Streamlining security access requests

Microsoft Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) is one of the largest customer support teams in the world. With over 17,000 employees worldwide, CE&S is responsible for shaping the strategy, design, and implementation of Microsoft’s end-to-end customer experience.

For one of their projects, CE&S focused on their Just in Time (JIT) security process used to grant access to resources.  “Leveraging the process mining capabilities in Power Automate, we wanted to explore ways to improve our responsiveness – without compromising on security,” says Kirk McNesby, Senior Business Process Manager at Microsoft. 

In just one week, CE&S successfully deployed process mining and began gathering insights. “With process mining in Power Automate, we were able to easily input data and immediately jump behind the wheel to do meaningful exploration,” says Kirk. “We had no prior knowledge or training. We were ingesting data and learning how to use the tool – all at the same time.”  

To begin using process mining, over 14GB of event log data (consisting of SR events and JIT security logs) was loaded into the tool. The team was particularly impressed with the easy-to-use interface. “We liked the out of the box presentations. Variances were presented in a clear, visual format and filtering worked really well with our data,” says Kirk.  

The team used the filtering capabilities within process mining to quickly segment access requests by type and looked for patterns that would contribute to optimization. This strategy revealed bottlenecks in a specific access request for users acting as backup support on cases when the main support engineer was unavailable.

By automating approvals for this scenario, the team estimated that they could automate up to 54,000 approval requests per year, saving users 13,200 hours of wait time. As Kirk adds, “The process mining capabilities in Power Automate were critical to achieving insights this quickly.”
 

Get started with process mining in Power Automate

• Review official product documentation
• Take the process mining in Power Automate learning path
• Start a free trial for Power Automate 
• Go even further with the Power Automate Process Mining add-on
  

Start a free trial today – and discover how easy it can be to optimize processes in your organization using process mining in Power Automate.

The post Elevating Efficiency: How Microsoft Customer Experience & Success streamlines operations with process mining in Power Automate appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Challenges of a rapidly growing business

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

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

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

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

Supporting business processes with generative AI capabilities in Power Platform

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

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

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

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

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

Summarization, categorization, and routing customer communications

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

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

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

Information extraction from customer emails and text messages

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

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

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

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

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

Data transformation from legacy systems

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

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

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

Content generation and automated reply suggestions

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

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

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

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

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

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

Future optimizations planned using Microsoft Power Platform

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

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

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

Share your story with us!

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

Availability

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

Responsible AI

Microsoft is committed to creating responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We are helping our customers use our AI products responsibly, sharing our learnings, and building trust-based partnerships. For these new services, we provide our customers with information about the intended uses, capabilities, and limitations of our AI platform service, so they have the knowledge necessary to make responsible deployment choices. Responsible AI FAQs are part of a broader effort to put Microsoft’s AI principles into practice. To find out more, see Microsoft AI principles.

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

In October of 2022 we released the Describe it to design it feature where you can write a simple sentence and get a flow based on this description. In this previous blog post, we shared how we initially built out this feature. Since release, we have seen it dramatically improve the experience of building flow reducing the flow creation time in half and flows are 1.8x more likely to run week-over-week compared to building from blank. In this post, we’ll dive more into the details of the improvements we’ve been making with this feature.

Model fine tuning

1) did NL2Flow suggest one or more flows, and

2) did the user review and accept the suggested flow

For privacy reasons, Microsoft does not, by default, get access to the sentences that you type or the details of the flows that are generated. However, administrators can opt-in to share this data with Microsoft, which can help us to improve our models. We used this opted-in data to identify which sentences had the lowest rate of successful suggestions and acceptance. With that data, we were able to generate more sample flows that targeted those areas and use that sample data for further fine-tuning of the model.

We have since had two additional rounds of model improvements – NL2Flow-003 (which was released in November) and NL2Flow-004 (which was released in January). Each release led to improvements in these two metrics. For example, between NL2Flow-002 and 003, we observed an increase in the flow acceptance rate by 3.0 points to 52.6%, and between NL2Flow-003 and 004 we saw an improvement of 2.2 points to 90.3% for successful suggestions.

This type of fine tuning is only possible because of the number of people trying out this feature – this month we’ve seen over 29K. As more people use Power Automate (and opt-in to helping Microsoft improve the model with their data), the models will only get better.

Finally, it’s worth noting that this process of fine tuning is distinct from traditional reinforcement learning (RL). In the future, we plan to apply RL, leveraging our A/B platform to handle the explore and exploit processes, but we need to have a large enough amount of data before we embark on this learning methodologyfor NL2Flow (like it has been done with ChatGPT).

Validating improvements

To ensure that the model is directly responsible for the improvements we observed, we show some users the current model and some a new one – a process called A/B testing. This is similar to the way we release new versions of the Power Platform, where a percentage of the users get newer release of the platform as well to test before full deployment to all. By doing so, we can know that the model itself is responsible for the changes, not other factors.

At the same time, it’s critical that we know that people are more successful with Describe it to design it, compared to other ways to build flows. And this is exactly what we see:

• 76% of flows created by NL2Flow in the last 7 days ran at least once (compared to 64% for flows created from templates, or 43% when created from scratch)

Together, with A/B testing and comparing to other ways users build flows, we have mechanisms in place to ensure we’re continually improving the experience for users.

Microsoft is committed to creating Responsible AI by design. Our work is guided by a core set of principles: fairness, reliability and safety, privacy and security, inclusiveness, transparency, and accountability. We are helping our customers use our AI products responsibly, sharing our learnings, and building trust-based partnerships. For these new services, we provide our customers with information about the intended uses, capabilities, and limitations of our AI platform service, so they have the knowledge necessary to make responsible deployment choices.

What’s next

As we shared at the Future of Work with AI event on March 16^th – the next step is to support interactive design with Copilot for Power Automate – so you can use natural language while you build out your flow. This will build on the NL2Flow models that have already been developed, as well as adding in new interactive behaviors powered by ChatGPT. We’re excited to share more details on this in the coming weeks.

The post Improving the Azure OpenAI models in Power Automate to save people time appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Common challenges for automation solutions

There are many challenges that organizations face as they look to scale up their legacy RPA investments. This includes – identifying the processes to automate, selecting the appropriate automation technology, and implementing solutions with an optimal architecture. It is even more challenging if you have limited time to make investment decisions on your RPA platform and prove Return on Investment (ROI).

These challenges may also pose new opportunities such as potential to (1) increase return on CAPEX investments, (2) simplify program management and governance, (3) reduce cost of parallel runs, operations, and training.

Prescriptive approaches for automation solutions

Prescriptive approaches to modernization can allow you to quickly organize your current RPA landscape, evaluate modern RPA technologies to invest in such as Microsoft Power Automate, and migrate to new automations to make smart investment decisions and measure ROI.

Learn how to improve your organization’s effectiveness by migrating to a low-code RPA platform like Microsoft Power Automate. Let’s discuss a methodology that can help you pair the appropriate tools and service for your RPA modernization journey.

Migration can be approached with 2 styles: “As-is” or Hybrid.

“As-is” approach for migration

For the “As-Is” migration approach, use a prebuilt migration tool. Below you will find existing options that you can use to either migrate yourself or hire a partner to migrate for you.

• Softomotive migrator: Process migrator for Softomotive products
• 3^rd party extended migrators: ISVs and SIs are using the extensible versions of the Process migrator tool to build custom migrators for 3^rd party software for their customers. A key example is available here: Blueprint RPA Migration Assistant. Engage your RPA implementing partner or work with your Microsoft representative to learn more about using this tool.

Using a tool helps you migrate the current processes “as-is” to the new platform using Power Automate as a desktop automation tool. In the “as-is” approach, you want to prioritize processes that are simpler with predictable results and a clearly defined set of actions. This is a recommended approach to build several desktop-based automations quickly. This approach is also very useful where the processes from the legacy platform are going to run similarly in Power Automate as well.

Hybrid approach for migration

For the hybrid approach, you can consider re-designing, re-engineering, re-architecting, or retiring some of the legacy processes to leverage the best-fit features of Power Automate. Using the 800+ connectors while integrating existing APIs and databases could increase your ROI significantly. However, for the hybrid approach, you must establish a rationale or justification for retiring some processes either with or without redesigned processes of accomplishing the same outcome from automations needed for your business. A hybrid approach to migration avoids the anti-patterns, but it might result in a longer implementation.

You will find several examples of design patterns that can help you evaluate the best fit approach for your business processes in the RPA migration whitepaper.

Methodology for implementing the migration

After you have selected your approach, begin the migration with the following methodical phases. The migration methodology is the same for both approaches, so let’s read ahead:

First and foremost, begin your migration with clearly defined goals after you diagnose your current RPA landscape, and assess the dependencies of various integrated systems that will be affected. From here, you should have a solid understanding of your current RPA landscape, an inventory of your current processes, and which approach you intend to use for the processes. Additionally, introduce an unbiased entity such as a certified System Integration partner to provide an objective perspective in how to modernize processes in your RPA landscape.

Second, perform in-depth planning for your migration. You need detailed timelines, allocated resources, and defined responsibilities of who will do what and how it will progress, as well as get evaluated with the appropriate rhythms. The plan must include the current inventory of processes that you prepared earlier. Setup your Power Automate environments, assign roles and responsibilities of the implementation team with appropriate licenses and security roles, and put a training structure in place. If you have a partner helping you with migration, assign the appropriate security roles to them as well by providing them a service administrator equivalent access to Power Automate and the related various integrated systems.

Next, drive readiness for the migration by creating alignment across stakeholders within the organization (IT and Infrastructure, Information Security, Microsoft administrator team, Cloud Operations, etc.). Often, project teams do not gain adequate buy-in from all such stakeholders before they begin. Consider readiness as a key component for automation migrations to activate a strong working project core team.

Before moving forward from Planning & Readiness, check that you have established the essential parts of a successful migration below:

• Identify a core central team that will setup the environments and implement the migration
• Learn the Power Automate environment and governance best practices. Assign Power Platform service administrator role to the core team. This grants users’ the necessary access to Power Automate and other components from the Power Platform
• Establish your tenant and environment strategy. Exclusively provide access only to admins to create net-new and/or production environments and automate the process of requesting new environments through ALM tools in your organization

These best practices are explained in depth in the Automation Kit. The Automation Kit today provides guidance for measuring ROI for newly built Power Automate flows. However, we are planning for a new Migration module that will be built from our experiences from our customer migration engagements. This migration module can be optionally added to the Automation Kit and will assist you with defining and measuring the ROI of your migrated flows.

The next phase of the migration is the most important phase, Conversion. As a best practice, do not attempt to migrate all the processes at once. Perform a series of migrations so that the implementation team builds confidence and proficiency in the components of Power Platform. This also helps you quickly iterate on your approach and plan, if necessary, and begin tracking ROI.

• Start with simple processes that are Desktop-based automations – as can use the tools discussed above that can predictably migrate processes to Power Automate for Desktop flows
• Move to the processes that can be custom developed using API-based Power Automate for Cloud flows
• Expand to the processes that introduce the AI Builder component
• Next, add approval flows which requires Humans in the loop
• Finally, add custom connectors for homegrown applications

Re-designing your existing process using the hybrid approach will help you optimize the migration to Power Automate and reduce rework at this stage.

Within the conversion phase, conduct code release planning sessions with all stakeholders. For the actual code migration of legacy bots to Power Automate, follow your organization’s BOT SDLC (B/RDLC – Bot/Robotic Development Lifecycle) approach. This must include a system integration test and user acceptance test before moving the sets of code to production.

Finally, set up a sustainable Management and Governance structure with hyper-care and cutover. Hyper-care and cutover are essential to building continuous governance, and structured efforts to manage the new processes in Power Automate. A continuous line of sight and feedback mechanism will help you iteratively apply the best practices and learnings to existing and new Power Automate processes going forward. Some of the key elements to keep in mind are:

• Form the governance team that will manage the Power Automate platform going forward with appropriate approvals and monitoring tools
• Setup Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies that align to your organizational policies
• Form and socialize Solution and Certification guidelines
• Build and communicate change management guidelines with all teams and stakeholders
• Drive compliance and “Do the Right Things” culture

These best practices are discussed in an organized way in the Automation COE using the Automation Kit.

Wondering how a customer did such a migration?

In 2021, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E) embarked on an ambitious Digital Productivity program leveraging automation and citizen development. While PG&E had multiple automation software tools in place, the lack of flexibility and slow adoption by co-workers necessitated a new approach that would enable them to consolidate their toolkit and expand their capabilities for the future. PG&E engaged long-time partner Cognizant and its Intelligent Process Automation team and decided to deploy Microsoft Power Platform.

As the Digital Productivity team planned their implementation, they recognized an opportunity to consolidate their toolkit and migrate existing automations to Power Platform. After evaluating the RPA landscape, they determined that 12 automations spanning Finance, Gas Operations, Customer Care, and Contract Management would need to be migrated to Microsoft Power Platform first. The migration of the bots leveraged Cognizant Neuro® Automation Workbench (AWB) enabling a faster implementation with a reduced team size – migration efforts leveraging Workbench often are reduced by at least 60%.

Eventually, the migration enabled a 100% replacement of their existing RPA platform, resulting in $130k in license savings and enabling PG&E to focus on the consolidated toolkit that they would scale across the enterprise. Eric Soria, Product Owner at PG&E stated

“The migration to Power Platform was crucial in our ability to begin rationalizing our automation tool footprint. We’ve been able to reduce our licensing costs, while simultaneously expanding capabilities and enabling Citizen Development. I look forward to continuing to scale the platform in PG&E, and to bringing digital productivity to more of our co-workers.”

In addition to the migration implementation, which shaped out as a hybrid approach, PG&E has driven year-over-year successful adoption of Power Platform to experience cost-savings and increased productivity. Read their full story here: Pacific Gas and Electric.

Wondering about your modernization journey?

Do not hesitate to begin your RPA modernization journey. Just like PG&E, find your success with cost savings, streamlined program management and governance, increased return on investments.

For a comprehensive list of tools and service offers for RPA migration, check the offers below:

• Use the Process Migrator to migrate from Softomotive to Power Automate
• Leverage the Blueprint Software Systems’ RPA Bot Migration Assistant to migrate to Power Automate
• Leverage Cognizant’s RPA Bot Migrator tool and service to migrate from your RPA platform of choice
• Leverage Avanade’s Power Automate Migration 2-Wk Assessment service
• Leverage Hitachi’s Migrate & Modernize with RPA: 4wk Implementation service

Microsoft is also bringing these offers together in an RPA migration program, which will provide a holistic way for you to pilot a migration project with a tool, service, and prescriptive guidance. This is only available for a limited number of customers. Please speak with your Microsoft representative to learn more about it.

Check out this cool video where the Power Automate team discusses RPA migration:

The post Begin your Robotic Process Automation modernization journey appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

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

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

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

Meet the Cineplex team

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

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

Cineplex’s journey adopting Power Automate

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Business scenario and challenge – gift card activation

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

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

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

Power Automate solution – gift card activation

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

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

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

Business scenario and challenge – manual ticket refund & seat adjustment

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

The manual process was as follows:

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

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

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

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

Power Automate solution – manual ticket refund & seat adjustment

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

Desktop Flow #1 – Email Validation / Refund Processing

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

Desktop Flow #2 – Seat Count Adjust / Journal Entry

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

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

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

Business scenario and challenge – ticket refunding

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

Power Automate solution – ticket refunding

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

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

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

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

Establishing a Center of Excellence (CoE) with Automation Kit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Summary of benefits

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

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

Overall

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

Refund process

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

Gift card processing

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

Looking ahead

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

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

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

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

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

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

Related links

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

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

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

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

Automation Journey

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

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

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

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

Business Scenario

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

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

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

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

Power Automate Solution

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

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

Managing sensitive information

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

Templatizing desktop flows for easier maintenance

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

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

Ensuring a successful automation environment at USACS

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

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

Summary of Benefits

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

Looking ahead

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

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

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

Since we added Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in 2019 alongside our digital process automation (DPA) and AI offerings, our momentum has continued to expand.

After we acquired Softomotive in 2020, we launched Power Automate for desktop and included it in Windows 10 and 11 at no additional cost. Users of Windows are now empowered to automate their desktop and web applications to gain time back for higher-value work, while admins retain control with Data Loss Prevention policies.

More recently, we announced the preview of hosted RPA bots to auto-scale unattended scenarios, a new pay-as-you-go option for greater flexibility, and now provide over 750 connectors to cloud services.

We want to take this opportunity to thank our customers, community members, and partners for helping shape Power Automate and this outcome with their feedback and continued support.

Learn more by using the following link to access the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation.

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 https://aka.ms/Analyst-Gartner-DocRPA22. 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. Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Robotic Process Automation, July 2022, Saikat Ray, Arthur Villa, Melanie Alexander, Keith Guttridge, Andy Wang, Paul Vincent.

Gartner and Magic Quadrant are registered trademarks and service marks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.

The post Microsoft named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Robotic Process Automation appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The first annual Power Platform Conference sponsored by Microsoft and Power Platform Conference is coming to Orlando for an amazing in-person event this September, with keynotes, sessions, breakouts and more—all dedicated to Microsoft Power Platform products: Power Automate, Power Apps, Power BI, Power Pages and Power Virtual Agents.   This is a unique opportunity to learn directly from leaders and community experts for Power Automate. The topics range from in-depth feature tips & tricks, to setting up automation at scale within the enterprise, and a digest of roadmap and product strategy. If you don’t know where to start, I would recommend the “Strategy & Roadmap” session, as well as “Extending SAP with Power Platform” which will both be very exciting.   Kicking off on September 18 & 19 with pre-conference workshops, the event runs September 20-22, 2022.  In addition to featuring more than 100 speakers and more than 150 sessions, conference-goers will have the opportunity to connect—and reconnect—with users from around the world, building their personal and professional relationships, while gaining valuable insight into what’s new and next for Microsoft’s business applications.

Power Automate sessions

• Getting Started with Power Automate for desktop
• Intro to Power Automate
• Just Go with the (Power Automate) Flow!
• Power Automate Strategy & Roadmap
• Intelligent Document Processing
• Automate CoE
• Cloud Flows Debugging and Error Handling
• Elevate your Microsoft Power Automate Game by Using Expressions
• Have it Your Way with RPA – At Home!
• Having Fun with Microsoft Graph and Power Automate
• Office Scripts + Power Automate = Out of the World Automation
• Power Automate – The Best Way to Automate M365
• And more!

Featured Power Automate speakers

• John Anastasopoulos (Group Product Manager | Power Automate for desktop)
• Ashvini Sharma (Group Product Manager | Power Automate cloud flows)
• Pranav Rastogi (Principal Program Manager | Microsoft Power Platform CAT)
• Tomasz Poszystek (Biz Apps MVP)
• Fausto Capellan Jr (Biz Apps MVP)
• Gwenael Bego (Group Product Manager | AI Builder)
• Azure McFarlane (Biz Apps MVP | HSO)
• Geetha Sicasailam (Biz Apps MVP | Artis Consulting)
• Harysh Menon (Principal Product Manager | Power Automate)
• Dian Taylor (Biz Apps MVP | Dynamics 365 | RSM)

Capping off the week is a conference-exclusive night at Universal Orlando Resort, home to the Wizarding World of Harry Potter® and Islands of Adventure™!

Don’t delay—sign up for the Microsoft Power Platform Conference today—we can’t wait to see you in Orlando!

Click here to register: Microsoft Power Platform Conference.

Click here for hotel reservations: Loews Royal Pacific Resort Reservations.

The post Join us at the first Microsoft Power Platform Conference Sept 20-22 appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

In this article, we learn about how an employee on their Digital Demand Engineering team took the initiative to use Power Automate for automating an enterprise-wide approvals process after being inspired by a colleague’s automation solution. From there, his passion for automation grew and more solutions were developed. The three Power Automate enterprise use case described in this article include:

1. Management of access extensions approvals for an internal application
2. User requests for provisioning of a new SharePoint site
3. Migration of user’s network files to OneDrive for Business

Meet Alexander

Alexander Nikulin has been with Mars since December 2009. Alexander initially worked in the maintenance stock room and was responsible for spare parts and had business user experience with an enterprise application. This eventually led to his next roles in IT projects such as working on an SAP project.

In 2018 Alexander moved into a more technical hands-on role as a Collaboration Area Lead in the Enterprise Collaboration team where they primarily work on the Microsoft collaboration services offered by SharePoint, OneDrive for Business and Yammer. It was in this role where Alexander was introduced to the Power Platform by a colleague who was building automation solutions with Power Automate cloud flows. This inspired Alexander to start learning Power Automate and building his own cloud flows. An example was automating the weekly matches of their football team by sending email reminders and saving the responses in SharePoint. After gaining experience, Alexander built several automation solutions to improve enterprise processes such as managing access of users for an internal application and enabling users to request for new SharePoint sites to be provisioned. He also started to nurture others in becoming automation experts in their line of work.

In 2021, he was promoted to Collaboration Architect in the Digital Demand Engineering team as a result of his Power Automate experience and improvements made to several enterprise processes. He is now responsible for the solutions his team develops using Power Automate, Power Apps and SharePoint.

Power Automate solution – Automating access extension approvals

The first enterprise automation solution Alexander developed was for automating user access extension approvals for an internal application used as a collaborative platform at Mars. Certain users have a set period in accessing the internal application which can occasionally be extended. Prior to automating this process, it was manual and time consuming. Several users overseeing the user access process had to monitor the termination date of user access and continuously follow up with line managers on whether their access should be extended.

Alexander developed two cloud flows in Power Automate to automate the user access extensions. The first flow is a scheduled daily cloud flow that checks a SharePoint list where user data is stored to evaluate whether a user’s access termination date is near and generates the approval and reminders. If the termination date is within 28 days, a second cloud flow is triggered that sends the required information and generates an approval which is sent to the line manager to remind them that the user’s access to the internal application is ending and confirm if the user’s access should be extended.

Second cloud flow triggered when it is 28 days prior to the user’s access termination date and waits for an approval or rejection, followed by updates based on the approver’s decision.

Secondary reminders are sent 14 days and 7 days prior to the user’s access termination date if the line manager does not respond to the initial reminders. If no response is received or the senior line manager rejects the extension, the user is removed from the Azure Active Directory group. Otherwise, if the line manager approves, the cloud flow performs the necessary actions to extend the user’s access to the internal application.

Automated access extension approval for the internal application.

“My managers and my peers were impressed that such a solution can be built using Power Automate.”

– Alexander Nikulin, Collaboration Architect, Mars

Summary of benefits and impact

The automated access extension solution processed over 500 approvals in the first two years of going live and has improved the management of users who need their access extended.

• Line managers are automatically notified based on reminders which reduces management overhead
• Minimal disruption for users as their user access is extended through automated line manager approvals
• Automation minimizes the possibilities of human error in missing extension requests for users

Additional Power Platform solutions

Request for provisioning a new SharePoint Site

Alexander automated two aspects of SharePoint site provisioning at Mars by using Power Automate and Power Apps:

1. Automating the creation of new SharePoint sites using Power Automate.
2. Improving the user experience for submitting new requests. This was achieved using Power Apps.

Alexander’s colleague who originally developed the legacy code for site provisioning recognized that it was outdated and complicated. Since Power Automate supports hundreds of connectors, Alexander’s colleague suggested that he use Power Automate cloud flows to improve the site provisioning process.

Alexander developed a cloud flow that runs every hour to identify the new requests submitted that are stored in a SharePoint List. The cloud flow then calls the SharePoint REST API to create the new SharePoint sites. Finally, the business user is notified that their requested SharePoint site has been created.

The Power Platform solution that automatically creates a new SharePoint site from the requests submitted via the canvas app.

Next, they looked into improving the user experience for submitting requests. Previously, user requests were submitted through a legacy Azure web application. The user interface was developed at a time when user experience was not valued and therefore was sub-optimal. The legacy application could not be modified for enhancements, failed to load for users at times and required manual monitoring of the sites created.

Alexander turned to Power Apps to modernize the process and user experience. Power Apps was ideal due to its feature rich user interface capabilities using low code and its integration with Power Automate. A canvas app was created which became the front-end interface for user requests and it modernized the end user experience completely.

For quick access, the app is launched from an intranet SharePoint page to submit their request. Users then proceed to provide details of their request in the app: justify the business reason for a new SharePoint site, who the backup owner will be, internal or external access for the site, the template to be used for the SharePoint site, and the site details such as Title, Description, Region etc.

Users launch the canvas app from their intranet to request for a new SharePoint Site to be created for their business.

The following are some key capabilities of the solution that made it a more modern and guided user experience:

• A progress bar visualization at the top of the app to guide the users in each step.
• Users can select their template preference for the SharePoint site.
• Site URL validation is implemented using a second cloud flow that calls the Graph API to check if the site URL provided by the user in their request already exists. If it exists, a warning is displayed to the user to prompt them to provide another value for the site URL. This eliminates duplication errors that lead to site provisioning failures prior to the actual creation of a SharePoint site.
• Users can also provide feedback after they submitted their request, allowing Alexander and his team to continuously improve the end user experience and functionality of the app towards the user requirements.

User confirms details and provides a new site URL if it already exists prior to submitting their new SharePoint Site request from the canvas app.

A summary of the benefits and impact of the solution is as follows:

• Low code design which provides flexibility in updating the processes for SharePoint provisioning and the end user experience for submitting requests.
• Modern user experience in submitting requests for provisioning of new SharePoint sites.
• 100-150 SharePoint sites are now provisioned monthly.

File Share Migration

Like any long-standing company, Mars operated with servers where enterprise applications and file management were on-premises. As technology advanced, on-premises applications evolved into cloud applications and likewise with file management – cloud services became the standard. Mars adopted Microsoft 365 a few years ago and saw the potential of moving files to the cloud to reduce maintenance and server costs. Storing files in the cloud also proved to be valuable as employees could easily access their files from any location and any device and provided greater storage capacity than their file management on-premises.

To transition to cloud file management, Mars initiated a project to migrate employee files from their personal network folder to their OneDrive for Business folder. A tool known as ShareGate was used for the actual file migration using PowerShell scripts. These PowerShell scripts were manually created for each migration which was time consuming since over 25,000 folders needed to be migrated. To speed up the migration process, Alexander and the team developed an automation solution using Power Automate cloud flows to help generate the PowerShell scripts.

This solution includes six cloud flows connected to four SharePoint Lists (Batches, Users, Sessions, Errors) and two document library folders (one for PowerShell scripts that process CSV files and another for migration reports for each user). Multiple iterative versions of the automation solution were developed over time to improve the technicalities of the process.

The cloud flow utilizes Microsoft Graph API and intelligently creates PowerShell scripts where relevant for the migration of files to OneDrive for Business.

The automation process is as follows:

• • The cloud flow uses the Microsoft Graph API to validate whether the users already have OneDrive for Business provisioned.
  • If the OneDrive for Business has not been provisioned for the users, the cloud flow is paused and sends an email to the analysts. It also provides them with a list of users who do not have OneDrive for Business yet.
  • The analysts are then required to run the PowerShell script automatically generated by the Power Automate cloud flow to provision OneDrive for Business for the users.
  • Once the analyst has executed the PowerShell script, the Power Automate cloud flow continues with processing the necessary actions.
  • Using Microsoft Graph API, a default folder is automatically created for each user which is the target destination of the migrated files from their personal network folder.
  • A SharePoint list has been utilized for audit purposes to keep track of the migration of user files, the size of their files, the OneDrive for Business URLs of the folders created, and any errors encountered.

• Another PowerShell script is automatically generated which is sent to the analysts to execute on the network server to migrate the files from user’s personal folder to their default folder in OneDrive for Business.
• Best practice of error handling was also implemented in the PowerShell script using the Try, Catch, Finally method. Whenever an error occurs a Power Automate cloud flow is triggered which saves the error details into the SharePoint List.

The Power Automate cloud flow checks if a user has OneDrive for Business and if not, performs the required actions to provision OneDrive for Business for the user.

The automation solution enabled Mars to successfully migrate files for over 25,000 users from the network folders to OneDrive for Business, reducing the time spent on manual work and with less errors.

The file share migration initiative will also expand to moving department files to SharePoint online as Mars continues to see the value in online file management. This will be a future project to continue with their progress to operating in the cloud to transition away from on-premises.

“Finally, we have this version – it has worked brilliantly, no issues. It was quite a long journey, but from my perspective that is the most complicated automation I have ever created so far because it is really long and there’s a lot of dependencies.”

– Alexander Nikulin, Collaboration Architect, Mars

Accelerating Power Platform adoption at Mars

In 2021 a companywide Power Platform hackathon took place with many teams around the world participating. These teams gained firsthand experience in designing and building business solutions with the Power Platform. Many saw the value of developing low code solutions rapidly which later led to an increase of automation and apps. Today Mars has approximately 10,000 cloud flows and 4,000 apps.

Alexander has been instrumental in enabling others at Mars to develop Power Platform solutions. Not only was he a coach for the Power Platform hackathon, but he also regularly participates in sessions to demonstrate automation solutions to inspire others at Mars to think about how processes within their line of work can be automated. Other colleagues in the collaboration related teams have since followed in his footsteps by developing Power Platform solutions for unified services, desktop devices etc.

To help govern and administer the increase of solutions being developed across the company, a Centre of Excellence is currently operating which Alexander, and his current team are involved with. They recognize that it is important to manage the growth to ensure company policies are followed but also harnessing the value of employees developing their own processes that fit their requirements.

“Once you give them the tools, they will be able to build great solutions for their departments, businesses, areas, countries because they know their business much better. They know exactly how they are supposed to work and combine technical knowledge and eagerness to learn and build something with business knowledge. It can produce a great result, but at the same time it is important to control when you have over 10,000 cloud flows and over 4,000 apps in your tenant.”

– Alexander Nikulin, Collaboration Architect, Mars

Looking ahead

To continue supporting the growth of Power Platform solutions at Mars, Alexander and his Digital Demand Engineering team are working on materials which will be accessible from their internal hub site. Several types of materials will be made available such as learning and training resources, FAQs and much more. Alexander is planning to run monthly webinars to help educate others on how to build effective Power Automate cloud flows. Alexander and his team also plan to explore other Power Platform services such as Power Pages to expand on digitizing their business processes at Mars.

“Anyone can (no-)code. Everyone should (no-)code.”

– Sandeep Dadlani, Chief Digital Officer, Mars

Related links

• Mars Petcare reimagines manufacturing operations and coaching using RealWear hands-free headsets with Microsoft Teams
• Power Automate customer stories
• Power Platform stories curated by the Power CAT team

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