The company began its business back in 2018, and since then has been using Microsoft Power Platform to automate some complex business processes. Since their early adoption of the platform, Nsure.com has grown their business with more complex processes as well as an increasing number of contacts from their potential and existing customers. Between 2020 and 2023, Nsure’s revenue grew at a Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) of over 100%.

Recently, Nsure.com has been adopting and infusing Power Platform’s generative AI and copilot capabilities into some business processes to support sustainable growth of the business without increased operational costs.

In this story, we’ll learn how Nsure’s business divisions have built automations with Power Platform and generative AI to increase efficiencies. Additionally we’ll learn how Nsure’s IT division, led by CTO Jakub (Kuba) Skalbania and his team, are integrating with other systems, building a Microsoft Fabric-based analytics platform, and using copilot features in Power Platform to rapidly build new automations to streamline internal processes by infusing generative AI – reducing manual processing time by over 60% and cost by 50%.

“The use of Power Platform, including Power Automate, along with generative AI, enables us to achieve hyper-growth without a substantial increase in team size. Nsure.com can markedly enhance client interactions while improving the quality of service. This is particularly crucial in the labor-intensive insurance sector, which is characterized by complex processes for both clients and agents.”
Adrian Dzielnicki, CFA – CEO, Nsure.com

Challenges of a rapidly growing business

Home and auto insurance policy purchasing is a complex business in the United States. It requires insurance brokers to make sure the customer’s policy purchasing process adheres to the requirements of each state. Because Nsure.com provides insurance policies from over 50 insurers, this complexity is multiplied.

With the company quickly growing to nearly 1 million unique users of the platform, the company had to think of a way to sustainably evolve the business, by trying to reduce any mundane and repetitive manual processes.

One of the primary challenges for Nsure.com was the overwhelming human involvement required in customer contacts. Nsure.com was dealing with over 1,000 data points for each unique user: information about the customer’s home, vehicles etc. – equating to over 1 billion datapoints in total. Each month, around 100 customer representatives processes over 100,000 interactions with the customer through calls, emails and texts.

Customer representatives had to manually respond to each of these contacts as well as refer to related records. The manual nature of these tasks not only consumed a lot of time but also increased the risk of errors.

Supporting business processes with generative AI capabilities in Power Platform

Nsure.com and their technology partner Netwise decided to try out the newly released Copilot and generative AI capabilities of Power Automate to streamline Nsure’s insurance processes.

The team focused on inbound communications (emails or text messages). They built Power Automate cloud flows that assess priority, generate tailored summaries, gauge intent, route to relevant departments, and even suggest possible next steps for agents. This ensures that every customer interaction is met with a tailored and efficient response.

With the help of Copilot in cloud flows, Nsure.com was able to construct these flows that seamlessly integrate Dataverse and AI Builder, using the power of natural language processing to build cloud flows from natural language prompts.

“What’s really incredible about one of the flows is that it only took us 40 minutes to create and totally configure using Copilot. Usually this would require an extensive process of dragging-and-dropping and clicking–it would take at least 4 hours.”
Jakub Skalbania, CGO, Netwise, acting CTO at Nsure.com

Following are some detailed examples of how Nsure.com uses generative AI to manage its customer contacts.

Summarization, categorization, and routing customer communications

Nsure’s shared inboxes were flooded with a large number of emails on a daily basis. As a result, customer representatives found it difficult to triage and identify which contacts needed to be worked on next.

To solve this, a Power Automate cloud flow is triggered when an email is received in the shared mailbox. Once an email is processed, generative AI is used to triage and decide whether that email requires immediate attention or not. Sometimes email responses are automatically generated; representatives just need to review the response before sending that email to the customer.

If the email requires manual intervention, generative AI summarizes the contents of the email, compiles, and routes ensures that all pertinent information is channeled to a single Teams group, making it easily accessible to all relevant stakeholders with appropriate priority.

Information extraction from customer emails and text messages

One of the critical components of customer satisfaction is ensuring that details (such as the customer’s available times) are captured when scheduling follow-up calls. These details are not always easy to capture or extract manually and can lead to missing information.

Nsure.com decided to use AI builder to map unstructured data collected by Power Automate flows from email, chat, and call transcriptions and uses these data points to trigger new actions and flows.

For example, if the customer wants to change the appointment time and sends a text message “I have an appointment at 4”, AI builder can extract the fact that this appointment is for today, at 4:00PM as shown in the image below and search for the existing 4:00PM appointment in the system automatically.

This is then integrated with their custom booking system to secure the next available timeslot of the representatives.

By understanding and recording key information the customer has provided, customer satisfaction is increased. The company has observed a significant reduction in customer complaints, resulting in a 4.7 (out of 5) star rating from over 4,000 reviews on review sites.

Data transformation from legacy systems

Customer representatives often needed to access multiple systems to provide accurate answers about policy details, as each state’s requirements are different and insurers provide different policies. Finding this information was one of the most time-consuming and mundane tasks for the customer representatives.

To automate this process, Nsure.com developed a Power Automate desktop flow (RPA) which gathers responses from these systems, which are automatically consolidated and transformed using generative AI models to specific formats that can be presented to customers and also transferred to other systems.

1. Power Automate is triggered when a new processing request is received and added to the Azure Service Bus queue
2. Data is extracted from Azure Blob Storage
3. Power Automate desktop flows are called to run the automation in virtual machine
4. Based on the type of case, relevant sub flow is called
5. Result from the virtual machine is sent back to the Azure Service Bus queue.

Content generation and automated reply suggestions

When customers purchase homeowner’s insurance in the United States, insurance carriers require for some states or counties additional documentation: Wind mitigation reports, 4 point inspections, construction permits. Previously agents had to manually review these documents, extracting the necessary information, and copying it.

With the help of generative AI and Power Automate flows, key information from the documents, can be automatically extracted. Generative AI analyzes the unstructured text from these documents. The outcomes of these analyses are then fed into another flow and model, ensuring that the best policy coverages are determined for the customer based on real-world data. Then, generative AI is applied to analyze returned offers from insurers, compare them, and send the best options to the client. It is a very complicated process, as each of the 50 insurers on the Nsure.com platform has their own product specifics.

Next-best action and email reply suggestions are also automatically generated and combined with other transactional data, activity data, and the communication history of the customer.

With manual tasks reduced by 60%, employees can focus on more valuable tasks

With all of these automations in place, Nsure’s customer service representatives reduced their time on manual tasks by more than 60, allowing them to focus on more valuable and meaningful tasks – engaging with high-priority, complex escalations; building customer relationships; and increasing satisfaction.

Instead of processing every contact, the team can now oversee the communications that are started by AI and make final decisions – where generative AI is essentially providing a copilot-like experience.

Future optimizations planned using Microsoft Power Platform

The flows described above are only the beginning for Nsure.com. In the future, Nsure.com has eliminate mundane and repetitive tasks with generative AI and Copilot capabilities as well as do more with less by having virtual assistants in call campaigns for sales of new policies, upselling, and cross-selling. Nsure.com aims to have more than 90% of incoming requests handled by AI virtual assistants to support requests for insurance quotes and policies – including activities such as submitting payments, reviewing renewal offers, and requesting discounts.

“Building flows with Copilot was insanely easy. I just had to describe it in natural language and it created the flow exactly as I needed it. I just configured the steps from there.”

Jakub Skalbania, CGO, Netwise, acting CTO at Nsure.com

Share your story with us!

Do you have a story or experience to share? We are excited to learn more about how individuals and organizations are using Power Platform with generative AI and Copilot capabilities! Submit your story at https://aka.ms/ShareAIStory

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These features are currently generally available in the United States and English language. Other regions may require you to select United States environments. Note that some of these features are in preview, and accuracy and relevance cannot be guaranteed. 

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The post Insurance agency Nsure.com leverages Microsoft Power Platform and generative AI to reduce manual processes by 60%+ appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Miyu Takai from Tokyo, Japan, began her career with zero IT experience and is now in a technical specialist role that she never imagined possible for herself, thanks to the Power Platform and the power of AI. Miyu leveraged her existing Excel skills and used the GPT-powered Power Apps Ideas capabilities to easily generate Power Fx formulas and wire together logic for her Power Apps solutions. She is now exploring the recently announced Copilot capabilities to continue building impactful solutions and enabling others in her community to do the same.

This story explores Miyu’s career transition – from processing fax orders to building apps and automation, her passion for technology, and how Power Apps with generative AI has aided her rapid upskilling and success.

“With Power Apps, all I needed to do was give examples. I knew what I wanted to do, and I didn’t need to explain in detail on what I wanted to achieve. It was just magical.”

— Miyu Takai, Technical Support Engineer, Sentreseau, Inc.

Career progression

In 2015 Miyu started her career in Tokyo, at an office branch of a food container manufacturing company. She was responsible for entering the sales orders received via fax machines into the ordering system. After several roles in the same company, she landed in the marketing department and gathered data using Excel for marketing activities in Tokyo, and then expanded to Osaka and other sales regions. “This was my first time I started to gain interest in optimizing processes with automation. I learned some basic Excel equations and some basic macros,” says Miyu.

When the global pandemic hit in 2020, her company accelerated the move to the cloud. Since Power Platform was available through Microsoft 365, that started her low code journey.

“I was always curious to try out new things. I immediately started trying out Power Automate and SharePoint, trying out things like deadline reminders. I was using it to an extent that one of the folks from IT asked if I could help by making some how-to videos for them.”

— Miyu Takai, Technical Support Engineer, Sentreseau, Inc.

Pivotal career moment

In 2021, Miyu connected with the RPA community in Japan. “I randomly found a post on Twitter, and it was the Japan RPA (robotics process automation) community – where they were talking about their virtual RPA Advent Calendar.” Miyu contributed a blog post to the series and shortly after, presented to the RPA community. This ignited her passion for the Power Platform and opened the possibility that she could pursue a career in IT.

“I was interested to be involved in IT, but I never felt I could land a job in IT. I had very little IT skills, but at the same time I was really interested in Power Platform,” she explained.

Eight months later, she came across the consulting company, Sentreseau. They had a Citizen Development Department that hires talent for Power Platform roles, who can help empower their customers with citizen development by providing training courses, facilitating hackathons and more. Miyu had doubts she would be accepted, given her minimal programming experience, and was delighted when she was accepted. In her role today as a technical support specialist, she helps customers with their Power Platform journeys. She builds solutions, provides Power Platform related training, and supports companies to build their own in-house communities.

Rapid upskilling with Power Apps AI capabilities

Prior to being hands-on with Power Apps, Miyu relied on books, blogs, and Microsoft Learn to upskill in Microsoft 365 and Power Platform. To help kickstart her learning, Miyu turned to the AI-powered Ideas feature built directly into Power Apps Studio. She could describe in natural language what she wanted to do, and the necessary Power Fx formulas were automatically generated.  This helped her quickly build apps and more easily learn advanced concepts in the process.

“In order for me to build apps, I needed to know what functions to use, but often I didn’t know what they were. Some of the blogs and articles were too technical for me or had assumptions that required background knowledge with Power Fx. With Power Apps Ideas, all I needed to do was give examples. I knew what I wanted, and I didn’t need to explain in detail what I wanted to achieve. It was just magical. I learned Power Fx this way much faster.”

Some examples of how Miyu used Power Apps Ideas:

• Extract the first three numbers of a phone number.
• Develop an event planning and management app that displays the Event Name, Start Time, End Time, and registered attendees as a gallery.
• Transform the data in the event app, such as by splitting the first name out of the registrant’s full name.

“If I did not have Power Apps Ideas, I would have had to go look up the Power Fx reference in Microsoft Learn from the top, and that would have taken a lot of time for me. Because of Power Apps Ideas, I could work on it very quickly.”

— Miyu Takai, Technical Support Engineer, Sentreseau, Inc.

Looking ahead

Power Apps Ideas helped accelerate Miyu’s ability to build apps with Power Apps. She is now looking towards how Copilot across Power Platform can simplify the development process even more.

“The nice thing about Copilot is that it gets things done really quickly. It will automatically create and suggest designs, so it comes up with ideas I wouldn’t have imagined myself.”

Following are some of the ways Miyu is looking to use copilots in Power Platform.

Power Virtual Agents

Miyu used Copilot in Power Virtual Agents to develop a bot that retrieves information from a website. She found the bot building experience much quicker due to the ability to design and modify bot topics using natural language.

“The hardest part of creating a bot was figuring out what to expect when creating a topic, so I think it’s great that Copilot makes that easier.”

— Miyu Takai, Technical Support Engineer, Sentreseau, Inc.

Power Automate

With Copilot in Power Automate, Miyu automated simple processes such as notifying the team when an email arrives in an Inbox. She also used Copilot to assist her in adding branching to a flow for conditional logic. She tested the resulting cloud flows to verify that the AI-assisted automation worked and tweaked the flows where relevant. By watching what the Copilot was doing, Miyu gained a better understanding of how to create the flows and make them run. Additionally, Miyu’s upskilling with Power Automate has been aided by Copilot, because she learned of more connectors and corresponding actions that she previously wasn’t aware of.  

Power Apps

Miyu is keen to try Copilot in Power Apps when it becomes available in the Japan region, to create solutions with Dataverse and Power Apps using natural language. She was inspired by the upcoming capabilities demonstrated at this year’s Microsoft Build, where a Power Apps app was created using data from Excel.

“The layout of the app is one of the hardest things to grasp when building apps. I’m not a design expert. I think it’s amazing that soon we can use Excel data and have Power Apps automatically generate an app. I look forward to this AI-powered capability with Power Apps.”

— Miyu Takai, Technical Support Engineer, Sentreseau, Inc.

As makers across the globe start to use generative AI capabilities and copilots in Power Platform to begin their app and automation development journey, Miyu’s story serves as valuable example of the power of these capabilities to transform business processes and careers. 

Share your story with us!

Do you have a story or experience to share? We are excited to learn more about how individuals and organizations are using Power Platform with generative AI and Copilot capabilities! Submit your story at https://aka.ms/ShareAIStory

The post Microsoft Power Apps and generative AI helps citizen maker upskill and transform career appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E), incorporated in California in 1905, is one of the largest combined natural gas and electric energy companies in the United States. They adopted Power Platform including Power Automate (RPA), Power Virtual Agents, Power Apps and Dataverse in conjunction with Microsoft 365 to create over 60 solutions that have saved them 300K+ hours and 38.5 million US Dollars in two years and enabled over 1,300 digital creators. They solutions include a total of 2,000+ Power Apps applications and 4,200+ cloud flows. This article describes few examples of solutions that emerged after a strong foundation was put in place through their Digital Productivity Center of Excellence.

Establishing a center of excellence to scale success

Establishing a Center of Excellence early on was key to PG&E’s success in rapidly adopting Power Platform and deploying solutions. They engaged over 1,300 team members to build a “community of practice” and established a robust structure for support and growth. They have continued to work with citizen developers across the organization on a weekly basis to assist them with building solutions. “We’re bringing something I like to call ‘tech equity’ to enable everyone at PG&E to create and innovate solutions,” said Thomas Bilbo, Principal Product Owner at PG&E.

With our community of Digital Creators, we’re enabling citizen development across the enterprise by touching base multiple times a month, providing regular training and hosting events that spur on innovation, and learning.”

— Thomas Bilbo, Principal Product Owner, PG&E

Looking ahead, PG&E is aiming to continue this strong growth by expanding Power Virtual Agents and Power BI, increasing the use of RPA solutions, accelerating new ideas through hackathons, hosting their first internal Power Platform conference, building an internal app catalog (App Pantry) with reusable components, and driving toward a goal of 2,700 PG&E employees being Digital Creators.

“We felt there was a ton of value to be had throughout our organization in terms of streamlining and automating a lot of low-value work, and re-dedicating people in the organization to doing high-value work. Our entire Executive Team is engaged in the success of this as well.”

— Mark Seveska, Executive Sponsor, IT Products and Enterprise Solutions, PG&E

Power Virtual Agent chatbot (“Peggy”) fulfills 40% of helpdesk queries and saves $830K

PG&E Technology Service Center (help desk) agents were burdened by fulfilling mundane and repetitive requests that led to increased wait times for workers and reduced overall productivity. 25%-40% of help desk demand is now fulfilled by Power Virtual Agents and Power Automate (desktop flows). This has significantly optimized agent workloads, provided sizeable labor savings and service level improvements, and given agents more time to focus on issues that required human intervention, thus improving the overall service level for their customers. They’ve saved over $830,000 US dollars from these optimizations.

First-Time Citrix Login dialog configured using Power Virtual Agent.

This initiative started when PG&E identified the need for a digital solution that would reduce the call volume of enquiries from employees to internal help desk agents. They envisioned an interactive chatbot as a solution for employees to fulfill requests on their own. They used Power Virtual Agents to build the chatbot and gave it a friendly name “Peggy” as a word play on “PG&E”. The goal was to encourage employees to “talk to Peggy”. Peggy would directly answer their questions or redirect them to a specific resource.

An example of “Peggy” in action is with assisting new users to login into Citrix for the first time. By utilizing a Power Virtual Agents chatbot to recognize trigger phrases, ask targeted questions regarding the login device, communicate basic information, and provide links to additional documentation, “Peggy” provides all the information required for a first-time login, without having to contact the help desk.

“Our latest skill for Peggy is to give her the ability to assist with Outlook Distribution List creation and management. So, everyone from the office to the field can use Peggy to find what they need and take care of work faster and securely.”

— Thomas Bilbo, Principal Product Owner, PG&E

Automating SAP Unlock requests eliminates 4,200 calls in a year

PG&E’s help desk team receives over 4,200 calls a year from users who needed to unlock their access to SAP systems. Building on the initial success with “Peggy”, they expanded the Power Virtual Agents chatbot to use Power Automate RPA capabilities and have automated the end-to-end SAP account unlock request process. This has further freed up help desk agents to focus on higher value tasks as they can offload routine items to “Peggy”. The total reduction in support hours is an estimated 840 hours per year.

“Employees from all over the company now have an easily accessible resource that doesn’t require a call,” said Thomas Bilbo, Principal Product Owner for Power Virtual Agents and Power Apps.

$1M+ savings annually on emergency equipment inventory management

As a critical infrastructure entity for the majority of California, PG&E has a responsibility to assist local areas to repair and rebuild from natural disasters such as wildfires and earthquakes and continue operations.

As part of the disaster response, PG&E sets up hubs for first responders with equipment used to manage the event. The IT Emergency Communications (ITEC) team at PG&E manages an inventory of 3000+ pieces of equipment that includes handheld radios, temporary cell towers, satellite uplinks, and many others. They needed a way to mitigate the loss of inventory, effectively track devices, and reduce the cost burden of replacing equipment.

Utilizing Power Apps and Power Automate, PG&E developed a solution to manage its entire emergency site inventory of over 3,000 pieces of equipment. 

Emergency equipment inventory management solution built with Power Apps

Each piece of inventory can be scanned using the built-in bar code scanning capabilities in Power Apps. As a result of the solution, equipment assignment is now completed in the field using mobile devices and all deployment tracking managed centrally and at warehouse facilities across various territories. The resultant savings is over $1M US dollars.

“We used to lose equipment prior to this. This solution has now saved over $1 million USD by leveraging RPA and enabling it to be used on both desktop and mobile devices.”

— Thomas Bilbo, Principal Product Owner, PG&E

Related links 

• Learn how PG&E partnered with Cognizant to develop their innovative digital productivity strategy
• Read Power Automate RPA customer stories
• Learn more about Power Automate and its desktop automation capabilities

Read other “do more with less” stories

• Lumen optimizes processes by 90% and scales innovation across the organization
• Kao uses Power Apps to boost frontline worker efficiency by 480 hours every month
• T-Mobile saves thousands of hours and achieves 12x gains in process efficiency
• Equinor embraces Power Platform to increase process efficiency while cutting costs
• Coca-Cola United automates over 50,000 orders in complex SAP invoicing process
• Leading US hospice care provider VITAS Healthcare processes 2 million patient visits to date
• Rabobank streamlines complex process from three weeks to three minutes
• Johnson Controls simplifies their infrastructure, saving 3,610 hours on training enablement

Additional links

• Read more “Do More With Less” stories
• 100+ Power Platform customer stories
• 70+ Power Platform customer story videos

The post PG&E saves over 38 million dollars from Power Platform solutions and a Center of Excellence appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Lumen Technologies, formerly known as CenturyLink, is a technology company that provides network, cloud, and security services to enterprise customers globally. The company’s offerings include network and data center services, managed hosting, and cloud infrastructure services, as well as a range of security and application management solutions.  

They have cultivated an active community of “Lumen Makers” – over 800 professional and citizen developers across the company building Power Platform solutions, some of which have increased efficiency of their business processes by over 90%.  

They used the recently announced Managed Environments and Pipelines capabilities in Power Platform, in conjunction with the CoE kit, to establish robust governance, administration, and application lifecycle management (ALM). This has enabled their IT team to effectively manage low-code innovation at scale – currently spanning 800+ apps, 11k+ cloud flows, 450k+ desktop flow actions – while experiencing a rapid growth in numbers of new makers and new digital solutions. 

Using automation to reduce discount processing time by 90% 

With the introduction of the Emergency Broadband benefit launched in the United States during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic, customers could request discounts from internet service providers. Program administrators needed to process requests, such as verifying customer accounts, checking for qualification criteria, downloading subscriber data, and many more processes for each request.  

During the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Federal Communications Commission launched the Emergency Broadband Benefit Program (EBBP), which provided qualifying customers with discounts on their internet service. For both EBBP and the successor, the Affordable Connectivity Program (ACP), administrators needed to quickly process consumer requests—such as verifying customer accounts, checking for qualification criteria, and downloading subscriber data—before the discounts could be applied to the customer’s account. By developing a solution leveraging over 57 Power Automate cloud flows, Lumen Technologies was able to automate this entire process end-to-end, reducing the processing time for each EBBP or ACP request by 90%. 

App developed by field supervisor slashes 80 days from claims wait time 

When copper or fiber optic cables maintained by Lumen are damaged, field staff need to capture details and submit claims. This used to be a cumbersome manual process that involved sending text messages along with emails and photo attachments to their field supervisors. The overall process from the time of incident to the claim being billed took 90 days.

As a field supervisor, Robert Autry regularly dealt with the challenge of manually collating claims information from multiple locations. He discovered Power Apps and as a self-taught citizen developer created a mobile solution to streamline the process. Field technicians now use a mobile app at the job site to capture all damage data and in just a few minutes can create and submit a claim for review by field supervisors.

The revised process has been used to process approximately $30 million in damages and has considerably reduced the overall time for claims to be billed out – down from 90 days to 10 days.

“It saved the company money. My company did not have to go and buy something off the shelf to replicate what I created.”

— Robert Autry – Lumen Technologies

Managed environments unleashes the power of citizen makers with easy ALM 

All of the innovations were possible due to how Lumen had set up their environment strategy. Lumen manages over 120 production environments and around 3000 developer environments.  One of the struggles Lumen had was to enable citizen developers to be able to follow an ALM (Application Lifecycle Management) strategy. This required code-first knowledge about CLI (Command Line Interfaces), Azure DevOps, and other development concepts, making it a steep learning curve for those without ALM experience or coding backgrounds. In order to trust important business processes in the hands of citizen makers, Lumen needed them to use mature ALM practices to manage and deploy their solutions. 

Lumen has started using pipelines in Power Platform – a feature within Managed Environments that enables people to easily set up ALM without prior knowledge – making it more friendly for those from a low-code background to have the same standard of ALM as code-first developers. 

“Training a user or a maker on ALM was easily a couple of hours, and most of the time, people weren’t coming back because they didn’t understand most of what was there. Now, all I have to do is just add the users as Pipeline admins and then just say “Hey, you see that little rocket down there? Just press that!”

— Andrew Gaskins, Global Power Platform Lead, Lumen Technologies

Developing the internal community 

Today, over 800 app makers and 1,400 flow makers are part of the Lumen Makers community, sharing best-practices and reviewing new features of Power Platform. For all its success today, the Lumen Makers Community began as a simple Teams channel in late 2019. Lumen partnered with the internal Change Leadership team at Lumen with an external vendor to formally launch the Lumen Makers network in Fall 2021. The Change Leadership team provided support by developing network launch communications and templates for success story spotlights and leadership updates, while the vendor’s Power Platform Practice initiated a citizen developer program to provide coordinated Power Platform training and use case development sessions to the first wave of Lumen Makers. 

“We recently licensed the whole company for premium features and Dataverse. It’s opened the doors for so many things we couldn’t do before.”

— Andrew Gaskins, Global Power Platform Lead, Lumen Technologies

Next steps 

• Learn how Lumen Technologies lights the way for citizen development
• Listen to the podcast about how Andrew Gaskins has developed the Lumen Makers community 
• Learn more about Managed Environments and Pipelines in Power Platform 
• Join the Global Power Platform Admins User Group led by Andrew Gaskins 

Read other “do more with less” stories

• Kao uses Power Apps to boost frontline worker efficiency by 480 hours every month
• T-Mobile saves thousands of hours and achieves 12x gains in process efficiency
• Equinor embraces Power Platform to increase process efficiency while cutting costs
• Coca-Cola United automates over 50,000 orders in complex SAP invoicing process
• Leading US hospice care provider VITAS Healthcare processes 2 million patient visits to date
• Rabobank streamlines complex process from three weeks to three minutes
• Johnson Controls simplifies their infrastructure, saving 3,610 hours on training enablement

Additional links

• Check all other “Do More With Less” stories
• 100+ Power Platform customer stories
• 70+ Power Platform customer story videos

The post Lumen optimizes processes by 90% and scales innovation across the organization with Managed Environments appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Founded in 1887 as a domestic soap manufacturer, Kao Corporation is now a Japanese multinational consumer goods company that specializes in personal care, household cleaning, and beauty products.

Reducing paper-based process by 480 hours monthly

Because the company has been in operation for more than a century, it has a long history of analog processes. There was a paper form for everything, from inspection records to raw material management to hazardous chemical storage. Trying to find the right paper for the right procedure was both challenging and time-consuming. In the Wakayama factory, Kao was managing over 300 types of paper cards that contained the type, location, quantity, and quality of raw materials. In some cases, the paper cards were difficult to understand because they were hand-written. If a card was lost or damaged, it slowed production as employees tried to address the problem.

“It was difficult to handle the information,” said Ryo Shibuya, a production worker in the chemicals department at Wakayama factory.

Ryo and his co-worker Nahoki Fujita decided to try a better way to manage raw materials. Using Power Apps, they created an app to digitize the process. The primary creation of the app fell to Ryo, a chemistry major with no previous IT experience. Once the app was launched, inventory management of the raw materials fully shifted to the app, which resulted in an efficiency improvement of approximately 480 work hours every month. Additionally, the production facility was able to add new functions to the app to manage the type and quantity of dangerous materials, which was not possible with the previous process.

“This project was successful because of the cooperation we received,” Nahoki said. “When we introduced the solution, we had to have time for learning. We had to stop some of our daily work to explain the purpose and meaning of the app. And all the people around us understood why that was important.”
“In my department, people are using this app and the members are saying that it is indispensable,” Ryo said.

Ryo and Nahoki are working on another app named Moon Chart, a production schedule management tool that allows employees to see what other people are working on in real time.

Building a development community for digital transformation across the organization

The paper-based process above was just the tip of the iceberg. As the senior manager of Kao’s technology development center, Shigeki Takemoto was eager to bring digital transformation to the shop floor. He learned about app development with Power Apps and thought the low-code development platform would be an ideal way for onsite personnel and engineers to easily improve operational efficiency in a short period of time.

“Within the manufacturing group at Wakayama, we have tried to nurture the citizen developers. We have trained a key user in each plant, who will serve as a promoter for this initiative and educate others who want to do the same. Additionally, we have established a support website to share our development story and it has been a great vehicle. Digital transformation is ongoing on the shop floor,” said Shigeki.

Kao’s citizen developers have created more than 260 apps across the company’s 10 plants in Japan since it introduced Power Platform in 2021. At the Wakayama facility alone, they’ve created over 50 apps.

“The person working on the production line often has an idea for improvement, so with this solution and tools, they now have the means to realize the improvement by themselves.”

— Tatsushi Okumoto, Fine Chemical Department, Kao

A digital future for Kao

Moving forward, Kao continues to pursue opportunities for further digital transformation and expand use of Power Platform to its operations in over 70 countries. Takemoto would like to utilize Power BI to visualize the massive amounts of data produced by the company.

“The popularity of Power Apps has prepared an environment for a layman like me to learn from scratch. That is really appreciated, and I think it will be an essential skill. I would recommend Power Platform to everyone. I didn’t know anything about making an app, but I still could complete it.”

— Nahoki Fujita, Chemicals department, Wakayama factory, Kao

Read more about how Kao continues to innovate with Power Platform to save money and realize process efficiencies with ease.

Read other “do more with less” stories

• T-Mobile saves thousands of hours and achieves 12x gains in process efficiency
• Equinor embraces Power Platform to increase process efficiency while cutting costs
• Coca-Cola United automates over 50,000 orders in complex SAP invoicing process
• Leading US hospice care provider VITAS Healthcare processes 2 million patient visits to date
• Rabobank streamlines complex process from three weeks to three minutes
• Johnson Controls simplifies their infrastructure, saving 3,610 hours on training enablement

Additional links

• Check all other “Do More With Less” stories
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The post Kao uses Power Apps to boost frontline worker efficiency by 480 hours every month appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Coca-Cola Bottling Company United (Coca-Cola United) is one of the largest privately held Coca-Cola bottlers in the United States. Serving about 200,000 customers demands an impressive infrastructure: 5,000 trucks to deliver more than 600 product lines to a full spectrum of consumer channels, from small convenience stores and restaurants to mega-retailers.

Efficient Order processing from half a day to seconds

Coca-Cola United wanted a faster way to process on-demand shipment requests (or “forced shipments”) from customers. Previously, account reps had to submit orders and check inventories manually, which often led to shipping delays.

A solution was built in just a few weeks using Power Apps and a custom connector was used to integrate with the central SAP system. Here’s how it works:

The benefits of automation were dramatic. What used to take half a day to validate inventories and other order data can now be completed in seconds. Along with more efficient processing, the new solution has also resulted in fewer errors, faster delivery times—and higher customer satisfaction.

“The solution has helped restore customer confidence—which has driven even better sales,” says Bob Means, Director of Business Solutions at Coca-Cola Bottling Company United.

Automating a cumbersome 11-step manual process

Coca-Cola Freestyle is a strategic brand builder—a self-serve dispenser that reimagines single-serving beverage sales and offers more than 100 Coca-Cola product choices, from bottled water to Sprite, many in a variety of formulations. But more choice for consumers complicated distribution. 

The customer relationship management representatives had to go through a complex and manual 11-step process including cross-reference customer and material numbers, process the order and manually push it through the system, scanning the invoice and walking it to the Accounts Payable department.

Multistep manual invoice process carried out by the customer relationship representative

To automate this cumbersome process, the solution was built by the company’s fusion teams of citizen developers and professional developers and its partner, by using a series of integrations between SAP and Azure with Microsoft Power Platform acting as the automation agent to automate the entire process.

Power Automate RPA took mundane, tedious tasks and enabled employees to focus on more strategic initiatives. Coca-Cola United can now schedule and trigger events that increase end-to-end automation of high-volume tasks—like its suddenly expanded orders for Freestyle. It also allowed Coca-Cola United to automatically process orders received from multiple channels – beyond having to have the agent to work on each order.

As a result, Coca-Cola United could benefit from immediately freeing up one full-time employee to work on more strategic activities, and better yet could profitably scale to execute the strategic local Coca-Cola Freestyle campaign where it would have taken a maximum of ten full time employees if done manually.

Process automated by Power Automate

Since then, Coca-Cola United has gone on to automate other business processes with Microsoft Power Automate RPA capabilities.

“We are very excited about this solution that will dramatically reduce labor costs, minimize the various points of error in our current solution and will allow us to rapidly expand the Local Freestyle Campaign to better support our customers.”

– Kaylan Cannon: Customer Service Manager, Coca-Cola United

Read more about how Coca-Cola Bottling Company United dispenses streamlined order management with RPA in Microsoft Power Automate

You can also learn more about how Coca Cola United automated their process from a video presentation below:

Find other “Do More With Less” stories

Equinor
Equinor, a forward-thinking energy company based in Norway, delivered a solution by their DigTEAM and citizen developers with an estimated annual value of over 500 million NOK (approximately $49M USD)

Learn more

VITAS Healthcare
VITAS Healthcare is nation’s largest single-source provider of end-of-life care delivering meaningful hospice and palliative care to its patients and their families across 14 states and the District of Columbia. VITAS has used a Power Platform solution called “Emmy” to process 2 million patient visits – equivalent to 92% of all patient visits.

Learn more

Rabobank
Rabobank currently uses more than 2,500 Power Apps and Power Automate solutions. One of their solutions to support their company re-org process reduced processing time from three weeks to three minutes. Additionally, they use Power Virtual Agents for a personalized customer support experience, automating 40-50% of customer calls – equivalent to 60,000 to 80,000 calls per month.

Learn more

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• 70+ Power Platform customer story videos

The post Coca-Cola United automates over 50,000 orders in complex SAP invoicing process with Microsoft Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Rabobank is a multinational banking institution headquartered in the Netherlands, with more than 40,000 employees in 38 countries. It has a long history of cooperation, innovation, and people-centered solutions.

As part of a broad digitization strategy, Rabobank adopted Power Platform to streamline internal processes. Rabobank currently uses more than 2,500 Power Apps and Power Automate solutions. One of their solutions to support their company re-org process reduced processing time from three weeks to three minutes. Additionally, they use Power Virtual Agents for a personalized customer support experience, automating 40-50% of customer calls – equivalent to 60,000 to 80,000 calls per month.

Streamlined company re-org process from 3 weeks to 3 minutes

As Rabobank moved to a new, digital model, the bank has been reorganizing its workforce to better align to that model. But the process was time-consuming. Previously, HR professionals would spend weeks pouring over Excel spreadsheets matching employees with new job roles.

The new solution used Power Apps and Power Automate to compile relevant HR data, and enabled the BAPPS (Business Applications) team at Rabobank to provide controlled access to the process by managers and employees. Previously, the process was open to only the HR team. Now, employees can review and, if needed, update their personnel data and managers can review new roles recommended by the system—all contributing to better placements overall.

“With our reorganization app (“R@pp”) built with Power Platform, analysis that used to take three weeks can now be done in three minutes. Better yet, we have achieved a placement accuracy of 99.1%, which is far higher than what we could manage previously.”

– Alex Meijvis: Product Owner for Transition at Rabobank

Read more about how Rabobank developed their solution with Power Platform

Automating up to 50% of customer calls

To help manage customer inquiries, Rabobank had initially adopted an on-premises virtual agent solution, building a conversational platform that had proved functional for routing customer calls to the right service team, but it wasn’t efficient as the system for virtual chat bots, and virtual call agent were independent – resulting in a need to maintain both systems separately.

Within four months, Rabobank reconstructed its virtual agent solution using Microsoft Power Virtual Agents. This allowed the team to simplify operations, reduce costs and create a more cohesive experience for customers. Within four months, the first virtual agent was deployed to production in April 2022.

Before Rabobank moved to Power Virtual Agents, only about 20 percent of Rabobank’s customers were using the online chat option as their first point of contact. With the new solution, usage of the chatbot has increased by 25% and 40-50% of customer calls now do not require escalation to a human agent. This adds up to 60,000 to 80,000 calls per month being handed entirely through automation built using the Power Platform.

“Doing conversational AI right can lead to cost savings. Becoming more cost effective allows us to stay competitive and retain our investment capabilities. At the same time, labor market conditions increase the need for efficient operations through automation.”

– Alex Meijvis: Product Owner for Transition at Rabobank

Read more about how Rabobank streamlines and personalizes customer support with Power Virtual Agents

Scaling low code throughout the organization

Above are two of several examples where low-code solutions have proven to be highly valuable for Rabobank. To scale adoption across the organization, they’ve established a robust Center of Excellence. They have over 2,500 Power Apps and Power Automate solutions in use with over 55% of the organization using Power Platform solutions each month.

As with any financial organization, Rabobank puts a high priority on security and compliance. So, while the efficiency of Power Platform was appealing, it was equally important that development on the platform be controlled and secure.

To meet that objective, Rabobank rolled out a Center of Excellence strategy before making Power Platform available to employees. This included a distinct set of environments, policies, and controls aligned to different types of users. The governance model at Rabobank has enabled citizen developers across the organization to build solutions in a secure and compliant manner.

Read more about how Rabobank selected Power Platform as its default development platform

Find other “Do More With Less” stories

In this blog series, we are sharing examples of customers who have been able to Do More With Less by utilizing the Microsoft Power Platform in their organization to build applications, automate processes, determine insights and more. This week, we are highlighting Coca-Cola Bottling Company United (Coca-Cola United), who have used Power Platform to (a) automate on-demand shipment requests – reducing order validation time from half a day to seconds, and (b) automate a complex multi-step SAP invoicing process to handle over 50,000 orders – an achievement that would not have been otherwise possible with just one employee tasked with managing the process.

Coca-Cola Bottling Company United (Coca-Cola United) is one of the largest privately held Coca-Cola bottlers in the United States. Serving about 200,000 customers demands an impressive infrastructure: 5,000 trucks to deliver more than 600 product lines to a full spectrum of consumer channels, from small convenience stores and restaurants to mega-retailers.

Efficient Order processing from half a day to seconds

Coca-Cola United wanted a faster way to process on-demand shipment requests (or “forced shipments”) from customers. Previously, account reps had to submit orders and check inventories manually, which often led to shipping delays.

A solution was built in just a few weeks using Power Apps and a custom connector was used to integrate with the central SAP system. Here’s how it works:

The benefits of automation were dramatic. What used to take half a day to validate inventories and other order data can now be completed in seconds. Along with more efficient processing, the new solution has also resulted in fewer errors, faster delivery times—and higher customer satisfaction.

“The solution has helped restore customer confidence—which has driven even better sales,” says Bob Means, Director of Business Solutions at Coca-Cola Bottling Company United.

Automating a cumbersome 11-step manual process

Coca-Cola Freestyle is a strategic brand builder—a self-serve dispenser that reimagines single-serving beverage sales and offers more than 100 Coca-Cola product choices, from bottled water to Sprite, many in a variety of formulations. But more choice for consumers complicated distribution. 

The customer relationship management representatives had to go through a complex and manual 11-step process including cross-reference customer and material numbers, process the order and manually push it through the system, scanning the invoice and walking it to the Accounts Payable department.

Multistep manual invoice process carried out by the customer relationship representative

To automate this cumbersome process, the solution was built by the company’s fusion teams of citizen developers and professional developers and its partner, by using a series of integrations between SAP and Azure with Microsoft Power Platform acting as the automation agent to automate the entire process.

Power Automate RPA took mundane, tedious tasks and enabled employees to focus on more strategic initiatives. Coca-Cola United can now schedule and trigger events that increase end-to-end automation of high-volume tasks—like its suddenly expanded orders for Freestyle. It also allowed Coca-Cola United to automatically process orders received from multiple channels – beyond having to have the agent to work on each order.

As a result, Coca-Cola United could benefit from immediately freeing up one full-time employee to work on more strategic activities, and better yet could profitably scale to execute the strategic local Coca-Cola Freestyle campaign where it would have taken a maximum of ten full time employees if done manually.

Process automated by Power Automate

Since then, Coca-Cola United has gone on to automate other business processes with Microsoft Power Automate RPA capabilities.

“We are very excited about this solution that will dramatically reduce labor costs, minimize the various points of error in our current solution and will allow us to rapidly expand the Local Freestyle Campaign to better support our customers.”

– Kaylan Cannon: Customer Service Manager, Coca-Cola United

Read more about how Coca-Cola Bottling Company United dispenses streamlined order management with RPA in Microsoft Power Automate

You can also learn more about how Coca Cola United automated their process from a video presentation below:

Find other “Do More With Less” stories

Equinor
Equinor, a forward-thinking energy company based in Norway, delivered a solution by their DigTEAM and citizen developers with an estimated annual value of over 500 million NOK (approximately $49M USD)

Learn more

VITAS Healthcare
VITAS Healthcare is nation’s largest single-source provider of end-of-life care delivering meaningful hospice and palliative care to its patients and their families across 14 states and the District of Columbia. VITAS has used a Power Platform solution called “Emmy” to process 2 million patient visits – equivalent to 92% of all patient visits.

Learn more

Additional links

• 100+ Power Platform customer stories
• 70+ Power Platform customer story videos

The post Rabobank streamlines complex process from three weeks to three minutes using Microsoft Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

VITAS Healthcare is nation’s largest single-source provider of end-of-life care delivering meaningful hospice and palliative care to its patients and their families across 14 states and the District of Columbia. VITAS has used a Power Platform solution called “Emmy” to process 2 million patient visits – equivalent to 92% of all patient visits.

Today, VITAS proudly delivers specialized care through an interdisciplinary group (IDG) of approximately 12,000 physicians, nurses, home health aides, social workers, chaplains, and volunteers. They work together to provide comfort-focused medical care and psychosocial support to more than 19,000 patients and their families. 

Emmy—named in honor of VITAS’ first hospice patient—is a suite of Power Apps canvas applications nested in Teams that allows clinicians and managers to better manage support care coordination, provide continuity of care, and to have real-time feedback with their teammates.

Emmy is now the central tool for managing clinician schedules and patient care coordination. VITAS team managers are no longer dependent on using disparate tools or manual processes to manage the schedules of 7,000 clinicians.

The Power Platform solution offers the patient care team several benefits:

• Real-time visibility into schedule changes, visit completion, etc.
• Allow team managers to focus on complex clinical care, provide mentorship and training to their clinicians, and better support patients and families.
• Allows the care teams to safely continue interdisciplinary group meetings virtually—especially important during the COVID-19 pandemic
• Dramatically reduced the paperwork associated with these meetings. 

Vitas believes that despite the significant success with Emmy, they’ve “barely scratched the surface” with Microsoft Power Platform and are looking forward to doing more.

“Creating efficiencies in the healthcare industry on a national level to reduce costs by even 2 or 3 percent translates into billions of dollars in savings. Developing solutions like Emmy with Microsoft technologies is a step in the right direction to reform the way we care for terminally and chronically ill patients.”

– Patrick Hale: Chief Information Officer and Executive Vice President

Read more about how VITAS Healthcare has gained success through “Emmy” using Power Platform and Teams.

Related links

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The post Leading US hospice care provider VITAS Healthcare processes 2 million patient visits to date with Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

“This is a great opportunity for us to achieve significant results through cost savings and transforming people’s jobs – eliminating repetitive tasks, focusing more on value added activities, and improving employee engagement.”
– Bo Wang, Vice President of Taxation & Treasury, Cineplex

Cineplex Inc. (TSX:CGX) is a leading media and entertainment company that welcomes millions of guests through its 170+ cinemas and entertainment venues. Cineplex operates in three main sectors: Film Entertainment and Content, Amusement and Leisure, and Media. In this story, you’ll learn how Cineplex has begun to digitally transform their business using Power Automate, beginning from one department to becoming an enterprise-wide initiative, achieving:

• Actual savings of over 2,600 hours of manual work from 7 automations in production over a 4-month period (over 8,000 hours of annualized savings)
• 40+ automation opportunities identified and under development with an additional 7,000 hours of potential time savings
• Increased process efficiency by 92%

Meet the Cineplex team

Bo Wang is the Vice President of Tax & Treasury in the Treasury department at Cineplex. As a CPA and CFA, he has worked in finance related roles throughout his career but has always leveraged technology to be more effective. As an early adopter of Power Automate RPA, he self-taught himself the tool and was able to quickly build flows that achieved time savings for his team, epitomizing the power and ease of use that Power Automate RPA provides. Since then, Bo has led the push for widespread adoption of Power Automate across the entire organization through the creation of the Automation Center of Excellence while transforming the Treasury department to meet the needs of tomorrow through automating processes, embracing new technology, and upskilling their team members.

Karwan Abdulkhalegh is a Treasury Manager at Cineplex. He has held several Treasury positions at the company over the course of 6 years. As a CPA his experience and educational background has always been focused on Accounting & Finance up until he was introduced to a virtual beginner coding course about 2 years ago. This was the first real exposure he had to IT. He was then introduced to Power Automate for desktop. This was the first time he had any interaction with an RPA platform, and building off of the exposure from the beginner coding course he was able to quickly start using the available features to automate repetitive and mundane tasks. The more success he had automating different processes, the more he was interested in learning additional skills, utilizing any resource he could to automate more difficult processes.

Cineplex’s journey adopting Power Automate

Like many other businesses, Cineplex was significantly impacted as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, experiencing widespread government mandated closures over the course of two years. That said, the company used that time as also an opportunity to find ways to simplify processes and look for ways to become more efficient for when it reopened. It was during this time that Bo discovered Microsoft’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA) via Power Automate desktop flows and began to explore its capabilities. He started with basic flows that grabbed information from a website and copied it into Excel, but with each use case, he quickly realized the potential value and looked at introducing it to his team.

He paired up team members and had each pair pick an actual manual process in their role to automate. Weekly cadences were then set up to work with each pair to provide guidance on how to use Power Automate Desktop to replace manual steps and assist with any blockers and issues. With each passing week as they started seeing the automation steps they built running without errors and making tangible progress, the enthusiasm and engagement picked up dramatically as the team could see the value and how it could be applied to other processes. They found that people who were more advanced users of Excel took only 2-3 weeks to ramp up and build their own automations, and even with those who did not have any coding exposure could still pick up and build automations within 1-2 months with the appropriate training.

Having seen the benefits associated with incorporating Power Automate and RPA for his own team, Bo wanted to leverage this on a larger scale, so he reached out to Nasir Khan and his team from the Digital & Technology (D&T) department to collaborate and bring the tool to the broader organization.

“We started exploring Power Automate for desktop in the early stages when it was first released and as our team started to use it more, we immediately saw the value as we could rapidly build, test and deploy flows. The key that isn’t talked about enough is the ease at which people can pick up and start building automations with its visual UI experience, while still being powerful enough to handle complex use cases as our users became more experienced.”
– Bo Wang, Vice President of Taxation & Treasury, Cineplex

After the Treasury team engaged with the D&T team, Cineplex started exploring the various RPA vendors by going through a proof of concept (POC) and undertaking the software selection process. After seeing the alternatives in the market, and a thorough procurement evaluation, they decided to go forward with Power Automate. The reason beyond the fact that Cineplex was already using another feature of Power Automate—cloud flows—and Power Automate being the most cost-effective, was how easy it was for non-IT professionals like the finance team to just pick up and start automating while still delivering robust functionality using advanced features such as unattended bots.

“Honestly, my team was biased towards other RPA vendors that had already been on the market, as they had done a lot of work in previous experiences with them. However, we were surprised at where Microsoft fit into the equation. We did not realize how mature that RPA solution was already – especially around unattended RPA bots. It was even better than the other solutions. It was surprising how Power Automate could stack up against two main competitors defined by Gartner.”
– Nasir Khan, Vice President, Enterprise Technology, Cineplex

Cineplex has a philosophy of “The Guest is Why” which guides their actions and decisions to ensure that the guest experience is at the forefront of their decisions and actions. With the digital transformation that is taking place through automation, the entire organization, including the Treasury and Finance functions could now improve and enhance the guest experience by automating manual processes like the ones discussed below.

Let’s take a deeper look at how Cineplex addressed some of their business challenges using Power Automate RPA.

Business scenario and challenge – gift card activation

One of the first business processes that Cineplex attempted as part of their POC was automating the activation of physical gift card orders purchased online. Cineplex sells physical gift cards through their online store that people can use at Cineplex locations across the country.

Behind the scenes, gift card activations were a manual process. Gift card orders are managed through the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, but loading and activating the gift card was a separate system. Because of this missing integration, each morning the fulfilment team would go into the CRM system to compile the list of gift card orders that were ready to be shipped and activated. Then they would log in to another 3rd-party system to manually enter the serial number and the amount to activate on the gift card before shipment.

During high-peak seasons such as the Christmas holidays, or whenever there was a new promotion, the fulfilment team could have over 700 orders each day to activate. Before automation, Cineplex would hire part-time workers to assist with processing all these gift card orders; and in some cases, people had to work over the weekends as well. The process was extremely time-consuming and prone to human input errors, especially for part-time workers, which required additional manual reviews by another team member to go through each order to verify the accuracy and completeness.

Power Automate solution – gift card activation

When Bo first heard of the gift card activation process, he thought it was a perfect chance to demonstrate the capabilities of Power Automate RPA and provide a clear example of the value and benefits that automation could bring to departments outside of Treasury.

He worked with the fulfilment team to understand the process, looked for ways that went beyond simply replicating manual steps and looked at simplifying steps to make the whole process more efficient. After only 2 weeks working on the flow during his off-time, Bo was able to develop a solution that met the needs of the team. The solution built with Power Automate provided end-to-end automation of the gift card activation process and became a major success for Cineplex’s automation team. Now, every day a Power Automate cloud flow is scheduled to run twice a day that triggers a desktop flow as diagrammed below:

1. The bot checks for any gift cards that have not been activated.
2. Then the bot logs into the system to activate those serial numbers.
3. Once all gift cards have been processed, the bot sends a summary email and logs of all the orders that were activated.
4. Power Automate also checks for any errors that occur, so that the fulfilment team can focus on just those orders.

Business scenario and challenge – manual ticket refund & seat adjustment

Cineplex had an internal web app that handled most guest refund requests, but a portion of the refund requests involved certain conditions such as partial ticket refunds that required manual processing due to system limitations in their legacy applications.

The manual process was as follows:

1. Guest service agent would log the relevant information about the refund such as the booking ID, theatre, film, showtime, tickets to refund, the amount, and payment method, and then submit an email to the Treasury team for processing.
2. Each email is logged into an Excel spreadsheet and all data is validated against information from an internal web app.
3. The log is used to process the refund on a 3^rd party web page.
4. The log is used to adjust the seat count in a legacy internal application per ticket type in the transaction.
5. Journal entry is made to reflect the adjustment in the seat count.

The total processing time from when the email is received by the Treasury team to the completion of the journal entry could take up to 8 minutes on average per refund depending on the number of ticket types.  The issues that made this process particularly challenging and time consuming included the following:

• High potential for human errors when initially entering the refund details into the email form, resulting in time consuming back and forth emails to validate and fix.
• Refund requests are received every day including weekends with significant peaks during summer blockbuster movies and during holidays, resulting in staff having to work over weekends and holidays to catch up.
• Legacy application UI was outdated and unintuitive. For example, theatre names are represented by a number so to navigate to a specific theatre requires you to cross reference to a list to find the number.
• Complex set of rules to correctly record the journal entry due to differences in tickets and payment methods (3D ticket vs non-3D, use of loyalty points, gift cards, discounted tickets, premium formats with different price points, etc.).

This process required almost every member of the Treasury team to assist at various times, with certain staff spending upwards of 80-90% of their time keeping up with volumes during peak periods instead of working on their main job responsibilities.

Power Automate solution – manual ticket refund & seat adjustment

Power Automate RPA made it possible for Bo and Karwan to fully automate these processes.  They enlisted the help of the entire Treasury team and worked together on tackling this multi-layered process by breaking it up into separate flows. One flow focused on capturing, validating the information from the email and processing the refund, and another flow handled the seat count adjustment and journal entry in the in-house legacy application.

Desktop Flow #1 – Email Validation / Refund Processing

1. The cloud flow is scheduled to run daily and retrieves the email requests from guest services and triggers a desktop flow.
2. Desktop flow validates all the information in the email by checking it against the internal web app and if errors are detected, they are corrected automatically or sent back to the guest service team for review. Advanced error handling was built to find the right combination of tickets to match the refund amount even if that information was missing from the email.  After all necessary information is validated, the refund is logged into an Excel table.
3. Desktop flow logs into 3^rd party web page and processes the refund back onto the payment method used and logs the refund portion as completed.

Desktop Flow #2 – Seat Count Adjust / Journal Entry

1. Desktop flow reads the data from the Excel table and signs into the in-house legacy application, navigates through multiple screens to find the ticket type for the specific auditorium, movie, show date, and theatre of the refund request before making the necessary seat adjustment utilizing UI automation and optical image recognition (OCR).
2. Desktop flow incorporates complex business logic for every ticket type to utilize the correct general ledgers account numbers and make the required calculations to record the correct amounts.
3. All the seat adjustments and journal entries are then logged for audit and documentation purposes.

This process was deployed on an unattended bot and scheduled to run daily. With this transformation, the manual refund process was completely automated requiring no manual intervention from the Treasury team.     Prior to the automation, the Treasury team estimated that they spent more than 5,000 hours annually on the manual refund process and with this time being freed up, the team could now focus on more value-added activities such as automating other processes through Power Automate.

“We had the equivalent of almost 4 full time employee hours being spent on these manual refunds and we would still struggle to keep up during busy periods. By automating this repetitive, time-consuming process with Power Automate, it has fundamentally changed our department for the better by allowing us to focus on more value-added tasks, while also improving the guest experience through more timely refunds.”
– Bo Wang, Vice President of Taxation & Treasury, Cineplex

Business scenario and challenge – ticket refunding

In December 2021, one of the most popular, highest-grossing movies of the year opened for advanced ticketing. Guests rushed to purchase those tickets 2-3 weeks in advance, with heightened anticipation to see the movie. Unfortunately, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the provincial government ordered a lockdown, and Cineplex was forced to shut down their theaters. Their guest services team were left with over 8,000 sold tickets to process for refunds. To ensure that guests received their refunds in a timely manner, Cineplex anticipated that temporary staff would be required to process the refunds for a few weeks to clear the backlog.

Power Automate solution – ticket refunding

Instead of manually processing the ticket refunds for the cancelled showings, the Digital & Technology team was able to develop a proof of concept within days using Power Automate and build, test and deploy a production ready solution in less than 2 weeks to reduce the need for additional staff while producing a better result for their guests. The automation completes the following process:

1. Retrieves the list of all tickets requiring refunds from an Excel spreadsheet.
2. Retrieves data such as booking IDs and email addresses used to buy the tickets.
3. Logs in to an internal web app to register and process the necessary refunds.
4. Logs success / failure of refund
5. Sends an email to the customer to notify that the refund was successful.
6. Sends the guest service agents the list of all the successful refunds.

This was the first time Cineplex could scale up the automation by running 4-5 unattended bots in parallel to speed up the process. For Cineplex, this showcased how it could scale up and down the unattended architecture based on demand.  In addition, it proved the power and value that Power Automate had even for IT teams in being able to produce working solutions quickly and efficiently.

“Through automation, we are able to transform the way the guest services organizations are going to work from now on and digitally transform other parts of the organization through RPA.”
– Nasir Khan, Vice President, Enterprise Technology, Cineplex

Establishing a Center of Excellence (CoE) with Automation Kit

Automation was already in the business mainstream and Cineplex’s leadership team had heard of the benefits it promised. But it was seeing the value they were realizing from practical use cases developed by Bo and his team that made it clear that the organization was ready to embrace automation as part of their strategy going forward.

With automation becoming a broader and core digital transformation tool at Cineplex, they decided it was time to establish an Automation COE. To accelerate this, Bo and Nasir’s teams implemented the Automation Kit for Power Platform so that the use of Power Automate could be scaled across the entire organization.

“Automation Kit played a BIG role in speeding up the development of Cineplex’s Automation Center of Excellence, providing Cineplex a single view across their company’s automation portfolio and showcasing the savings achieved at an organizational level.”
– Bo Wang, Vice President of Taxation & Treasury, Cineplex

With the Automation Kit in place, Cineplex has each of their automations linked to an objective to ensure its purpose is met. The Power BI dashboard that is included with the kit provides Cineplex with a holistic view across their company’s automations, helping Cineplex identify high-value automation opportunities and capture the savings from active automations.

From the time Bo started using Power Automate for desktop back in September 2020 to the initial installation of the Automation Kit, his team of citizen developers had 7 bots in production with 11 automation projects accumulating estimated annual savings of 8,000 hours.

In the short 4 months following the installation and deployment of the Automation Kit, the estimated time savings for automation opportunities had increased by almost 7,000 hours with more than 40 new automation projects that are currently being worked on by citizen developers, demonstrating the success in expanding the usage across the company.

A big reason for the accelerated adoption was that, with the support of Microsoft, Bo and Karwan designed and hosted their own RPA Workshop in August 2022 at the new Microsoft office in Toronto. Karwan took 40 citizen developers through a step-by-step session in Power Automate on how to build a flow that automates a journal entry, which was one of the key use cases for the finance team.  To make the session more practical and relevant, the workshop incorporated the use of Cineplex-specific applications so the learnings from the workshop could seamlessly carry into real-world use cases.  The workshop was designed to develop their first batch of local RPA champions at Cineplex, who then helped drive adoption in their respective teams.

Alongside the RPA Workshop, the Cineplex COE also launched their Process Automation SharePoint site and Teams channels to formally introduce Power Automate to everyone and create a citizen developer community.

You can find out more about Automation Kit in this announcement:  Introduction to Automation Kit

Summary of benefits

Automation has allowed the Cineplex team to continue innovating their operations by making jobs more efficient and reducing time spent on repetitive, mundane tasks so people can be more productive.  Beyond just saving time, giving employees an opportunity to grow, share their achievements, and upskill their technical ability through automation is going to help keep employees engaged and motivated.

This combination of leveraging talent and automation has allowed Cineplex to deliver tangible results through more effective processes, drive the mindset of continuous improvement, and shift manual efforts to higher-value more real-time insights and analysis.

Overall

• Actuals savings of over 2,600 hours of manual work from 7 automations in production over a 4-month period (over 8,000 hours of annualized savings)
• 40+ automation opportunities identified and under development with an additional 7,000 hours of potential time savings
• Increased process efficiency by 92%

Refund process

• Savings of 5,000+ hours annually while eliminating human errors and providing enhanced data validation
• Significantly improved effectivess of the Treasury department by shifting the time savings into building more automations and contributing to the Automation COE
• Automation could be scaled up and down dynamically based on demand of the process

Gift card processing

• Savings of 2,500+ hours annually while eliminating human errors and providing enhanced data validation
• Removed the need to hire temporary workers for peak seasons and extended overtime during weekends and holidays
• Improved the customer experience by providing same day activation of gift cards to speed up processing and shipping of orders

Looking ahead

Since the launch of the Process Automation Community and the RPA Workshop, Bo and Nasir’s teams have seen a real sense of optimism and excitement around the use of Power Automate and the benefits it can bring.  With the support of Cineplex’s leadership team, the Automation COE are continuing to leverage the Automation Kit to make Power Automate a citizen-led RPA initiative by enabling business process owners to automate their own processes.

Beyond this, Bo’s team recognizes that to fully leverage the power of automation, it also requires the right talent.  That is why they have updated their team’s hiring process to incorporate the evaluation of ability and willingness to learn the use of Power Automate to identify talent that will embrace automation with the same enthusiasm as the rest of their team.

As Cineplex continues its automation maturity, they are focusing on the following items:

1. To improve its Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) on Power Automate ensuring smooth migrations between environments, monitoring, and reporting on flow exceptions and ensuring continuity of ownership of citizen developed automations through improved governance.
2. As Cineplex’s citizen developers become more experienced and their use cases increase in complexity, they are looking to dive deeper into other features of the Power Automate platform such as Process Advisor to gain insights into existing processes and discover ways to optimize them, and AI Builder to predict future outcomes from historical data.
3. To support their developing community, their Automation COE have plans for recurring office hours where citizen developers can jump on and get help with their issues or ask questions, sessions to cover advanced topics and highlight new features of Power Automate, and eventually automation hackathons.

By continuing to build engagement and adoption of Power Automate and harnessing the untapped potential of the citizen developer community, Cineplex is not only making its teams more effective but is accelerating its digital transformation journey as well.

“Automation is one of our key initiatives as it positively impacts the guest experience and the employee experience and drives cost savings. Creating our Automation Centre of Excellence has accelerated our adoption of automation and by empowering the citizen development community, we will ensure that we focus and prioritize the appropriate use cases as we systematically move forward freeing up that critical resource – time. This will then allow the team to focus on more value-added activities.”
– Gord Nelson – CFO, Cineplex

Related links

• Automation Kit repository
• Automation kit documentation
• Automation CoE Strategy
• HEAT
• HEAT video series
• Automation Admin & Governance whitepaper

The post Cineplex drives digital transformation with Power Automate (RPA) led by citizen developers appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

One of the largest benefits of low-code tools such as Power Automate is that we have been able to expand our search for folks beyond traditional IT programming. While IT skills are needed, we also can pull from IT-inclined business experts.”
– John Hendrock, Director of Business Applications, US Acute Care Solutions

Alteon Health (recently acquired by US Acute Care Solutions (USACS)) is a leading provider of emergency medicine, hospitalist medicine, critical care, post-acute care, and virtual and home health services serving 200 practice locations in the United States. In this article, we’ll learn how the Alteon Health DevOps team uses Microsoft Power Automate to automatically take 20 million medical records each year from a wide variety of providers and process them into a coherent medical history for each patient that can be used for both care history and billing purposes.

Automation Journey

To understand the adoption of automation at USACS, we need to look back at the history of Alteon Health. The history of automation started over a decade ago at 4M Emergency Systems, which eventually merged with other companies to form Alteon Health. “Automation” in those days were Batch Scripts using Windows Scheduler. In cases where the team was unable to automate a task, they relied on vendors to do this via Perl scripts or similar.

4M and subsequent companies utilized automation to “do more with less.” As they grew, they went in search of a true Automation platform and found WinAutomation (which subsequently became Power Automate for desktop). With Microsoft Power Automate offering a breadth of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) capabilities via desktop flows and Desktop Process Automation (DPA) capabilities via cloud flows, automating manual processes continued to take off.

Eventually with another merger, the company doubled their visit counts and automation continued to significantly contribute to scaling their business. They reduced the need for external vendors who previously handled approximately half of the tasks. As the company has grown, they’ve been able to absorb more visits and more clients without the need to constantly expand the IT or Operations staff.

“I’m extremely proud of what our team has done on the Power Automate platform in just a few months. In the photo, we are wearing our team shirts which translated to English that says, “I will find a way or make one” which through collaboration we have been doing.”
– Mark Norris, DevOps Manager, US Acute Care Solutions

Business Scenario

In a typical patient visit to a hospital, there are various types of information, such as doctor visit records, patient demographics data, timestamps of how long a patient stays in the hospital, medical examination results, and any other supporting documentation for each patient.

USACS provides staffing of various hospitals with required physicians, clinicians, and other practice providers with a total of 3 million patients served each year generating 20 million sets of data from 200 practice locations. Each hospital that USACS works with submits data through a secure file transfer to USACS for billing and other purposes. As each hospital has different medical data systems, some provide data through their own file transfer service, and others use USACS’s infrastructure – resulting in the need for manual formatting and data extraction from many different data formats.

USACS needed an automation solution that could process the different types of data such as text, images, and PDFs, to be used in both patient management and billing systems. Without some form of automation in place, this would have resulted in the need for manual formatting and data extraction from a variety of different data formats, where dozens of people would need to manually process this data 24/7.

“A typical hospital would have around 100 patients each day, and we had dozens of hospitals to receive information from and required a few thousand records in total to be processed per day.”
– Juan Ramos Paniagua, Senior Analyst, US Acute Care Solutions

Power Automate Solution

Using Power Automate desktop and cloud flows, USACS was able to automate processing of millions of records with a team of just five people . Let’s take a deeper look at the automation solution.

To automate the process, combinations of different actions are used to process each set of data. For example, text files are processed with regular expressions (regex) to identify which facility the data originated from . With PDF files, a PDF editing application is used to separate PDF pages. Once all the files are processed, they are sent to the USACS internal systems for billing and account management. This enabled employees to transform their business process from a manual process to exception-based processing – where automation alerts anomalies and employees now need to only deal with failures.

Managing sensitive information

Handling data securely for personal health information is essential for the healthcare industry. USACS used secure inputs and outputs as well as Microsoft Azure cloud services, including Azure Key Vault, to manage sensitive information such as email and database passwords when bridging the data across Power Automate cloud flows and desktop flows.

Templatizing desktop flows for easier maintenance

USACS’s RPA team set up Power Automate flows for each automation scenario are scalable and maintainable. The cloud flows are separated by facilities/hospitals, where a particular cloud flow handles certain file types that come from those facilities specifically. The flows are set up to be modularized, like a universal processing module, by passing variables back and forth between cloud flows and desktop flows. This means that USACS’s RPA team had to build the module only once and then provide it with the data it needs, such as metadata or processing.

Having modularized flows made it easy for USACS to maintain a single pattern of automation that would work across many hospitals and patient records. This was facilitated using context variables such as those for facility IDs.

Ensuring a successful automation environment at USACS

As part of the Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) strategy, three environments are set up to ensure that no issues arise when automations are running in production. There are separate Development, Test and Production environments and each automation is managed inside solutions.

Connection references and environment variables are used extensively to ensure that all values can be dynamically updated when migrating from one environment to another.

Summary of Benefits

• US Acute Care Solutions could scale their business without needing to hire new staff when new clients/processes are added
• An automation-first culture saves 100,000+ hours worth of work each year
• Employees have transformed their business process from manual processes to exception based processing – where automations alert anomalies and need to only deal with failures
• Integration with Microsoft Azure and its distributed data centers reduces business risk
• Securely process sensitive healthcare data
• Ability to expand IT solution team to include business experts

Looking ahead

The recent acquisition by US Acute Care Solutions has created a combined patient volume of over 9 million, looking to grow to 18 million in the next few years. As a next step for the automation team, they are looking into Azure DevOps and potentially setting up a repository for version control – bringing a new level of maturity to the automation program at US Acute Care Solutions.

“If I had to add it all up over the years, we would easily need to double/triple the number of folks that would be necessary to keep the gears turning… not to mention that adding new clients/processes would require new staff. Automation (in whatever form) has saved easily over 100,000+ hours of work, and untold/incalculable vendor costs.“
– John Hendrock, Director of Business Applications, US Acute Care Solutions

The post US Acute Care Solutions automates processing of 20 million medical records annually using Power Automate (RPA) appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.