Sep 2022 13:30:18 +0000

To establish a successful automation culture, you typically need to build an Automation Center of Excellence (CoE) to maximize your organization’s investments and define guardrails to develop RPA and other hyperautomation scenarios for digital transformation in a controlled manner. Back in December 2021, we blogged about HEAT (Holistic Enterprise Automation Techniques) and automation adoption best practices.

We also released a private preview version of Automation Kit (previously Automation CoE Starter Kit), which has been implemented by many customers across the globe at early stages of the development.

Today, we are happy to introduce the Automation Kit for Power Platform, now available to the public as an open source GitHub project.

What is the Automation Kit?

The Automation Kit for Power Platform is designed to help organizations manage, govern, and scale automation platform adoption based on industry best practices. The toolkit is a collection of components and tools based on HEAT concepts and built using Power Apps and Power Automate, so you can easily extend and customize the kit to your needs.

The Automation Kit for Power Platform helps you accelerate your organization’s automation CoE. It includes a set of Power Apps applications and Power Automate flows that provide ready-made solutions to manage your automation projects, capture near-real-time value tracking, and gain insights to your automation initiatives. The kit was built based on feedback from customers across the globe using Power Automate as their choice of hyperautomation and RPA platform.

Case study: Cineplex accelerates establishing their Automation Center of Excellence with Automation Kit

Cineplex Inc. is a leading media and entertainment company that welcomes millions of guests through its 170+ cinemas and entertainment venues.

Bo Wang, Vice President of Taxation & Treasury, started using Power Automate desktop flows back in September 2020 to automate business processes within his team. After realizing the benefits in process efficiencies and time savings, he decided to set up the Automation Center of Excellence so that he could further scale the use of Power Automate across the entire organization. To do so, Bo and his team adopted the Automation Kit to manage and have visibility across the automation development lifecycle. The Automation Kit helped Cineplex:

Accelerate the development of their Automation Center of Excellence
Centrally manage the automation lifecycle from ideation to production
Get insights for both leadership and operations team about return on investment (ROI) in automation

What’s included in the Automation Kit?

Automation Project Management

Use this app to manage the automation initiatives in your organization and define the metrics to calculate ROI.

Projects are managed in the Automation Center

Solution Metering

The kit offers capabilities to link Automation Project definitions with their Power Automate cloud flows, desktop flows and other artifacts in order to automatically capture and calculate the contributions of an automation.

Artifacts are attached to solution metering for automatic metric captures

Automation CoE Dashboard

The dashboard provides a holistic view of your automation projects, ROI, and goals. It includes multiple views and metrics that are automatically calculated and refreshed based on what you have defined in the Automation Projects.

Your organization can identify which automation projects to work on using the complexity score and estimated savings to ensure correct prioritization is being made on the automation investments.

Once the automations are established, the organization can then track the savings and track them against goals.

Dashboard showing the complexity score and list of projects

Where to start

Now that you do have a sneak peek of all the cool features the Automation Kit has to offer, here are resources that can get you started.

What’s next

We’re continuing to evolve and expand Automation Kit features based on customer feedback to support your ability to grow your organization’s automation maturity to enterprise scale.

We will regularly publish a prioritized list of features from our open-source backlog that we will work on and release in our next monthly update.

As part of our upcoming planned regular office hours that start Tuesday 11^th October 7:00AM – 8:00AM PDT with you can register at https://aka.ms/ak4ppofficehours. We will showcase new and planned features and hold an “ask me anything”-style conversation to get feedback about your use of the Automation Kit and prioritize areas that we should work on to provide the most impact for you.

Disclaimer

Although the underlying features and components used to build the Automation Kit (such as Microsoft Dataverse, admin APIs, and connectors) are fully supported, the kit itself represents sample implementations of these features. Our customers and community can use and customize these features to implement admin and governance capabilities in their organizations.

If you face issues with:

Using the kit: Report your issue here: aka.ms/automation-kit-issues. Microsoft Support will not help you with issues related to this kit, but they will help with related, underlying platform and feature issues.
The core features in Power Platform: Use your standard channel to contact Support.

The post Introducing the Automation Kit for Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.