Process Improvement Archives - SharePoint & Office 365 Consulting Services

What is Microsoft Power Automate?

Over the past year, we’ve seen increased interest from customers to optimize processes. Organizations in both the public-sector and private sector are in search of ways to eliminate redundant tasks and time-consuming data entry to deliver faster and higher-value results with little to no added cost.

As a Microsoft Partner and Nintex Partner, we have seen both companies make significant investments to bring RPA capabilities to customers. Both organizations have taken a much broader approach to creating business value and have been diligent about engaging the entire organization to promote automation. The message and strategy of RPA extends to IT Pros, developers and end-users, encouraging the entire enterprise to leverage tools to improve processes and proactively identify parts of the business that can benefit from task automation.

Microsoft Introduces Power Automate and UI Flows

Microsoft recently announced the release of UI flows, which adds robotic process automation (RPA) functionality to

Focusing on What Matters

The enterprise application landscape is typically a mix of legacy applications and modern services, some running on-premises and others in the cloud. RPA is the answer for organizations that want to scale but are dependent upon systems that don’t talk to each other, which creates a disconnect between legacy and modern applications and services.

RPA uses bots to work between the applications, passing information from system to system and initiating actions which traditionally required a human to facilitate. Deep automation capabilities are now accessible to organizations that would have never explored RPA as an option to streamlining processes. These solutions were generally very costly and complex, Microsoft’s Power Automate is unique and more intuitive, allowing customers to do more with less across their business.

Microsoft’s goal with Power Automate is to bridge the gap between the legacy and modern applications, leveraging UI flows in Power Automate.

UI flows in Power Automate are powered by Azure and allow organizations to build automation atop the UI of applications that do not have an API available. Organizations can automate repetitive tasks performed through a browser or the user interface of their Windows applications.

With UI flows, users can record step-by-step UI actions such as mouse clicks, keyboard use, and data entry, and then replay those actions.

This enables organizations to:

Automate in a single platform across apps and services that don’t have APIs
Customize, build, and manage UI flows scripts in a secure cloud environment
Leverage a low-code experience with a step-by-step record and play back experience
Seamlessly integrate UI automation with API-based automation by combining UI flows with regular flows

Microsoft Supports Digital Transformation

Power Automate will be a major player in Microsoft’s strategy to be a digital transformation partner. The modern workplace is dependent upon technologies that automate process and enable users to focus on the most important pieces of the business. In the spirit of Satya Nadella’s presentation on Tech Intensity, Microsoft continues to bring no-code/low-code tools market that empower users to automate intuitively, quickly, and with agility.

We will be working with clients in 2020 to help them better understand the capabilities and talk more about the common processes that can be improved using RPA and tools like Power Automate. To learn more, please contact us. We’d love to hear about the process that your organization is looking to automate.

Microsoft Flow and PowerApps are in the Government Community Cloud (GCC)

If you follow Kiefer Consulting and read our blogs on a regular basis, it’s pretty obvious that we are very excited about Microsoft Flow and Microsoft PowerApps being added to the Government Community Cloud (GCC).

A better way to route, review, and approve: The Kiefer Review and Approve Solution

Many agencies have processes that are highly manual in nature. These processes are typically dependent upon the serial review and approval of critical documents. We have often encountered processes that require multiple staff members to review, approve, and route documents to numerous stakeholders across an organization.

Vision 2020 and the focus on the future: Our thoughts on CDT’s strategic plan.

Next year, Kiefer Consulting will be celebrating 30 years of successful project delivery. Over the last 29 years, we have had to stop from time to time and think about the company’s direction and strategy. 2017 was one of those years. We took inventory of our portfolio and our partnerships, and we identified the “in-demand” solutions that would be critical to our 2018 and 2019 business plan. It appears that we are not the only ones taking a hard look at our business. The State of California is also working on a strategic vision.

The beauties and beasts of business workflows.

Every organization has workflow. Some organizations have formalized and documented their processes so that every member of the organization understands how information should flow through the organization. These processes include business-critical processes like invoice processing, new-hire on boarding and I.T. provisioning. Documenting your process is an effective way of bringing consistency to how you do business, but it doesn’t necessarily ensure that your process is operating with efficiency. It’s important to understand what you can do to bring efficiency, consistency and automation to your business workflows.

Cool new stuff in Office 365: The Activity Button

Office 365 continues to be updated with new features! We wanted to start a blog series to share features that were either “new” or “newly discovered” by members of the Kiefer team. Hopefully, this blog is helpful in assisting you in gaining a better understanding of the capabilities of Office 365.

How the cloud can help your team collaborate.

Being able to collaborate is critical in today’s business environment. High performing teams need to be able to quickly share information and conveniently review documents.

Using electronic signatures to improve workflow.

In August, California Gov. Jerry Brown signed a bill to clarify how government agencies could accept signatures on documents electronically.

Brown signed Assembly A.B. 2296, which is designed to set clear standards around how state and local agencies can use both electronic and digital signatures. Read the article

How Office 365 can lower operating costs and increase ROI.

A survey conducted by Gartner reports, “IT Infrastructure & Operations (I&O) represents approximately 60 percent of total IT spending worldwide, so with IT budgets remaining tight, it’s no wonder that I&O cost-cutting pressure continues to be intense”

The Value of Usability Testing: More than just a test.

So, you’re building out your new website. You’ve organized all of your content, built wireframes for all of your pages and you’ve got your talented team of graphic designers working on branding and finding good images for the site. But when launch rolls around, you realize that you’ve forgotten the most important part of the user experience, usability.

Process Improvement

Tag: Process Improvement