Source: (Gartner, October 2024)1* 

We are excited to share that Microsoft has been named a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms** for the sixth year in a row. This recognition, we feel, reflects the trust of millions of users who continue to build on Microsoft Power Platform—a comprehensive low-code solution that spans application development, process automation, external websites, and intelligent copilots.  

Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms

Learn why Microsoft was named a Leader.

Read the report

The success stories of our customers demonstrate the tangible impact of Microsoft Power Platform in real-world scenarios. A few examples include:

• Pacific Gas & Electric, a US utility company that has built over 300 complex solutions delivering over $75 million in savings each year and are also adopting generative AI to further advance their service center chatbot, which alone saves $1.1 million each year in helpdesk support.
• Zurich Insurance Group, a Swiss insurance company, is skillfully balancing the growth of low-code development with the strong governance required in the highly regulated financial services industry sector. 
• Cineplex, one of Canada’s leading media and entertainment companies, has saved 30,000 hours (approximately 3.5 years) and over $1 million in the past two years by leveraging automation and copilots built on Microsoft Power Platform to improve overall customer service and reduce query handling time from 15 minutes to just 30 seconds.² 

These companies—and many more—are using Microsoft Power Platform to transform their operations by building solutions on a secure, scalable platform that effectively handles and streamlines AI integration, governance, security, and enterprise data connectivity, a platform that enables developers to build with natural language, visual interface, or code, and deploy powerful solutions to web, mobile, or Microsoft Teams with ease.

“[Microsoft] Power Platform enables us to carefully control the data that feeds our AI models and, through [Microsoft Azure] Active Directory and [Microsoft] Dataverse, also control who can access which data through those models”.

Thomas Bilbo, Principal, Product Owner, PG&E 

Let’s dive into the factors that we believe set our platform apart as a Leader. 

Microsoft Copilot in Power Platform is transforming how people use and create software, making Microsoft the low-code application platform (LCAP) of choice for customers who need to rapidly modernize their application estates for the age of AI. 

Makers can harness Copilot in Power Apps to turn natural language descriptions into functional solutions quickly. Copilot helps makers from the beginning, when they build a plan for their solution, and continues to assist with tasks like working with data models, adding new tables, creating relations between data, adding new screens and controls within the canvas experience, and crafting complex formulas in Microsoft Power Fx.  

“Building the prototype from scratch would have taken 6-8 hours. We were able to just describe in natural language and build in a few minutes.”

Ron Colvin​, Director of Innovation, CONA Services​ 

End-users benefit from out-of-the-box Microsoft Copilot capabilities when using apps built on Dataverse. And with Copilot streamlining actions such as drafting text inputs, filling forms, and filtering records, users are saving significant time on manual and repetitive tasks.  

To date, over 480,000 organizations have used AI-powered capabilities in Microsoft Power Platform. For instance, Nsure.com significantly improved efficiency and reduced costs by using generative AI to automate complex business processes, cutting manual processing time by 60% and associated costs by 50%.  

Confidently adopt at scale with enterprise-grade security and data governance  

Through Managed Environments, the suite of advanced governance capabilities that comes with Power Platform premium licenses, the platform provides a robust control framework for secure, scalable low-code adoption. Leading organizations like PG&E, Equinor, Shell, T-Mobile, Lumen Technologies, Zurich Insurance Group, and HSBC manage extensive developer networks and solutions globally with exceptional visibility and control.  

Since 2022, Deutsche Bahn (DB) Group has been using Managed Environments to drive innovation at scale across the world’s largest railway company. At Rabobank, more than 55% of their 40,000 employees use Microsoft Power Platform solutions. Similarly, Accenture has over 200,000 employees using applications built on Microsoft Power Apps every month. 

Each of our coworkers has a [Microsoft] Power Platform license to create, to solve problems for his or her team, or even for the whole company. It’s very easy to make your own app, and very fast.

Thomas Czierpke, Head of Adoption and Change Management, Microsoft 365, DB Group  

We continue to invest in Managed Environments as customers drive greater scale and sophistication on the platform. In the past year, we have introduced comprehensive application lifecycle management, including Git integration and source control, a proactive intelligent advisor for risk management, and advanced administration options. We’re equipping administrators and experienced developers with advanced tools, and our upcoming release plan will continue to add new functionality in application lifecycle management, enterprise-scale administration, licensing and capacity management, monitoring, security, and compliance. 

Start your low-code transformation now 

In the journey of digital and AI transformation, every maker and every developer plays a crucial role in driving innovation. It’s amazing to see 83,000 participants in our partner bootcamps and airlifts, with Microsoft Power Platform communities growing to 5.8 million monthly active users! It is all of you—our community—that make this journey so rewarding. 

We are grateful to all the organizations, customers, the community, and partners for this recognition—thank you for everything that you do! As a next step, dive into building with Power Apps Developer Plan. Learn more about our position as a Leader in the 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms report. 

Sources

1. Gartner®, Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms, October 16, 2024, Oleksandr Matvitskyy,  Kimihiko Iijima, Mike West, Kyle Davis, Akash Jain, Paul Vincent

2. Microsoft Fiscal Year 2024 Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call 

*This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document. The Gartner document is available upon request from Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms. 

**Gartner is a registered trademark and service mark and Magic Quadrant is a registered trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved. 

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. 

The post Microsoft named a Leader in 2024 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platforms    appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Jump to: Popular categories | Org name (A-Z) | Videos

Featured stories

Accenture Power Platform for 50k newly skilled makers	Pacific Gas and Electric 300+ solutions generate ~$75M in savings annually
Epiq AI-driven employee onboarding automation saves $500k/year	Nsure.com AI & Power Automate cut manual processing time by 60%

Makers in action

Jacqui Peck Audiologist builds apps for HAPEE program	Foyin Olajide-Bello IT Pro creates a community of citizen developers	Rebecca Sackett Citizen developer digitizes manufacturing processes
Lauren Taylor Principal uses Power Apps for reading fluency	Brian Hodel Code-first developer automates complex processes	Martin Lee Dispatcher builds over forty apps

See also

• Champions driving change with Power Platform
• Professional developers using Power Platform

Popular categories

• Generative AI and Copilot – Accelerating development and streamlining processes with generative AI.
• Scale and governance – Organizations with a center of excellence and enterprise-wide adoption.
• SAP + Power Platform – Customers who have built Power Platform solutions integrated with SAP systems.
• Fusion teams – Cross-functional teams collaborating to build impactful solutions.
• By industry – Education, Financial Services, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Media & Communications, Retail, Government, Non-profit, and more.
• By company size – small, medium, and large businesses.
• By scenario category – Assets, Customers, Employees, Products/Services, Supply.
• By maker persona – Citizen development, Pro-devs, IT-Pros, Partners.
• By technologies used – Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Pages, Copilot Studio, Dataverse.

Stories by organization name (A-Z)

Accenture Accenture, a global professional services company, uses Microsoft Power Platform to enable over 700,000 employees to work anytime, anywhere. customer story | case study on Accenture.com | interview on Power CAT Live
ADH Clinic A small business owner went digital, staying open during COVID-19. The solution uses Microsoft Bookings, Forms, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Dataverse. customer story
Ardent Mills Ardent Mills, with over 40 locations specializing in flour, quinoa, and organic & gluten-free products, uses Power Apps solutions daily. They adopted Dataverse to build a paperless, modern mill. customer story
Arm Arm, a leading semiconductor and software design company in Cambridge, England, used the CoE Starter Kit to manage the platform and build a thriving maker community. customer story
Armanino Armanino used Power Apps connected to Azure SQL to build a workspace scheduling solution that helps manage office space for its agile workforce. customer story
Balfour Beatty Balfour Beatty, a leading UK construction contractor, used Power Platform, Dataverse, and Azure services to streamline over 70 legacy documents in their processes for new businesses, bid management, and project delivery. customer story Blackmores A team of full stack developers used Dynamics 365 and Power Platform, along with Microsoft Dataverse, to consolidate and unify several systems. Includes apps for coaching sales staff, managing vendors, and more. customer presentation
Brown-Forman Brown-Forman, with over 150 years of history and brands like Jack Daniel’s, Herradura, and Korbel, used Power Automate’s RPA and connectors to integrate systems like Salesforce, Workday, and Google Workspace, saving thousands of hours in 7 months. customer story
Call2Recycle Call2Recycle, a non-profit, partnered with EFOQUS to digitize sales, finance, and operations using Dynamics 365. They used Power Pages, Power Automate, and Power BI to create an external portal for e-bike retailer enrollment and training. customer story | video
Centrica Centrica, an international energy services company serving millions in the UK, expanded their Power Platform success by investing in Microsoft Dataverse and establishing a Center of Excellence for scalable adoption. customer story
Chevron Chevron has built a scaled up Center of Excellence with robust governance processes enabling hundreds of makers to build thousands of apps. blog | customer presentation | Center of Excellence deep dive
Choice Aviation Choice Aviation Services, a US-based international airline cargo company, used Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI to create a unique logistics system, setting new efficiency standards for the industry. customer story
City of Kobe Built multiple solutions using the entire Power Platform to respond to COVID, providing status on special cash payments and information via chatbots and dashboards. customer story
City of Ottawa City of Ottawa IT used a fusion development approach to deploy chatbots for citizens and employees. Built with Power Virtual Agents, these chatbots integrate with various systems using Power Automate and custom code. customer story | MBAS presentation
Coca-Cola Bottling Company United Power Automate desktop flows were used to automate complex back-end processes for managing vending machines cartridge replacements. customer story | video | MBAS presentation
Custom Air Products and Services A Power Platform solution by citizen developer Rebecca Sackett tracks the entire lifecycle of HVAC units from “cradle to crate” through the manufacturing process. customer story | video | presentation | demo
Cancer Research UK Power Platform, SharePoint Online, and Teams were adopted to accelerate fundraising and advance cancer research. Apps were built for procurement, connecting research teams, and helping patients find matching trials. customer story
Degrees of Change Using Microsoft Power Platform, Dataverse, and generative AI, Degrees of Change, which provides equitable access to education for underrepresented youth, built apps to go paperless, improve application scoring, and serve more students. customer story | video
Ecolab Ecolab leveraged Power Platform integrated with Dynamics 365, Azure, and Microsoft 365 to build “The Hub” – a unified app for managing core sales and service processes. customer story | MBAS presentation
ECS Using Power Automate and AI Builder, a team member at ECS, a professional services organization, automated the extraction of performance data from PDFs and generated Power BI reports, saving the company hundreds of hours of manual labor while delivering innovative solutions to government agencies. customer story
Electrolock Using Power Apps, Power Automate, and Microsoft Dataverse, Electrolock, a premiere provider of insulation products and solutions for the manufacturing industry, partnered with Confluent to build an inventory management solution. customer story
EY Using Power Platform, Dataverse, and Azure, code-first professional developers working in fusion teams built digital solutions that integrate with third-party services. Scenarios include processing emergency loans, managing global employee mobility, transforming an annual salary reviews, and managing quality and risks. story – SAP integration | story – loan processing | story – employee mobility | story – EarnEY | story – customer onboarding | presentation – Assurance Management Tool
FortisAlberta FortisAlberta won a Canadian Safety Technology Award for this Microsoft Power Platform solution. To more efficiently document Injury Prevention Plans (IPPs), they transitioned away from paper forms to using Power Apps and Power BI. Solution built by Fidelity Factory. customer story
G&J Pepsi G&J Pepsi has digitally transformed their organization with Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI, equipping nearly 900 field personnel with mobile apps that have saved the organization over $1.5 million. customer story | video
Giant Eagle Giant Eagle is one of the nation’s largest food, fuel, and pharmacy retailers and distributors. With Microsoft Power Platform, the company has harnessed its innovative spirit to produce solutions that have increased productivity, reduced costs, and made for more engaged team members. customer story
Hanover Insurance Business and IT leaders at Hanover Insurance have partnered closely to automate time consuming manual tasks during the underwriting process. They successfully adopted Power Automate for desktop RPA capabilities and built custom apps using Power Apps to drive rapid automation. customer story | MBAS presentation
Hearing Australia A citizen developer at Hearing Australia, in partnership with the IT team, used Power Apps and Dataverse to streamline how Community Engagement Officers, audiologists, and the operations team collect and track critical program information. customer story | video – fusion team
Hexion Sales staff use a Power Apps canvas app with AI Builder capabilities to scan business cards at events. Data is integrated into Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Dataverse. In addition, 80+ Power Automate flows are used to automate several business processes. customer story
IKEA France The Power Community at IKEA France, with around 1,500 users, has developed 430 apps to meet the needs of its 34 stores and 4 national warehouses. The People & Culture app, accessible to 12,000 employees in France, has replaced paper forms for requests like submitting receipts or changing addresses. customer story (English) | customer story (French)
IKEA Sweden Power Apps apps are used to manage in-store kitchen sales appointments, B2B sales pipeline, and speed up customer support requests. Built by Microsoft Gold Partner Capgemini. customer story
John Cockerill A team of professional developers leveraged the speed of low code development with the rigor of Azure DevOps to develop high quality, enterprise-wide apps. Over 30 Power Platform solutions are used by more than 2,000 daily users. They range from desk space reservation to a time tracking solution with integration into the company’s SAP system. customer story
Johnson Controls Serving four million customers in 150 countries, more than 100,000 Johnson Controls employees create and deploy systems and digital solutions that optimize building performance, safety, sustainability, and comfort. Utilizing Microsoft Power Platform, Johnson Controls is building a new class of training deployment and tracking solutions. customer story
Kao Corporation Kao Corporation used Microsoft Power Platform to create digital solutions for frontline workers across their factories in Japan. A single citizen developer project resulted in an efficiency increase of 480 hours per month. This is one of the 250+ apps in use across ten facilities in Japan. customer story
Kelly Roofing Power Apps mobile app used to capture photos and status updates at job sites. Integrated with Microsoft Dynamics 365, Dataverse, SharePoint and Teams. Built by PowerObjects. customer story
Komatsu Australia Komatsu is an industry-leading equipment manufacturer and supplier. They used Power Automate (RPA) and AI Builder to automate a manual invoice fixing process for 52K+ invoices a year. They went from purchasing licenses to deploying the solution in production within a short span of four weeks. They’ve also built an Automation Center of Excellence and a Citizen Developer Program. customer story
Leonard Cheshire Care workers use Power Apps canvas apps and model-driven apps, along with Dynamics 365, to manage health care for people with disabilities. Built by QUANTIQ. customer story | blog series | news article | MBAS presentation
Lerøy Seafood Group Lerøy Seafood Group, the third largest salmon and trout producer globally, purchased 4,000 Premium Power Apps licenses as part of their digitization strategy. Leveraging an automated Center of Excellence, they developed new enterprise applications, saving millions annually in operational costs. customer story
London Heathrow Airport From security guard to IT User Adoption Specialist, Samit Saini has built apps that improve the passenger experience at Heathrow airport. He has trained a community of super users who are now building apps and digitizing business processes at Heathrow. video | customer story
London’s Air Ambulance Charity The life-saving charity treats an average of five patients every day. They partnered with Intelogy to build a suite of checklist apps that have replaced the existing paper-based processes. The solutions use Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI and Dataverse. customer story | video
Mars Mars, Incorporated, is a global manufacturer of confectionery, pet food and food products, and provides animal care services. They automated multiple enterprise IT use cases using Power Automate, such as managing extension approvals, SharePoint site requests and migration of network files. They have over 10K cloud flows and 4K Power Apps solutions. customer story
Metro Bank A Power Apps tablet app connected to Dynamics 365 is used to welcome customers and manage the appointment experience when the visit the bank. Ignite presentation with demo | Forbes article | customer story
Miami Dolphins The Miami Dolphins, well known for football, also own Hard Rock Stadium, which hosts a wide range of sports and entertainment events. To free its service agents from repeatedly answering routine questions, the organization used Power Virtual Agents to build a chatbot that’s now available 24×7 on their web properties. customer story | video
Microsoft Account Planning Global sales and marketing organization digitally transforms the account planning process for thousands of enterprise accounts by using a Power Apps canvas app, Power Automate and Power BI connected to Dataverse. customer story
Microsoft Global Demand Center The Global Demand Center (GDC) is the connected sales and marketing engine that runs all commercial marketing campaigns for the company. In partnership with Accenture and Avanade, they used Power Automate, Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents and Power BI to reinvent operations and recover 25% of capacity and budget. customer story
Microsoft HR Mobile suite of apps deployed to all Microsoft employees for viewing employee news, people profiles, global holidays, reporting vacation time, sending kudos and more. customer story | MBAS presentation | Demos
Microsoft Operations Citizen developers within Microsoft built an “Intelligent Launch Assistant” that lets release managers quickly define the scope of a launch, document change requests, track issues and risks, and more. Intelligent launch assistant
The National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) The National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF) transitioned from a time-consuming, Excel-based process to the Patient Access Management System (PAMS) developed by Spanish Point Technologies using Power Platform. Since its 2019 launch, PAMS has managed patient numbers growing from 30,000 to over 160,000, significantly reducing waiting times. customer story
Novo Nordisk The Global Clinical Development department at Novo Nordisk started their Power Platform journey in Dec 2019 with access to premium licenses and the full capabilities of the platform, including Portals. They accelerated adoption during COVID-19, built several applications, and are expanding to other parts of the organization. MBAS presentation
NSure Nsure.com is a proprietary online insurance shopping platform that enables consumers to transparently compare home and auto insurance quotes from more than 50 top-rated insurers and purchase a policy within minutes. A back-end system driven by Power Platform, Dynamics 365, and Azure services automates much of the process. customer story
Office Depot Office depot saved hundreds of thousands of dollars by rapidly creating multiple Power Apps solutions that run embedded in Teams. An example is the Payroll Action Form app that replaced a fax process and resulted in faster and more accurate payments to associates. video
Oslo Agency for Health Oslo Agency for Health is the organization responsible for providing digital services to Oslo’s healthcare sector. Using Power Apps, Dataverse, Power Automate and Power BI, they built 25 apps to support patient-doctor communications, contact tracing, covid-19 test booking, vaccinations and more. In just four months, the number of users went from 30 to 3,000. customer story
Pacific Gas & Electric In less than a year, Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) launched its Center of Excellence, scaled it across nine business units, and delivered 132 solutions including an app for tracking equipment shipped to emergency sites, an FAQ chatbot for service desk requests, and unattended bots to help reconcile billing data. customer story
Partners In Health Gift officers use Power Apps to review donations and drive follow up actions. Power BI dashboards are used to gain insights on the donation process. customer story | customer story – Power Automate | MBAS presentation
PayPal PayPal uses Microsoft Teams for employees to collaborate. They’re creating a Power Apps and Power BI solution to manage the list of all portfolios and programs which will be deeply integrated with Teams. customer story
Pinnacle Group Citizen developers built 14+ Power Apps connected to SharePoint to conduct safety audits, centralize profit center listings, manage innovation ideas, and more. customer story | slide deck
Progressive Insurance Professional developers used Power Virtual Agents and fusion development to quickly create the ‘Cloudie’ chatbot. Cloudie is available for use to anyone at the 50,000-plus-employee enterprise to get quick answers for cloud-related queries. This work spurred other teams to create their own intelligent conversation chatbots using a no-code approach. customer story
PwC PwC, a global network of professional services firms, wanted to offer its teams a more convenient way to search for needed content, like strategy presentations and client-related documents, across its repositories. Using Microsoft Power Virtual Agents and Bot Framework Composer, PwC gives even its non-technical team members the ability to easily interact with chatbots that automate the content searching process, improving the speed and accuracy of their results. customer story – PVA | customer story – Power Pages
QuoteWizard QuoteWizard used Microsoft Power Platform and Power Automate to build an automated, AI-powered ticket routing system to match tickets with the right talent at the right time. This has helped the company improve efficiency, hone its competitive edge, and deliver a better employee experience. customer story
R3 Retail Development Family-owned small business now runs their business on Power Platform, offering a customized app for complex project management tasks in retail installation projects. Built by Confluent. customer story | Ignite presentation
Rabobank Rabobank is the second-largest bank in the Netherlands, with more than 40,000 employees in 38 countries. As part of a broad digitization strategy, Rabobank adopted Power Platform to streamline internal processes and today runs more than 2,500 Power Apps and Power Automate solutions. 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. customer story | customer story – Power Virtual Agents
Reliable Electric Digitization of complex work order estimation process for custom electrical projects in high-end homes. customer story | blog post
Rockwell Automation Rockwell Automation is a world leader in industrial automation and information. Using Power BI and Azure, and the Microsoft modern data warehouse architecture, they created a unified platform for analytics. Their world class BI Center of Excellence with training events and a thriving community has enabled serve-serve BI across the company. customer story
Sandvik Sandvik is a Stockholm-based engineering company that specializes in the development and production of stainless steel and alloys and tools for a wide range of industries. Solutions based on Microsoft Power Platform have been deployed across the company, including an app that has streamlined operations in its Materials Technology division. customer story
Schlumberger Schlumberger has a robust Center of Excellence with hundreds of apps, flows and dashboards built across several business units. The apps are used for managing the response to COVID, tracking fitness activities, managing promotion evaluations, executive feedback, and more. customer story | customer presentation | MBAS presentation | PDF
Seattle Visiting Nurses Association (SVNA) Seattle Visiting Nurses Association transformed their vaccine delivery process so that patients, nursing staff and admin staff could safely deliver flu vaccinations using Microsoft Dataverse, Power Apps, and Power Automate. Built by Signetic. customer story | blog post | Ignite presentation
Shell Shell Global has enabled over 4000 citizen developers through a Center of Expertise and hundreds of distributed DIY coaches, generating business value and culture improvements. Their success can be attributed to governance for use cases, local community cultivation, and committed leadership. Estimated annual savings generated by each app ranges from 35K to 3M USD. customer story | Forrester case study
SNCF SNCF started with a grassroots app development effort and now have hundreds of Power Apps in production. They’ve built a company-wide center of excellence to enable thousands on the Power Platform. customer story | video
Sonae Sonae MC, a company in the Sonae portfolio, is a leader in the food retail sector based in Portugal. Their Workplace Design team used Power Automate to build a solution to enhance their Sonae Contacto Traineeship Programme for attracting, retaining, and onboarding selected candidates. customer story | MBAS presentation
Standard Bank Standard Bank has created a center of excellence focused on Microsoft Power Platform and Microsoft 365. Their driving principle –“apps built by business for business”. customer story | MBAS presentation | Ignite demo
Tacoma Public Schools Lauren Taylor, Principal at Manitou Public Elementary used Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI to create solutions for managing student reading assessments, return to school approvals, and more. Apps and dashboards run embedded in Microsoft Teams. Ignite keynote | video | demo
Team Rubicon Team Rubicon uses Power Apps to manage complex operations from reconnaissance of disaster sites to execution of support efforts. They also use Power Apps Portals to recruit and train volunteers. blog post | mechanics demo
Telstra Field technicians and managers use 70+ tools for daily operations. Includes Power Apps, Power Automate and Power BI. The Power Platform solutions are led by a citizen developer who is now project owner for the PowerFactory Center of Excellence initiative. customer story | video | MBAS presentation & demo |
T-Mobile Teams and executives track use Power Platform with Microsoft Dataverse to track approvals for all company-wide initiatives. T-Mobile has also setup a community of champions building Power Platform solutions across multiple business units. customer story | customer story – RPA | technical case study | MBAS presentation video
Toyota Toyota has a robust Power Apps center of excellence to enable makers across the organization to build solutions. This includes field engineers using Power Apps and Power Automate to manage approvals. customer story
US Acute Care Solutions The DevOps team at Alteon Health (recently acquired by US Acute Care Solutions (USACS)) used Power Automate for desktop (RPA) 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. customer story
University of Oxford The world-renowned university, which teaches 25,000 students every year, has created a range of easy-to-use Power Apps solutions. These includes apps that handle course fees, funding applications, assigning colleges, childcare services for staff, and more. customer story
Virgin Atlantic The IT Lite Team delivers quick wins for business units –apps for managing VIP customers, compliance audits, cargo delivery, and more. Plus, an admin app built in Power Apps to manage the Power Apps footprint in the organization. customer story | video and case study
Western States Caterpillar Western States Caterpillar Equipment Company is an authorized Caterpillar dealer for five mountain states in the United States. Pro-developers in the IT team built mobile Power Apps in collaboration with business teams. The apps are used to manage equipment rentals, sales activities, and more. customer story | MBAS presentation
Westpac Westpac, Australia’s first bank and one of the largest banks in New Zealand, has been using Microsoft Power Platform to help streamline business operations, solve IT issues, and formally support its “citizen developers”. In under two years, they have built about 1,000 apps, which are used by 15,000 people, and IT is building in-house solutions faster with low-code tools than with traditional software development. customer story
ZF Group Hundreds of makers at ZF Group are digitizing excel and paper-based processes with Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI and Dataverse for Teams. Solutions include – performance reviews, turnover tracking, improving teamwork, and more. customer story
Zurich Insurance Zurich Insurance Group (Zurich) is an insurance company based in Zurich, Switzerland. To accelerate digital transformation, drive innovation, and streamline operations across the global enterprise, citizen and pro developers at Zurich have turned to Microsoft Power Platform for business app development, process automation, and more. customer story

Story index

Explore this representative set of curated stories organized by popular categories.

Generative AI and Copilot

Organizations have accelerated their development, streamlined processes and reduced costs using Power Platform’s generative AI capabilities such as Copilot in Power Apps, Copilot in cloud flows, Microsoft Copilot Studio, AI Builder text generation models, and more.

Generative AI and Copilot stories: ABN AMRO | Degrees of Change | ECS | Holland America | Nsure.com | Pacific Gas & Electric | Sentreseau

Scale and governance

Several organizations have built centers of excellence for Power Platform, with hundreds of makers creating apps, flows, dashboards and copilots across the organization. These organizations have used the Center of Excellence Starter Kit along with Managed Environments capabilities in the Power Platform Admin Center to setup robust governance processes and cultivate a thriving community of makers.

CoE stories: Accenture | Arm | Balfour Beatty | Centrica | Chevron | H&M | IKEA France | John Cockerill | Komatsu Australia | Leroy Seafood Group | London Heathrow Airport | Lumen Technologies | Pacific Gas & Electric | Rabobank | Schlumberger | Shell | SNCF | Standard Bank | Telstra | Toyota | Westpac | Woodside | ZF Group | Zurich Insurance

SAP + Power Platform

Organizations are taking advantage of the rich extensibility and connectivity capabilities in Power Platform to build solutions that integrate with their SAP systems.

SAP integration stories: Avocados from Mexico | Coca-Cola Beverages Vietnam | EY – Power Post | EY – Customer onboarding | John Cockerill

Fusion teams

Fusion development teams are defined as “cross-functional teams that use data and technology to achieve business outcomes.” To support organizations that want to deliver low-code apps, automations, and bots faster and more effectively, Microsoft Power Platform offers several capabilities for fusion teams. The following are examples where individuals from a diverse set of backgrounds and roles have collaborated to rapidly build impactful digital solutions for their business.

Fusion team stories: Accenture | Balfour Beatty | City of Ottawa | Coca-Cola Bottling Company United | EY-EarnEY | Hearing Australia  | John Cockerill | Novo Nordisk | Nsure | Oslo Agency for Health Progressive Insurance | Rabobank | Toyota Motor North America | T-Mobile | Western States Caterpillar | Zurich Insurance

Related link: Meet the developers combining Power Platform and Azure to go faster

By industry

By maker persona

Note: “Partner” refers to an implementation partner, systems integrator, or ISV, i.e. a third-party vendor.

By technologies used

Note: Power Apps and Power Automate cloud flows are included in almost all stories in the All Stories section. The ones mentioned below are a curated subset.

Related content

Watch Power Platform customer story videos
Read stories about Power Platform Champions
Read stories about RPA and Power Automate for desktop

The post Microsoft Power Platform Stories appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Enhancing your AI business strategy with Microsoft Copilot Studio and Microsoft Dataverse enables organizations to simplify the complex data integration, third-party data extensibility, and security guardrails organizations must have in place to assist in the implementation and adoption of AI.

At Microsoft Build 2024, we are excited to unveil Microsoft Copilot connectors. Microsoft Copilot connectors provide seamless and secure integration with your productivity, analytical, and operational data as well as empower users to activate existing business processes. Copilot Studio and Dataverse allow organizations to create actions, build knowledge, and integrate grounded data into their copilots with ease, all while easily meeting their compliance requirements with a rich set of security features.

Bridge the gap between enterprise data and Microsoft Copilot

The concept of enterprise knowledge in Copilot Studio is a groundbreaking addition that allows copilot makers to add specific contextually relevant knowledge sources to their copilots, thereby improving the reliability and accuracy of responses. Knowledge supports a wide range of data types, including public websites and Microsoft Dynamics 365 (powered by Dataverse) and brings simple discoverability and understanding of enterprise data, which is critical to scaling the delivery of agent copilots across an organization.

Figure 1: Makers can select enterprise data sources as their copilot’s knowledge.

Many Microsoft customers are seeing the benefits of adding grounded enterprise data into their copilot experience. From supply chain management, customer relationship management, and productivity insights, customers can increase the efficiency of business processes, make their workforce more productive, and provide rich customer experiences. Read below how Peppermint, EY, and Docusign have developed impactful solutions.

Peppermint reimagines legal business processes with Copilot

Law firms are challenged with optimizing workflow efficiency and delivering effective client services. Achieving this entails implementing a range of services, including case and matter management, document management, and client engagement. How can law firms, who are primarily focused on legal expertise, utilize technology to overcome this challenge and achieve their goals?

Peppermint Technology, a leading global independent software vendor (ISV) revolutionizing legal firms and departments, has built solutions that easily ground copilots with enterprise data stored in Dataverse and SharePoint to provide more relevant and secure business insights. Peppermint has been using Microsoft Power Platform to model their legal case process and storing their business data in Dataverse. With their existing integration, allowing Peppermint’s copilot to access enterprise knowledge and processes from Microsoft Power Platform, while maintaining user context security, requires minimal effort and allows rapid adoption of modern AI workloads for increasing productivity and automation

Figure 2: Use natural language to retrieve matters stored in Dataverse.

Lawyers can now use LARA (Legal Analysis and Research Assistant for Peppermint) to efficiently prepare for upcoming meetings by identifying internal contacts for new accounts, accessing pertinent information, and taking necessary actions ahead of their meetings.

Figure 3: Use natural language to identify connections with new accounts.

“At Peppermint Technology, we are excited to utilize Copilot Studio’s enterprise knowledge to not only extract maximum value from corporate data but also significantly enhance our law firm clients’ ability to engage with their clients and increase billing efficiencies. This strategic adoption aligns perfectly with our business priorities of reducing risk and boosting client engagement, enabling our clients to offer superior service and achieve better outcomes.”—Mike Walker, Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Peppermint Technology

Take your enterprise business processes further with Copilot connectors

With Copilot connectors in Copilot Studio, organizations can easily expand their copilot knowledge and actions with their business data. Copilot connectors allow organizations to bring together data from Dynamics 365, Microsoft Power Platform, SharePoint, OneDrive, Microsoft Fabric OneLake, public websites, and many other systems of record.

When incorporating Copilot connectors into your custom copilots, Copilot will work in the background on your user’s or organization’s behalf, and reason across structured and unstructured data to execute your business processes.

Figure 4: Microsoft Copilot connectors diagram.
Copilot connectors are part of the broader Copilot ecosystem, which includes Copilot Studio and Microsoft Copilot. They play a crucial role in the extensibility of Copilot, allowing developers to create custom AI solutions that are deeply integrated with Dataverse and Microsoft Power Platform. Some key benefits of Copilot connectors are:

• Semantic search: Allows the connector to understand and interpret the text data, enabling more relevant and context-aware responses.
• Data syncing and caching: Ensure your data is synchronized and cached efficiently, allowing for quick access, and reducing potential latency issues.
• Extensive third-party service integration: With a few clicks you can access the ecosystem of more than 1,400 connectors so that even non-Microsoft data can be included.
• Support for complex data types: The connectors can handle a variety of data types, including relational data and unstructured data, making them versatile for different business needs, and come with production-grade service levels.
• Low-code and pro-code: Whether you want to create custom application programming interface (API) or existing prebuilt connectors, the choice is up to you.

Docusign expedites the workforce with Copilot connectors

By enabling the Docusign Copilot connector within Microsoft Copilot, Docusign delivers greater value to their customers by not only surfacing document details, steps, and processes, but also allowing users to ask queries with natural language, and drive results faster than before. Docusign’s integrations with Microsoft Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Copilot for Sales provide AI-powered agreement insights to help drive employee productivity, close deals faster, and manage renewals at scale. Customers across human resources (HR), sales, procurement, legal, and more can now use natural language to ask Copilot for agreement status and summarization, extract key information, send reminders to others, and more.

Figure 5: Activate Docusign Copilot connector and find agreements with natural language.

“Through our partnership with Microsoft, we are revolutionizing the way organizations do business. Docusign’s integrations with Copilot for Microsoft 365 and Copilot for Sales harness the power of AI to drive intelligent automation and innovation, leveraging Microsoft Power Platform plug-ins and Microsoft Copilot Studio. Meeting people where they work, these integrations empower organizations to accelerate revenue, reduce risk, and create better experiences from the agreements that run their business. Together, we’re not just streamlining processes, we’re redefining what’s possible in the digital era.”—Janine Grasso, General Vice President (GVP) of Partner Development and Alliances, Docusign

Gain visibility and increase your security posture

As organizations increase the complexity of their solutions and incorporate data from multiple systems of record through Copilot connectors, gaining and maintaining visibility of the security of that data is critical. Previously, fragmented experiences created barriers to customers assessing risks, and a lack of clear, defined guidance in achieving the defense in depth that organizations strive to maintain. Without security tools for both proactive and reactive governance of both citizen and pro developers’ applications, administrators may resort to solutions that stifle modernization, productivity, and business growth.

The Security Hub is designed to solve these challenges and more, with intuitive experiences, and strategic guidance, administrators can navigate the complexities of managing security at scale. This centralized hub provides administrators with tools to assess the security posture of their tenant, identify and act on impactful recommendations, and proactively set policies to safeguard against vulnerabilities and threats all through the Microsoft Power Platform admin center.

The Security Hub for Microsoft Power Platform, in public preview, offers several benefits, including:

• Enhanced security posture: Providing administrators with tools to assess and improve the security posture of their tenant, ensuring that data and applications are protected against vulnerabilities and threats.
• Actionable recommendations: Identify impactful recommendations that administrators can act on to strengthen security measures.
• Proactive policy setting: Proactively set policies to safeguard your environment, preventing potential security incidents before they occur.
• Centralized security management: One centralized platform for managing security across Microsoft Power Platform, streamlining the process, and making it more efficient.

These features are designed to provide a comprehensive security solution that aligns with an organization’s security practices, contributing to the overall success of digital transformation efforts. For example, Security Hub identifies if minimum safeguarding is in place and guides you to set up the appropriate data loss prevention policies (DLP) around Copilot connector usage in your organization. In addition, administrators can expect to utilize the following generally available in the Security Hub: vNet for Dataverse plugins, privileged identity management (PIM), tenant isolation, IP firewall, IP cookie binding, and environment security groups, while the following features will be available in public preview: client application control and Dataverse audit enhancements.

Additionally, Copilot Studio makers can now ground generative answers to SharePoint site content—enabling copilots to surface labeled resources as labeled responses in Teams chat with Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels.

Microsoft Purview Information Protection sensitivity labels are widely adopted by enterprises today to label and protect sensitive information in Microsoft 365 apps and Fabric, and they are coming soon to Microsoft Power Platform.

Watch our latest overview of Microsoft Power Platform and Dataverse security features.

EY prevents data exfiltration at scale with Microsoft Power Platform security controls

Data exfiltration prevention protects the unauthorized transfer of sensitive data from an organization to external parties. This allows a business to maintain business continuity, comply with regulatory requirements, and keep up with competitive advantage. This feature allows the security officer to allow or block what apps that their authorized users can run in a Dataverse environment.

“As an enterprise consumer of the Microsoft Dynamics 365 platform, I am thrilled to share my experience with the recent enhancements made by the Engineering team. Their diligent efforts have had a significant, positive impact on our Dynamics 365 launch with the necessary data controls to support our information security policies and data governance processes.
The introduction of data exfiltration permission controls was critical to comply with our Information Privacy and Data Governance policies. These controls allow us to grant permissioned access to the Dataverse while maintaining strict data security. Here’s why these features are crucial:

• Foundation for Data Governance: The ability to control data exfiltration is at the core of our data governance strategy. With these controls, we can confidently manage how Dynamics 365 data is accessed and shared beyond our system boundaries.
• Enterprise Data Controls: Microsoft Dynamics 365’s permissioned access ensures that sensitive information remains within authorized boundaries. We can now define granular permissions, restricting data flow to only those who need it. This level of control empowers us to safeguard our data assets effectively.
• Privacy Compliance: Our member firms operate under stringent privacy agreements. The Engineering team’s work aligns perfectly with our commitment to data privacy. By enforcing permissioned access, we uphold our privacy standards and protect our enterprise information.

The Engineering team’s dedication to building robust permission controls has enabled our data landscape. We can confidently deploy Dynamics 365 and navigate the complexities of data sharing, knowing that our privacy agreements remain intact and grant access to only approved systems and usage.”—Erick J. Kirchner, Associate Director, Markets and Business Development, Ernst & Young LLP

Looking ahead

As we continue to innovate and push the boundaries of what is possible with data and AI, Dataverse remains committed to providing businesses with the tools they need to succeed in an ever-evolving digital world. These new features are just the beginning of what is to come, and we cannot wait to see how organizations will leverage them to achieve new heights of productivity and security.

Join us at Microsoft Build to learn more about these exciting developments and how they can transform your business.

The post Unlock new levels of productivity with Microsoft Dataverse and Microsoft Copilot Studio appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

A simpler way to manage diabetes

In just a few days, Haniel had come up with a solution. He created a mobile app using Power Apps that simplifies many of the time-consuming tasks required to manage diabetes. The app is called “Munching Red Panda”, named after Eden’s favorite animal. (She came up with the ‘munching’ part.)

A simple interface makes it easy for Eden to enter blog sugar levels on her phone (date and time are tracked automatically). This includes a Power Automate flow that triggers an alert if Eden enters a dangerously low blood sugar level. The alert is sent to Haniel and his wife as an email or text message, along with a map that shows Eden’s location. Another function tells Eden which type of insulin to take (she has two types, depending on the time of day). The app also tracks when an insulin pen is about to expire and provides a reminder when a pen needs to be changed.

The app also helped simplify an even more tedious task – food monitoring and carb calculations. Initially, Haniel would have to manually enter several pieces of information into the app for each meal: the food Eden was about to eat, the amount, and the units. Eventually, he built up a catalog of this data which he displayed in the app. In this way, Eden only needed to select the food, enter an amount – and the app would calculate total carbs. Time saved.

Saving time with generative AI

The app turned out to be an ideal solution, especially when Eden was younger – and her diet was simpler. But as she grew older, went out more to restaurants, and tried new foods, the food catalog that Haniel created needed to be manually updated with each new food. So, Haniel added another innovative update – this time, using the generative AI features in Power Automate that automates the carb count for just about any food.

Haniel started by selecting a pre-built text generation model. He then configured the ‘Create text with GPT’ action by giving it a prompt with the food entered by Eden. The flow takes the data, structures it as a JSON object, and sends it to Edamam, a nutrition website which looks up each food and returns many nutritional parameters, including the total carb count. What’s even better is that the action will work off data entered by either voice or text. “AI Builder made it surprisingly easy to add exactly the AI model and functionality I needed. In just a few minutes, I was able to dramatically improve the way my app works,” says Haniel.

Now, all Eden has to do is press the microphone on her phone and say the food and quantity that she wants to eat. For example, she could say: I want one slice of watermelon, a banana and 300 grams of cheese – and the app automatically displays the total carbs.

Benefits like this had a huge impact on the family’s everyday lifestyle. As Haniel explains, “Recording and calculating data – something that could take up to 10 minutes per meal — could now be done in a few seconds. That’s a significant time savings – especially when you have to do this for every meal.”

Eden was particularly impressed with the AI capabilities of the app. “I have seen AI work in my robotics courses – but was surprised at how well it worked within the app.” She also appreciates the time that the app gives back to her. As she points out, “I would often start eating later than everyone else because we would have to calculate all the carbs manually.” With the app, she can eat right on time with her family and friends.

Sharing their success with others

Another happy ending to this story is that, now that Eden has access to a glucose monitor and insulin pump, she no longer needs many of the functions built into the app. But as Haniel says, “There are thousands of families who simply can’t afford this equipment – even with insurance, which often doesn’t cover the full cost.” This is why Haniel is working to make the app more widely available.

In addition, Haniel is talking to doctors at the Hospital for Sick Children in Toronto, Canada (where insulin was invented 101 years ago) about how the app could be used to support their diabetes research. In addition to collecting food information, Haniel envisions using the app to collect other data such as demographics, activity levels, health conditions – all information that could help generate new insights and breakthroughs.

In the meantime, he’s just pleased that he could help make life easier for his daughter, Eden – all thanks to some inventive thinking and a simple app on Power Platform.

Thanks 

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

MEDICAL DEVICE DISCLAIMER. Applications built using Microsoft Power Platform are not designed or intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or judgment and should not be used to replace or as a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or judgment. 

The post Maker uses Power Platform to help his daughter manage diabetes appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The shortcut for this blog post is https://aka.ms/PowerPlatformResources.

I am NEW, help me get started

• Building Tech Intensity with Microsoft Power Platform – Satya Nadella
• The future of App Development – Charles Lamanna
• Overview sites – Power Platform | Power Apps | Power Automate | Power Pages | Power BI | Power Virtual Agents | Dataverse | Security and Governance | Connectors
• Announcements – Low-code announcements at Build | Latest Power Apps features
• Customer stories – 100+ stories | 75+ videos | 25+ hero profiles | Pro-dev stories | Automation stories
• Create your first – Canvas App | Model-driven app | Flow | Dashboard | Chatbot
• Training labs – Power Platform “In a Day” trainings | App in a Day | Automation in a Day | Power Pages in a Day | Power Virtual Agents in a Day | Training modules on Learn
• Take the free Power Platform course on Udacity – https://aka.ms/UdacityPower, #Udacity
• Browse documentation – Power Apps | Power Automate | Power Pages | Power Virtual Agents | Power BI | Dataverse | Connectors
• Sign-in and explore samples and templates – Power Apps | Power Automate | Power Virtual Agents
• Power Platform Admin Center – documentation | portal
• Microsoft Mechanics videos – Power Platform playlist 
• YouTube channels – Power Platform | Power Apps | Power Automate | Power BI | Power Virtual Agents | Power Platform on Microsoft Mechanics
• Community – Community Home | User groups
• Get expert help from partners – https://powerapps.microsoft.com/partners/
• Licensing – Understanding Power Platform licensing article | licensing guide | FAQ
• Resources curated by the community each week – Power Platform Weekly

I have SOME EXPERIENCE

• *new* Power Platform Adoption – homepage | workbook | best practices | maturity model 
• Power Platform Guidance Center – documentation | architecture video series
• 2021 updates – April 2021 launch event | Demo by Charles Lamanna
• 2021 release waves: Wave 2 (Oct 2021 – Apr 2022) | Wave 1 (Apr 2021 – Sep 2021)
• Latest shipped features – Weekly release notes
• Conference sessions – Ignite 2021 | Power Platform Community Conference | Ignite 2020
• Intermediate / advanced architecture series – Power CAT Live
• Useful Power Apps reference – Controls and properties | Formulas
• Power Apps Component Framework (PCF) gallery – community gallery
• Additional labs – Power Platform labs and challenges | Power Platform labs
• Power Automate how-to videos – webinars and videos gallery
• Power Automate guidance – Enterprise automation techniques for RPA | Planning a Power Automate project
• Real-world usage patterns – architecture patterns | scenario patterns | index of stories by scenario category

I am interested in ADMINISTRATION & GOVERNANCE

• Power Platform Admin Center – video | documentation
• Power Platform Governance – whitepaper | Admin in a Day lab | blog posts
• Establishing a Center of Excellence – CoE Starter Kit | videos | adoption maturity model
• Power Platform Governance Enhancements – Feb 2021 – blog post
• Power Platform Guidance Center: documentation | architecture video series
• Conference presentations: Ignite 2020 | MBAS 2019 |
• Build a customized Admin experience using the Power Apps admin connectors – blog post with sample admin dashboard | admin connector documentation
• Strategies for improving app discoverability in your enterprise – part 1 | part 2 | part 3
• Security and certifications – Microsoft Trust Center
• Manage Power Apps licenses in your organization – documentation | FAQ | licensing guide | planning and managing licensing and capacity (Ignite 2019)
• Pricing and licensing – Summary | Licensing documentation
• Licensing Terms & SLA information of Microsoft Power Apps and other online Services – Online Services
• Microsoft’s approach to deploying Power Apps for all employees – blog post |  Pat Dunn’s presentation at Biz Apps Summit

Resources for PRO DEVELOPERS and FUSION TEAMS

• Microsoft Power Platform is the best way for teams to build together – blog post with resources
• Pro-dev features and learning paths – webinar | learning path | ebook | BUILD session
• New Power Apps developer plan – get started | documentation
• Microsoft Mechanics episode on pro-dev adoption of Power Platform – blog | video
• Low code application development on Azure – landing page | YouTube video playlist | tours
• Power Apps and Microsoft Azure better together – landing page | TEI report | ROI calculator
• POWERful Devs virtual conference and ongoing videos – video series
• Additional pro-dev topics:
  • Azure APIM Connector on the Power Platform – blog post
  • GitHub actions for Power Platform – blog post
  • Power Apps for enterprise developers – documentation
  • Register and use custom connections – documentation
  • Build and certify your own connector – blog post | documentation
  • Power Apps Component Framework (PCF) – documentation | community gallery
  • Calling Azure AD protected Azure Functions using a Custom Connector – blog post | documentation
  • Register and use custom connectors in Power Apps 

I am a MICROSOFT PARTNER

• Start at https://powerapps.microsoft.com/partners/
• Join the Power Apps Partner Program
• Become a Recognized Solution Architect
• You can also sign-up to deliver trainings for our customers
• View Power Platform partner stories

Show me REAL WORLD CUSTOMER STORIES

• The curated stories list is now being maintained at – https://aka.ms/PowerPlatformStories
• Additional links – customer story videos | pro-dev stories | automation stories | hero profiles

How do I GET INVOLVED and STAY CONNECTED

• Ways to collaborate with the Power Apps team – blog post
• Stay updated – product team blog | webinars
• Community sites – main community page | forums | community blog | best practices & app gallery
• Get support – blog post | support page
• Submit an idea

COPILOT AND GENERATIVE AI

CONNECTORS AND DATA INTEGRATION

• Power Platform connectors – documentation | Power Automate connectors list
• Data integrator – documentation
• Power Query – documentation
• On-premises data gateway – documentation
• Common Data Model – documentation and printable CDM poster
• Microsoft Dataverse and Power BI – documentation
• Introduction to the Microsoft Common Data Model – Ignite 2019 talk

I use SHAREPOINT, how can I integrate with Power Apps

• SharePoint welcomes Power Apps and Flow
• Integrate Power Apps with SharePoint Online
• The Power Platform for SharePoint people (Ignite 2019)
• Power Apps, the successor to InfoPath | Modernize InfoPath forms with Power Apps
• Custom list forms in SharePoint with Power Apps – blog post | demo | documentation
• Reinvent business processes in SharePoint – blog post
• Pro tips for transitioning from InfoPath to Power Apps – part 1 | part 2
• Embed Power Apps in SharePoint pages – blog post
• SharePoint Online document libraries supported in Canvas apps – blog post | documentation

I use ACCESS WEB APPS, how can I leverage Power Apps

• Introduction to Microsoft Power Apps for Access web apps developers
• Access Services in SharePoint Roadmap

LABS, CERTIFICATIONS, COURSES & BOOKS

• Summary list of labs and training content – https://aka.ms/PowerPlatformLabs
• Microsoft certifications – Power Platform Exams & Certifications | PL-100 | PL-200 | PL-400 | PL-900 |
• Pluralsight – Microsoft Power Platform Fundamentals
• LinkedIn Learning – Power Platform classes
• Udemy – Power Platform classes | Power Apps | Power Automate | Power BI
• Power Platform Academy by Rory Neary – free courses
•  Books:
  • Pro Microsoft Power Platform (published by Apress)
  • Learn Microsoft Power Apps (by Matthew Weston)

BEST PRACTICES & COMMON USE CASES

• Community content – community app and component gallery | working with data | design discussion
• UX/UI design tips – video | UX patterns | managing fonts and colors
• Performance best practices: documentation | optimization techniques | performance considerations | more tips
• Power Apps accessibility guidelines – blog post
• Customize list forms in SharePoint with Power Apps – blog post | demo | documentation
• Access web apps migration to Power Apps – whitepaper
• Approval workflows – blog post |documentation | guided learning
• Using the on-premises gateway – overview | installation & FAQ | proxy configuration
• Build an offline app – blog post
• Creating dialogs in Power Apps – blog post | video
• Display a map using the Image control – step-by-step walkthrough | video
• Send an email from your Power Apps app – video
• Connect to Microsoft Cognitive Services – video
• Implement role-based security – blog post
• Build a customized interactive calendar – step-by-step guide
• Notify user that new data is available – step-by-step guide | push notifications feature
• Deep link into an app using URL parameters – step-by-step guide
• Audit scenario solution – blog post from community member

PRODUCT PAGES

Power Apps

• Website | Blog | Documentation | Community | Suggest Ideas | Webinars
• Product updates
• Guided Learning | YouTube playlist
• Licensing / Pricing
• Support – known issues | view/report issues | create a support ticket

Power Automate

• Website | Blog | Documentation | Community | Suggest Ideas | Webinars
• Product updates
• Guided Learning | YouTube Playlist
• Licensing / Pricing
• Support

Copilot Studio

• Website | Blog | Documentation | Community | Suggest Ideas 
• Licensing / Pricing

Power BI

• Website | Blog | Documentation | Community 
• Product updates
• Guided Learning | YouTube Playlist
• Licensing / Pricing

The post Microsoft Power Platform: Learning Resources 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.

The global company has always empowered its workforce to solve business challenges. A solid example is how Chevron was an early adopter of the Microsoft Power Platform, which plays a crucial role in advancing how anyone at the company can make significant business impacts through technology—regardless of their discipline or function. Enrolling and cultivating a global force of citizen developers has required new approaches to generate, test, and replicate innovative ideas faster, at lower cost, and with less risk.

Recently, Chevron partnered with Microsoft to use low-code solutions to remove data access barriers. Providing easier access to data is just one of these successes, and the results are impressive—increased productivity across the organization.

Chevron has been a leader in embracing citizen development, teaming with Microsoft to advance low-code capabilities, governance, and training on a global enterprise scale. Their collaboration has been critical to the growth of the Power Platform, ensuring people with varying technical skill levels can build and maintain solutions that make important business impacts.

Removing data access barriers  

For any organization, easy and secure access to data is one of the greatest obstacles to building sustainable business applications—whether low code or not. The solution is to store the data as parquet files in a secure data lake. Otherwise, applications end up relying on duplicative data repositories with varying levels of reliability and access risks that have traditionally been a headache for even the most seasoned professional developers. Because Chevron is well versed in data lake development, the company knew this was the approach they needed to take to better enable its rapidly growing citizen developer community.

It was not simple undertaking. The enterprise scale of this challenge meant it didn’t need to be solved just once – the team needed to establish a repetitive pattern to allow anyone to follow the same steps to access the data lake. Fidelity with respect to access rules also had to be maintained from user back to source. The team created a proof-of-concept based on Power Platform telemetry data, which is also being used to better understand and improve use of the Platform.

Traditionally, citizen developers, or “makers,” had to spend days on a multi-step process of identifying the data folder or parquet file, requesting appropriate access, configuring a Power Apps connection, and ensuring proper permissions were in place and effective. Now, using Synapse Analytics with the virtual table connector in Dataverse, Chevron eliminated the “heavy lifting” steps, allowing makers to spend less time on data access and more time building innovative solutions.

Creating Dataverse virtual tables using Power Platform telemetry data stored in data lake:

• Enables direct and easy consumption of external data while extracting its complexities,
• Shortens time to develop working application,
• Prevents duplication or replication of external data,
• Increases adoption of virtual tables

The resulting business value associated with the implementation of virtual tables and Synapse Analytics includes:

• Simplified and secure access to data lake parquet files
• Shortened time from ideation to design and ultimately a working application
• Faster feedback to produce iterations that lead to a final, produced application

“We want to make it easy to do the right thing when it comes to data architecture and reducing data duplication, and Microsoft Dataverse helps make it possible. Not only does it eliminate complexity associated with virtual tables, it helps modernize data that needs a home by liberating and protecting stranded data traditionally stored in Excel files.”

— Tavia Prouhet Product Owner, Chevron Low code and automation, Catalysts

The sustainable future of low code at Chevron

Chevron’s workforce relies on hundreds of business applications to perform their day-to-day roles as they solve some of the world’s most difficult energy challenges. Throughout the past decade, the company has blurred the lines between traditional IT and business, teaming to embrace cloud and SaaS, reduce application complexity, enhance agility, and scale solutions. The results are clear. And as these efforts advanced, the question became how to handle the unique needs within the organization—those that are not mission critical or connected to broader workflows already supported by the company’s impressive solution portfolio. The answer—low code. An approach that lets the people closest to the business problem develop a solution that follows company technical standards regardless of their development skills.

Low code platforms provide an intuitive approach to software development with minimal or no coding to build applications and processes that help both the business and IT. Enterprise licensing enables every individual in the organization to have full capabilities and contribute to the continuous digital transformation.

Key to its low code success, Chevron enrolled and trained a community of developers who create solutions for complex problems and lean on each other for support. The company cultivated a sense of community across low code users, including more than 2,800 innovators. The apps empower employees to increase productivity, drive efficiency and enhance reliability. Chevron also maintains a robust upskilling program for employees that ensures sustainable progress. As of mid 2023, over a hundred teams across the globe have participated in these programs, with over 500 participants supported by several hundred mentors and previous program graduates. Internally, the citizen developer movement is referred to as RADD, which stands for Rapidly Accelerating Democratized Development. Living up to that name requires an appropriate method to democratize data, a challenge Chevron willingly accepted as exemplified by their workflow to access the data lake via virtual tables.

Chevron is known as “The Human Energy Company,” and low code and democratized development are powerful enablers in helping its workforce advance the future of energy.

Learn more about Microsoft Power Platform

• Get started with Microsoft Dataverse using the Power Apps developer plan.
• Learn about the recent Microsoft Dataverse announcements at Build 2023 – Safely hyperscale low-code apps with ease using Microsoft Dataverse | Microsoft Power Apps
• Get started with integrating data from external data sources just like native tables with Microsoft Dataverse virtual tables.

The post Chevron Leads the Way in Citizen Development by Extending Data Lake Accessibility with Microsoft Dataverse 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
• 100+ Power Platform customer stories
• 70+ Power Platform customer story videos

The post Kao uses Power Apps to boost frontline worker efficiency by 480 hours every month appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

In this new blog series, we are sharing examples of customers who have been able to Do More With Less by utilizing Microsoft Power Platform in their organization to build applications, automate processes, determine insights and more. This week, we highlight how T-Mobile, one of the largest wireless carriers in the United States, has used Power Platform to save the company over $4M USD and 97,000 hours with a single Power Apps app – Orbit.

Orbit is used by team members, projects leads and executives to approve all new initiatives across the company, such as device promotions, service offers, and more. It uses Power Apps (canvas and model-driven apps), Power Automate, Power BI, Dataverse, and integrates with Microsoft Teams. In 2021, with the acquisition of Sprint, T-Mobile needed to integrate Orbit with Sprint’s legacy back-end systems. They turned to the robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities in Power Automate to help the two systems operate as one. As a result, they’ve been able to process 11x more requests in real time, improve the overall processing time by 12x and reduce errors from 7% to 0%.

Helping two companies operate as one

The Sprint side of the business was using Quickbase for detailed project management aspects such as tracking tasks and timelines. Post the merger, when companies began to integrate their business operations and IT systems, Hodel and his team started designing a way to integrate the Orbit app with Sprint’s legacy system.  Building a complicated integration across two legacy IT systems was no small task. “At first, this was a very manual process,” says Hodel. “We would pull reports, see what’s changed, and then go in and either create or update the records of the legacy system. There were data-entry errors and a large time commitment. Unlike most processes that are repetitive, things ended up being batch-inserted. Eventually, updates were only happening once a week. There was a latency of the data, which is really challenging when you have to work on things that are moving as fast as they do in this world.”   

To connect the two systems and eliminate some of the manual steps, Hodel and his team members first attempted to integrate into the APIs of Sprint’s legacy customer initiative and promotion system, Quickbase. There was no technical API documentation available, and the process became overwhelmingly complex. Hodel and his team started looking at other options. They had a long history of using Power Automate cloud flows, including within the existing Orbit app, so they decided to try the robotic process automation (RPA) capabilities within Power Automate for desktop. The UI-based approach in RPA turns manual tasks into automated workflows by recording and playing back human-driven interaction with software systems that don’t support API-based automation. “Within a very short period, we were able to get the RPA solution working without any training. Using the RPA capabilities in Power Automate was a very natural process”, Hodel says.

Before the Sprint merger, majority of the automation workflows within the Orbit app were built with Power Automate cloud flows. Now when specific criteria are met— device promotions, service offers, or device launches—these flows trigger the Power Automate RPA desktop flow within Sprint’s legacy Quickbase system. The flow either updates the existing record or creates a new record. This keeps the Orbit app and the legacy Sprint system in sync. 

“In order for us to work across the organization in a real-time way, we need real-time data access, and the RPA scenario allows us to do that.”

-Brian Hodel: Principal Developer, Power Platform, T-Mobile

Saving time and improving efficiencies

The Orbit app, which has been running in production since February 2020 has been able to support a growth of 150% each year and a total 800% increase in go-to-market initiatives without needing to add additional resources, resulting in savings of $4M USD and 97,000 hours. The RPA capabilities in Power Automate solved the issues caused by the need for manual data input, greatly improving processing time and data accuracy, which freed up the analyst’s time to work on more strategic projects and increase job satisfaction.

Hodel advises other teams not to underestimate the power of a low-code solution.

“Don’t be fooled by the low-code branding. It is absolutely low code because anyone can quickly go in and learn the tools and move forward but it is fully capable of delivering on any sort of business requirements. Anything you can build with the full-code solution, you’re likely to be able to do with Power Platform as well. Really, consider it a no-limits platform.”

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

• T-Mobile adopts Microsoft Power Platform for fast and powerful low-code development
• T-Mobile uses RPA in Power Automate to integrate systems during Sprint merger
• Orbit app by T-Mobile to manage approval of customer initiatives

Find other “Do More With Less” stories

• 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 T-Mobile saves thousands of hours and achieves 12x gains in process efficiency with Power Platform appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.