Power Fx is the low-code language, inspired by the Excel formula syntax, that brings the capabilities of logic expressions to Microsoft Power Platform. It’s versatile, declarative, and designed for both no-code makers and pro-code developers. With Power Fx, you can express complex logic in a human-friendly text format, making it accessible to everyone.

Power Fx in desktop flows (preview)

Power Fx made its debut for desktop flows in Power Automate for desktop December’s release. Since then, makers can harness the capabilities of this expressive language directly within their flows.

Power Automate for desktop’s March release will include the following features:

IntelliSense capabilities

• Syntax colorization: Enjoy a visually pleasing experience with color-coded expressions, allowing for quicker and clearer distinction of variable components.
• Real-time suggestions & autocomplete functionality: While typing, Power Fx provides context-aware suggestions, assisting in expression synthesis.

• Function signature helpers: Get a quick overview of function parameters and usage right within the respective input field (formula bar).

Revamped variable picker

An enhanced variable picker is now available, providing filtering and shorting capabilities allowing for more intuitive of selecting variables in the respective actions.

Function picker

The new function picker allows for scrolling through a list of Power Fx functions, providing a quick overview to the full list of available functions.

The post Introducing Power Fx in desktop flows: Empowering Makers with low-code capabilities appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

These credentials can then be used in your desktop flow connections (instead of providing username and password values manually).

Key Features

Built-in credential manager: Centralized repository to manage all your credentials in one place, allowing you to easily manage and retrieve login information.

RBAC: Credentials can be shared and used without giving access to the secrets themselves.

ALM (application lifecycle management): Credentials are based on environment variables which are ALM compliant and can be exported using solutions.

Password rotation: Credentials and connections using them are updated when the Azure Key Vault secrets are updated.

Get started with credential management

Ready to create your first credentials and learn more about using them in desktop flow connections ?

Let’s get started today by visiting the Power Automate portal:

1. Select More in the left navigation pane, then select Discover all.
2. Under Data, select Credentials (preview). You can pin the page in the left navigation pane to make it more accessible.
3. Follow the steps described in our documentation !

The post Announcing Azure Key Vault credentials for desktop flow connections (preview) appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Key features

Work queues provide enterprise-scale orchestration and management capabilities, enabling complex processes and automations to be broken down into smaller parts and processed independently, resulting in optimized performance and reduced risk of SLA breaches.

Built-in human-in-the-loop and monitoring experiences foster seamless cross-team collaboration between business, operations, and IT, ensuring that everyone is on the same page and working towards common data processing goals that adhere to prioritization and defined SLA’s.

Supported processing types

Whether you want to process work queues through digital process automation (DPA) with cloud flows, robotic process automation (RPA) with desktop flows, or integrations through direct Dataverse API access, we’ve got you covered!

Get started with work queues

Ready to streamline your automations and learn more about work queues? Let’s get started today by visiting our documentation!

The post Microsoft Power Automate work queues are generally available 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.

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.

Test the waters

When building enterprise flows that is shared with a large set of users in your organization, it is often tough to predict how many users will want to use it. Now you can start with the pay-as-you-go option to gauge usage patterns then determine whether purchasing a pre-paid Power Automate subscription plan makes sense.

Share costs across your organization

Many organizations want to allocate software license costs to the department or team that used the licenses.  Pay-as-you-go makes this possible by letting teams pay for flow runs using Azure subscriptions linked to their own departmental budgets, and by providing the option to use Azure Cost Management and Azure tags to visualize and divide up costs.

Setting up Power Automate pay-as-you-go plan enables users to build and run premium Power Automate flows and to pay for their usage using Azure subscription based on the number of times these flows run.

Users and flows with standalone licenses will not incur charges for running flows. This means that you can simultaneously leverage the per user plan to license some users of your flows in a pay-as-you-go environment while also using the Power Automate pay-as-you-go meter to cover for seasonal/occasional usage. You can review usage reporting for Power Automate pay-as-you-go meters in the downloadable pay-as-you-go consumption report from the Power Platform admin center and move users to standalone licenses for optimal pricing.  For more details about how flow run charges work please review our documentation.

To make it easy to test and fix your flows no charges will be incurred if you’re testing your flow in the designer or resubmitting failed runs. Additionally, if you use the child flow feature for cloud flows or attended desktop flows, there will only be a single charge for the parent flow run, no charges will be incurred for child flow runs.

In addition to Power Automate, other services like Power Apps and Dataverse are available in a pay-as-you-go model offering flexible licensing across the Power Platform.

If your organization already has one or more Power Platform pay-as-you-go environments configured, Power Automate pay-as-you-go will be enabled for all those environments and any Power Automate usage in those environments that qualifies based on our documentation, will result in charges to your Azure subscription.

Check out this video for a deep dive on Power Automate Pay-as-you-go plan

aka.ms/PowerAutomatePaygovideo
Please give it a try and share your thoughts!
Questions: Power Automate community forum

The post Announcing public preview of pay-as-you-go for Power Automate appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

On top of providing our community with a brand-new interface to share ideas, the migration will enable our product teams to be much more responsive to user feedback and better integrate your ideas into our product roadmap.

Fig 1. New Power Automate Ideas portal, available for desktop and mobile browsers

The Power Automate team is listening!

A new process for voting and managing ideas will be implemented as part of this change. Every month, our community team will review and triage all incoming ideas. Duplicate ideas will be grouped for easier search, and clarification may be requested from the author. Top ideas (ideas that get upvoted at least 50 times) will be sent to the Power Automate product team for review. During every planning cycle, the product team will review Top ideas and determine if and when they can be added to the roadmap.

Statuses for ideas will be updated as follows:

• NEW: New ideas recently submitted that haven’t been triaged yet
• NEEDS VOTES: Triaged ideas that need at least 50 votes before they are reviewed by the product team.
• TOP IDEA: Ideas that have gathered at least 50 votes, and are currently being reviewed by the product team for inclusion in the next release wave.
• IN BACKLOG: The product team has approved the idea for inclusion in the product backlog, without a committed date yet.
• PLANNED: The team has committed to building the idea which has been added in the official release plans.
• COMPLETED: The idea has made it into the product and has shipped!
• DECLINED: The product team has declined to build the idea at this time

With this new process, the Power Automate product team will be able to respond to your community ideas and incorporate more of them into the product.

Fig 2: Posting a new idea on the portal 

How will the migration happen?

On July 18, Power Automate Ideas will go into “read-only” mode. The possibility to post a new idea will be temporarily disabled while we transfer all existing ideas to the new site: https://ideas.powerautomate.com

Starting July 20, we will launch the new site and you will be able to resume posting and sharing ideas. All ideas posted prior to July 18 will be made available on the new site with their new corresponding statuses.

We thank you for your continued engagement in our community and look forward to your new ideas for Power Automate!

The post New ways to share Power Automate Ideas appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The team has heard from many customers interested in this capability and also about the strong interest in Microsoft Mechanics videos in the past (how Xerox benefits from RPA, Power Automate Desktop walkthrough). We thought it’d be useful to present a walkthrough starting from a simple automation and make it scale across AI, unattended, multiple virtual machines, then enable automatic scale up and down with the Azure Virtual Desktop starter kit. The video is available here:

In the video, we go through a few steps:

1. Implement a very common scenario of taking data from Excel and enter data into a web form through Power Automate for desktop.
2. Use AI Builder to process the incoming requests, automating a key part of the process and bypassing manual data entry in Excel.
3. Run the overall process in an unattended mode and monitoring execution runs in the Power Automate portal.
4. Dynamically scale unattended RPA through Azure Virtual Desktop integration starter kit.

For those unfamiliar with Microsoft Mechanics, Jeremy and team drive Microsoft’s official video series for IT Pros, Solution Architects, Developers, and Tech Enthusiasts. Here, Microsoft engineers show you how to get the most from the software, service, and hardware we’ve built. Through in-product demos, recommendations, how-to’s, and tips, we simplify complex topics so you can share them with clients, peers, and your management team. These are in-depth looks at Microsoft 365, Azure, Data and AI, Surface, Windows, and the Power Platform. Get up to speed and subscribe here.

We hope you find the video as useful as it was fun to make. Happy Automating at https://Microsoft.com/PowerAutomate!

The post Walkthrough of achieving cloud scale with Robotic Process Automation appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Today, we are pleased to announce a special series around managing Power Automate Desktop on Windows at scale throughout your organization. This has been designed for Automation CoE’s (Center of Excellence)/ admins looking to enable and govern the roll out of Power Automate Desktop throughout the organization.

This series includes 8 episodes that introduces you to the concept of managing lifecycle for Power Automate Desktop, leveraging Microsoft Endpoint Manager tools such as Intune, SCCM and ring deployment techniques to deploy, monitor and audit Power Automate Desktop.

Watch the video series on YouTube and get your copy of the playbook today.

Highlights from the video series and playbook.

Managing Power Automate Desktop on Windows

In this debut episode, we will give an overview of the challenges with managing a desktop application and how can you solve them using Microsoft Endpoint Manager and Power Automate.

Create Intune Package for Power Automate Desktop

In this episode, we will show you how to deploy Power Automate Desktop through Intune. We will be creating groups in Azure Active directory and also creating an Intune package to deploy Power Automate Desktop app.

Configure Intune for Deploying Power Automate Desktop Package

In this episode, we will show you how to configure Intune to deploy Power Automate Desktop app. We will look at various options an admin can use to install the applications.

Deploy Power Automate Desktop and lifecycle management

In this episode, we will show you how you can use the Ring deployment methodology to roll out Power Automate Desktop across the organization

Manage Power Automate Desktop through System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM)

In this episode, we will show you how you can use SCCM to package Power Automate Desktop and manage it’s lifecycle (e.g. upgrade, uninstall etc.)

Silent registration for Power Automate Desktop machines with Power Automate

In this episode, we will show you how you can use register the machine deployed through Intune with Power Automate service. We will be using a Service principal in Azure to register the machine with Power Automate.

Analytics for Power Automate Desktop app in Intune

In this episode, we will show you how you can monitor the Power Automate Desktop deployments in Intune. Intune provides out of the box reporting for device health, application version and more across the organization.

Audit/ Compliance for Power Automate Desktop app in Intune

In this episode, we will show you how you create compliance policies to monitor the Power Automate Desktop deployments in Intune. You can also integrate with Azure conditional access which gives administrators a centralized place to manage policies and compliance status across the organization.

We would like to thank Thomas Barcenas (KMicro Tech, Inc.) for his contribution to this playbook and the video series.
We hope you find this useful and are excited to see what you will be automating!

Call to action!

1. Watch the video series on Automate It YouTube channel
2. Get your copy of the playbook
3. Get started with Power Automate Desktop

Resources

• HEAT – Holistic Enterprise Automation Techniques: https://aka.ms/rpapnp
• Automate It video series on YouTube: https://aka.ms/automateit
• Power Automate Desktop on Windows Whitepaper https://aka.ms/padonwindowspnpdoc
• Microsoft Endpoint Manager documentation
• Microsoft Intune documentation
• Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager documentation
• Manage and protect mobile and desktop applications with Microsoft Endpoint Manager
• Governance in Power Automate Desktop
• Silent registration for machines
• Microsoft Intune reports
• Device compliance policies in Microsoft Intune
• What is Conditional Access in Azure Active Directory

The post HEAT special: Automate It video series and playbook for managing Power Automate Desktop on Windows appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.