{"id":5241,"date":"2020-03-30T14:24:42","date_gmt":"2020-03-30T21:24:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/?p=5241"},"modified":"2023-06-27T14:01:08","modified_gmt":"2023-06-27T21:01:08","slug":"how-microsoft-used-power-automate-to-create-its-new-centralized-banking-portal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/insidetrack\/blog\/how-microsoft-used-power-automate-to-create-its-new-centralized-banking-portal\/","title":{"rendered":"How Microsoft used Power Automate to create its new centralized banking portal"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"MicrosoftVinni Dang doesn\u2019t consider herself a software developer, but she is certainly a problem solver.<\/p>\n

When Dang recognized the manual process used by the Microsoft employees who access 1,300 company bank accounts in 191 countries, she wanted to streamline this largely manual process.<\/p>\n

Not an engineer, she looked around for a non-technical solution and discovered Microsoft Power Automate<\/a>, a cloud-based workflow solution for automating workflows across applications and services.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were empowered to do it ourselves, and do it efficiently,\u201d says Dang, a senior treasury manager on Microsoft Treasury\u2019s Global Cash Management team.<\/p>\n

Best of all, no coding was required.<\/p>\n

Dang worked with Brandon Diersch, a treasury group manager in Global Cash Management, to create a tool that would centralize online banking portals and track access requests.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t need to work with engineering teams or have a coding background to create a tool,\u201d Dang says. \u201cWe just needed some business logic and approval workflows. Once we had that designed and mapped out, we were able to implement the solution using Power Automate.\u201d<\/p>\n

[Learn how Microsoft builds connected business solutions with Power Automate.<\/em><\/a>\u00a0<\/em>Learn how Microsoft transformed payroll processes with Power Automate.<\/em><\/a> Learn how citizen developers at Microsoft used Power Apps to build an intelligent launch assistant.<\/em><\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n

Empowering citizen developers to solve problems on their teams<\/strong><\/p>\n

The Global Cash Management team began to learn how to use Power Automate through trial and error and used online courses and tutorials.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe started by building simple flows before we made the business logic more complicated,\u201d Dang says. \u201cThe major learning was that we needed to manually plan our logic before we built it out on Power Automate. This enabled us to identify the gaps in our processes before we started implementation.\u201d<\/p>\n

To develop this solution, Diersch\u2019s team took advantage of Power Automate\u2019s drag-and-drop technology.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you\u2019ve ever created a slide in a PowerPoint deck and made simple animations to make the deck more polished, you can create a Power App,\u201d says Pat Dunn, a principal program manager in Microsoft Digital who designs, builds, and supports Power Apps. \u201cYou don\u2019t need to know a programming language to begin, but you\u2019re able to use the power of the platform to create low-code or even high-code solutions.\u201d<\/p>\n

Using Power Automate, Dang and Diersch created a centralized tool to evaluate whether an employee was active, manage access requests, and create a clear audit trail of who accesses a bank account and why.<\/p>\n

\u201cDue to the low-code, no-code capability of Power Automate, the life cycle was completed in a few weeks with no dependency on the IT team,\u201d Dang says.<\/p>\n

Using Power Automate made it easy for the team to scale the solution, integrate new business logic as the company expands, and receive error messages in a timely manner.<\/p>\n

\u201cNow, we not only have a clear audit trail of who has access, but also an approval workflow that\u2019s been automated with this application,\u201d Dang says. \u201cThis ensures that everyone who gets access to Microsoft accounts has an appropriate business justification.\u201d<\/p>\n

Prioritizing governance and security<\/strong><\/p>\n

The team also consulted the Microsoft Privacy team to ensure that their hand-built tool was certified.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn conversations with compliance or audit groups, it became apparent that this tool offered a reliable, systematic way of logging changes and activity, especially when compared to a more manual tracking system,\u201d Diersch says.<\/p>\n

Diersch says that the team was able to iterate on the application in an agile way. For Dang and Diersch, the most rewarding part was building an improved experience for end users.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe used Power Automate to pull in hierarchy information in an intelligent way and route them to the right people,\u201d Diersch says. \u201cThis is how we used it specifically, but it can also be applied for any approval process.\u201d<\/p>\n

With this tool, the Treasury team receives tickets with all the information associated with an approval request, which has increased efficiency by 75 percent. If an employee leaves the company or switches teams, the Treasury team can also change the logic on the back end to add additional employees or restrict access.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re seeing huge gains in the quality of the data,\u201d Diersch says. \u201cOur processing team receives clean and validated information, and it\u2019s more efficient than receiving this data over email.\u201d<\/p>\n

Dang agreed, remarking on how fast the tool responds.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf a treasurer has a question about who has access to Microsoft bank accounts, we can pull this data in seconds,\u201d Dang says.<\/p>\n

For teams who want to automate processes in their organization, Diersch recommends leveraging existing Power Automate templates and experimenting with different connectors.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s such a big library, so there\u2019s probably an existing flow that could be modified to address some of your business needs, or just provide a place to start,\u201d Diersch says. \u201cYou can customize the rest.\u201d<\/p>\n

Power Automate is part of a larger suite of Power Platform<\/a> apps that can be used to build end-to-end business solutions. To support the development of apps and flows, Power Platform users in small to medium-sized businesses can also take advantage of the Power Apps Center of Excellence starter kit<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt connects users with the community and empowers them to be citizen developers with guardrails,\u201d Dunn says.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, Power Platform users like Dang and Diersch are embracing the power to meet their personal and team productivity needs, which benefits both IT and the company as a whole.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the IT professional side, make sure you have governance strategy, processes, and tooling so you can govern citizen development in your tenant,\u201d Dunn says. \u201cThis enables you to build a thriving community where people are empowered to build productivity tools and make the organization more efficient.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Related<\/p>\n