“Finding out about all the things in the Power Platform has been amazing. Like this is technology that I didn’t even know existed. I want so much more time to learn everything on the Power Platform and AI because it can do so much for my profession.”

Crossing paths with generative AI automation

Generation of engagement letters

• Determine the type of engagement
• Add details such as the date, the client’s name, fee information, and the due date to file taxes
• Add correct text for certain conditions, such as “first year” statements for new clients
• Generate the letter as a PDF
• File the PDF into the correct folder for the project

“It was incredible to see the amazement on people’s faces when they realized what Power Automate could do in moving information from point A to point B, which is a huge benefit amongst accountants as the applications we work with don’t interact with each other.”

Importing financial data – from a week to minutes

4 ways accountants can benefit from AI and Power Platform

Email management

Generate suggested responses to clients

Summarize information aligned to the current tax law

Educating new accountants

Helping the community upskill with AI and automation

1. Process mapping, as she sees this as a preliminary step to automation
2. Using AI tools for documenting manual processes identified from the process mapping
3. Automate the process that was mapped and documented

Looking ahead

“This Power Platform technology is amazing; it’s not just making our jobs easier. It’s helping our profession thrive and grow and continue to help other people – both accountants and clients.” – Ashley Francis, Certified Public Accountant, The Francis Group

Share your story with us!

Availability

Responsible AI

The post Certified Public Accountant transforms accounting processes using Power Automate appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

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

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

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

What is the Automation Kit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s included in the Automation Kit?

Automation Project Management

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

Projects are managed in the Automation Center

Solution Metering

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

Artifacts are attached to solution metering for automatic metric captures

Automation CoE Dashboard

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

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

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

Dashboard showing the complexity score and list of projects

Where to start

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

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

What’s next

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

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

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

Disclaimer

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

If you face issues with:

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

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

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.

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

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

In this story:

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

Meet Eric

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

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

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

Business scenario

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

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

Before Power Automate

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

The manual process was as follows:

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

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

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

Power Automate solution – Invoice fixing automation

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

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

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

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

Automation of the invoicing fixing processing with Power Automate.

Power Automate cloud flows

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

AI Builder document processing

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

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

Power Automate desktop flow (1)

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

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

Power Automate desktop flow (2)

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

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

Summary of impact

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

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

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

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

Solution architecture

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

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

Expanding ROI through Automation CoE Starter Kit

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

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

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

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

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

Creating value together – citizen development program

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

Collaboration amongst the citizen developers using Microsoft Teams and Yammer.

Examples of Power Apps built by a citizen developer

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

Scanning and identifying equipment attachments

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

Changing the destination for new equipment

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

Looking ahead

Scaling the community across the company

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

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

Aligning Power Platform with ALM and monitoring best practices

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

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

Related links

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

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

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

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

Episode highlights

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

Call to action

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

Useful links

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

The post Hyperautomation special video series for SAP based integration and automation with Power Automate appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Dataverse for Teams

Dataverse for Teams is an important subset of Microsoft Dataverse. With Dataverse, users can:
• Deliver services with agility by using an extensible data platform that uses out-of-the-box common tables, extended attributes, semantic meanings, and an open ecosystem.
• Increase scale and efficiency by quickly developing applications, processes, and reusable data schemes. Also, easily build, validate, and deploy your applications using GitHub and Azure DevOps.
• Make your data work smarter by adding low-code AI tools to your process automation. Identify and resolve duplicated and conflicting data with a managed data platform that includes built-in business logic and rules.
• Rely on the security of a trusted platform with a robust security management infrastructure that provides critical security and compliance capabilities—advanced encryption, rich access control, and deep integration with Azure Active Directory.
As Figure 1 depicts, Microsoft Teams integrations offer development capabilities which range from full-code custom solutions to ready-made apps. The new Dataverse for Teams provides a balance for pro developers and citizen developers to create unique solutions to address business challenges.

Dataverse for Teams offers a suite of  embedded Microsoft Power Platform tools in Teams, including Power Automate.  With Dataverse for Teams, organizations can easily build low-code apps, automate processes, and deploy chatbots without leaving Teams.  All of this creative capability comes with rich administration, security, and governance. Microsoft Dataverse for Teams follows the existing governance rules established by Power Platform and offers access control through the Teams Admin Center.  Check out more more details about the Teams Admin Center.  Also learn more about  Power Platform admin center which provides more detail on Power Platform solutions and control, including monitoring dedicated capacity utilization. Since Dataverse for Teams entered preview in September, many organizations have been using Power Platform in Teams, driven by the ease of use of Dataverse for Teams as a low-code back end.  Let’s look at how Power Automate can be used in Dataverse for Teams.

 
Easily add automations to Dataverse for Teams App

With Power Automate’s integration to Dataverse for Teams, users can easily add automation to apps built with Dataverse for Teams.  Figure 2 shows the ‘solution explorer’ view in the Teams UI and the list of flows created using Dataverse for Teams for one team.  With Dataverse for Teams, the apps, bots, and flows are created by team members of a given team.  While a team owns the apps, bots, and flows, they can be shared organization-wide if desired.

Power Automate’s UI makes it very easy to create a step-by-step view of the automation a user creates.  That same easy to follow UI is available in Dataverse for Teams.  It is seamlessly embedded into Teams so users can create their automation right from Teams as shown in figure 3.  With Power Automate in Dataverse for Teams, users have the same rich experience offered by the native Power Automate service.  The seamless integration across the multiple connectors and ease of use in Teams, makes it easy to create powerful automations for apps right inside the Teams experience.  With Dataverse for Teams, automation for apps and bots is an easy, seamless process, and enabled within the collaborative environment of Teams.  It is a powerful example of the benefits of integration and combining collaboration and creativity.

Enhance Your Digital Transformation with Power Automate

Learn more about Power Automate by joining our growing Power Automate community and participate in discussions, provide insights, and even influence product roadmap. If you’re not already, begin following the Power Automate blog to get news on the latest updates.  To get started on your first flows, learn how to use Power Automate from our tutorials and our video channels hosted by Power Automate engineers who will demonstrate how to create sophisticated flows within a matter of minutes. Go to powerautomate.com, to get started with Power Automate today!

• Power Platform Mechanics Series
• A guide to building enterprise-ready flows
• Power Automate Community
• Power Automate Blog
• Learn Power Automate
• Power Automate Tutorials with Audrie Gordon
• Administering a PowerApps Enterprise Deployment Technical Whitepaper
• AI Builder

The post Automation made easy with Dataverse for Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Power Automate appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

This Ignite, we are focusing on the new advancements we have made with Robotic Process Automation (RPA) which we launched in Power Automate earlier this year. Recently, we also acquired Softomotive to further expand and strengthen Power Automate’s RPA capabilities. Over the past few months, our engineering teams have focused on integrating Softomotive’s WinAutomation technology into Power Automate, and at Ignite, we’re going to give you some glimpses of how the new RPA capabilities enhance Power Automate and enable your organization to do even more (figure 1). Additionally, we’ll focus on how deep integration between Power Automate and Teams enables your end users to solve their business challenges more quickly and easily. There are also some great sessions which focus on other areas of the Power Platform which will provide you a look at the robust and nearly limitless possibilities with the Power Platform.

Figure 1.  The new Softomotive RPA integrated with Power Automate

Live Sessions

• Microsoft Power Platform: Fill the app gap and supercharge organizational agility
  • Live Tuesday Sept 22: 9:30 – 9:50 AM PDT
  • Replay Sept 22: 5:30 – 5:50 PM PDT
  • Replay Sept 23: 1:30 – 1:50 AM PDT

• Build Agile Business Processes with Power Apps
  • Live Tuesday Sept 22: 11:30 – 12:00 PM PDT
  • Replay Sept 22: 7:30 – 8:00 PM PDT
  • Replay Sept 23: 3:30 – 4:00 AM PDT

• Automate your desktop with Power Automate

  • Live Tuesday Sept 22: 1:45 – 2:15 PM PDT

  • Replay Sept 22: 9:45 – 10:25 PM PDT

  • Replay Sept 23: 5:45 – 6:15 AM PDT

• Amplify your pro developer skills with Power Platform
  • Live Wednesday Sept 23: 12:15 – 12:45 PM PDT
  • Replay Sept 23: 8:15 – 8:45 PM PDT
  • Replay Sept 24: 4:15 – 4:45 AM PDT

• How to responsibly scale Power Apps in your organization with a Low Code Center of Excellence
  • Live Tuesday Sept 22: 1:45 – 12:15 PM PDT
  • Replay Sept 22: 9:45 – 10:15 PM PDT
  • Replay Sept 24: 5:45 – 6:15 AM PDT

Session on Demand

• Automate Business Process with Microsoft Teams with Power Automate
• End-to-end intelligent automation with Power Platform

 
Enhance Your Digital Transformation with Power Automate

If you haven’t had a chance to try WinAutomation yet, check it out.  We’re looking forward to further enhancing the integration between WinAutomation and Power Automate and will be making more advancements soon, so stay tuned.   Learn more about Power Automate by joining our growing Power Automate community and participate in discussions, provide insights, and even influence product roadmap. If you’re not already, begin following the Power Automate blog to get news on the latest updates.  To get started on your first flows, learn how to use Power Automate from our tutorials and our video channels hosted by Power Automate engineers who will demonstrate how to create sophisticated flows within a matter of minutes. Go to powerautomate.com, to get started with Power Automate today!

• Power Platform Mechanics Series
• A guide to building enterprise-ready flows
• Power Automate Community
• Power Automate Blog
• Learn Power Automate
• Power Automate Tutorials with Jon Levesque
• Power Automate Tutorials with Audrie Gordon
• Administering a PowerApps Enterprise Deployment Technical Whitepaper
• AI Builder

The post Power Automate at Microsoft Ignite Virtual Conference appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.