Best Power Apps Use Cases for Every Organization

Successful organizations collaborate well within their business functions – sales, marketing, operations, HR, and finance. But at times, simple requests that need to be addressed through email are left unattended for a long time. Small challenges create an array of bigger problems. Not all progressive organizations today have predefined solutions for such issues. Streamlining workflows and digitizing experiences with disparate data sources can often be challenging. Microsoft Power Platform has an array of solutions that cater to all the evolving needs of digital enterprises. A paradigm shift with the technology needs for every organization, typical business processes, and holistic experience seems to be driving the need for a holistic view with Microsoft Power Platform. With increasing democratization of programming and accelerated time to market for enterprise applications, low-code platforms are in focus for every organization. Microsoft Power Apps is the best low-code platform for application development and is recognized as a leader by Forrester. Let me deep dive into the solution and the best Power Apps use cases.

Microsoft Power Apps – A Brief Overview

Power Apps uses a low-code approach to design and develop enterprise applications with a simple drag and drop approach powered by a visual interface. Low-code development addresses the technical skills shortages, manual code development, and longer application development cycles. With Power Apps, you can develop enterprise applications that are scalable, secure, and cost-effective. These apps can seamlessly connect with the Microsoft application suite and others via the Common Data Service (CDS). With Microsoft Power Apps, users can build canvas apps, model-driven apps, and web portals.

Canvas Apps vs. Model-driven Apps vs. Portals – Transforming Every Business Function

Canvas Apps – Known for their ease of use, Canvas Apps are powered with simple drag and drop components to craft an exceptional user interface. What about data integration? Canvas Apps can connect to various data sources with over 200 connectors. Better user experience, ease of use, and anyone with a basic understanding of PowerPoint and Exel can build Power Apps.

Model-driven Apps – These apps take a data-first approach. Model-driven apps rely on the underlying data stored in Common Data Service (CDS). If you intend to develop apps with complex business logic, then model-driven apps seem to be the right fit for you. Though the user interface components are premade, they are responsive and render themselves according to the device.

Portals – We discussed internal applications above, but what if you want to create external-facing websites? Portals empower you to develop applications that can be accessed by external stakeholders using a wide variety of identities. Additionally, they offer you the best self-service options as per your need.

Why do you need Microsoft Power Apps?

As per Forrester Total Economic Impact Study, Power Apps use cases can improve efficiencies and many more qualitative benefits.

• Users can witness 188% improvement in ROI over 3 years.
• 4.3% uplift in revenue with accelerated time to market and changes in development efforts
• Application development costs reduced by 74%
• Expected payback can be less than 6 months
• Employee productivity gains by 3.2hrs per week

How is this possible?

• Integration with Office 365, Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Sharepoint, and scalable Microsoft Azure Cloud infrastructure
• Streamlining workflows with Power Automate
• Over 200+ connectors for data integration
• Internal and external applications with enhanced security and Azure Active Directory usage
• Reliable enterprise apps with minimal effort and costs

Power Apps Use Cases to Transform every Business Function

Do you think that Power Apps fits for only specific purposes in your organization? You may have to rethink, and you need to expand your scope and deep dive into the templates, interfaces, and business logic to establish multiple Power Apps use cases into more business scenarios. With our interactions with many industry leaders, we outlined a few Power Apps use cases according to business functions so that you reimagine your processes.

Sustaining and Improving Employee Engagement with HR applications

HR departments usually look simple from the outside, but they host a lot of processes. A simple discrepancy can have a ripple effect on the overall employee experience. A few Power Apps use cases to transform such processes:

Employee Onboarding – As it involves a lot of sub-tasks and multiple workflows, organizations can now leverage low-code app development. A simple app can be created to perform onboarding tasks, request approvals, queue up tasks, and organizational content – company details, team introductions, and general processes.

Leave Management – Global companies now have a different leave policy according to the location. Applying leaves, sick day reporting, vacation planning, communication between peers, HR, and approvals can be managed with an easy-to-use app in no time.

Benefits Management – Benefits policies like healthcare, Learning and Development, recreational, and team building are unique for each organization. A standard solution readily available in the market may not suit every need; you need to customize it as per your need. Instead, you can use Power Apps to create the app in a shorter time.

Employee Engagement Survey – Using the Power Apps Employee Engagement Survey pre-built in the solution or by leveraging Canvas Apps, you can easily create the survey in no time and track the responses more efficiently than ever before.

Microsoft leveraged a suite of employee engagement mobile apps branded as Thrive suite to enhance the experience for over 100,000+ employees.

Reimagining customer experience with Sales and Marketing Power Apps Use Cases

Communication with the right information at the right time is critical for sales folks to gain trust from the customers. Multiple small areas get lost in a host of processes involved in sales and marketing. By leveraging Power Apps, you can improve a few of them.

Event Management – Marketing events usually require a lot of planning and scheduling. Registrations, communications, and management of events seem to be another cumbersome task. You can create an end-to-end event management app that can also include personalized communications by analyzing the bios of your attendees.

Product Information – Often, many organizations feel that their sales and marketing functions do not have updated information about each other. Creating a repository with shared access to all the stakeholders might resolve the communication barriers.

Field Service Management – These professionals carry a lot of information, and they need to communicate in real-time to provide better service to customers. Status notes, customer history, and real-time actions to sales and operations teams are a few among many that can be replicated in a dynamic app. The features may be specific to the organizations according to the service or product.

Global Contact Management and Internal Communications – The world is now a tiny village. Having a 360-degree view of the customer is essential to provide the next best offer that suits them. Likewise, the geographical disparity also exists between sales folks. A common platform seems to be the most needed for effective communications.

Ikea leveraged Microsoft Power Apps to improve their B2B customer experience and increase sales for their Kitchen department. A host of applications in their sales tools like product demos, appointment scheduling, customer 360-degree view, and customer support center to reimagine the customer experience.

Fast track your financial needs with simplified processes

Like every other business function, finance too will be transformed by leveraging the best Power Apps use cases. A few of them include:

Expense Management – Every organization invests a lot of time processing expense claims as the review process needs a lot of time. With Power Apps, you can easily view the receipts, review, track and manage expense claims in a short time.

Invoice Processing – Many organizations do a lot of tasks in invoice processing manually. Using different templates and Power Automate in Microsoft Power Platform allows you to automatically create invoices and create a workflow with required alerts and notifications.

Payments Tracking – Usually, all organizations need to track the payments to their suppliers, from their vendors, and expense claims. While we automate the other two, it gets easy to track the payments with individual IDs created against each.

Financial Reports – Generating reports always seem to be a tedious task and the finance department does it many times. Multiple workflows and apps need to be leveraged to generate reports, but it is worth the effort.

Optimizing operations for a Better Experience

Simplifying operations is not about efficiencies but also about flexibility and experience. Let me walk you through a few exciting Power Apps use cases to optimize your operations.

Customer/Employee Self-service – Self-service options are now witnessing demand everywhere. With Portals in Power Apps, you can easily create a Help desk application that caters to the information needs and addresses your critical stakeholders’ services needs – employees and customers.

Partner Portal – Though this looks simple, you can comprehensively manage a host of vendors, suppliers, and service partners’ contracts and communications.

Supply-chain management – Manage your inventory, assets, production, and logistics in a combined app to enable a single view of the status and utilization everywhere.

Several organizations leveraged Power Apps to enable the return to the workplace, screening, and communication in this pandemic.

The Power Apps Use Cases above are just a sample of many possibilities with the low-code solution. Our experts know the knits and grits of the solution to enable your processes. Get in touch with us to learn more about Power Apps solutions for your organizations’ needs.