Accelerate Time to Value
With Apps and Portals

Addressing the Challenges of Digital Transformation

Tackling digital transformational challenges can help us better understand the problem statements stemming from both IT and business departments. The business side strives to achieve more with limited resources and budget constraints, facing high expectations for transformation alongslide cumbersome and inneficient processes. Meanwhile, the IT department works to keep up with business demands, establish partnerships, maintain existing technology portfolios, and mitigate shadow IT and security risks, all while staying at the forefront of innovation.  Understanding this divide can help us reach a compromise that satisfies the needs of both organization departments. 

Introducing low code and Microsoft’s Power Platform can greatly alleviate the challenges above. In fact, many of the aforementioned points can be addressed and managed effectively using the proper set of tools. By adopting a platform that fosters innovation while providing pre-built security and compliance measures, the following benefits can be realized: 

By embracing Microsoft’s contemporary ERP system, you can enhance your operational efficiency and simplify financial procedures, resulting in greater flexibility, versatility, and cooperation throughout your company. This will empower your organization to thrive during this unprecedented era of global economic transformation.

Benefits of Leveraging
Microsoft's Power Platform

Efficient and Secure Business Scaling: As customer demand grows, businesses need to expand to meet those demands. However, integrating new products to accommodate increased workloads and functionality can be time-consuming and costly. In the digital landscape, where everything is interconnected, security breaches are more prevalent. The rise of remote work has further escalated cybersecurity risks. Many business users resort to shadow IT solutions, which lack governance and controls, posing significant risks.

Costly and Challenging Custom Application Development: Building custom applications is an expensive and time-consuming endeavor. Moreover, there is often a shortage of IT skills and resources to keep up with the rapid pace of digital business demands. Traditional coding incurs significant initial costs, and maintenance, integration, and modifications over time require specialized skills. Empowering citizen developers to build applications through a democratized tool reduces reliance on hiring software developers for custom applications.

Agile Solutions for Customer Needs: Custom applications take considerable time to develop and are expensive to modify. Some solutions can take months to build, with subsequent minor changes requiring weeks to implement. Customers require solutions that can swiftly adapt to their evolving needs. Additionally, these solutions must seamlessly integrate with legacy systems and consolidate data from disparate sources, offering a unified platform for all application development requirements.

Prioritizing Accelerated Workflows: Organizations must embrace automation and digital culture to keep pace with the rapidly evolving landscape. Transitioning from outdated, paper-based processes to digitized and automated workflows in the cloud is paramount. Employees should focus on solving critical business problems instead of being burdened by repetitive tasks. Legacy models have strained the relationship between business and IT departments, with the latter struggling to meet modern business demands.

Maximizing Data Quality: Collecting data through error-prone methods such as paper forms or manual entry in spreadsheets undermines confidence in data accuracy. Gaining full visibility into potential blind spots is vital for the overall functioning and security of a business.

An Overview of Microsoft's Power Platform

The world’s most complete set of integrated, low-code development tools

Microsoft’s Power Platform includes five power applications for application, automation, chatbots, websites and BI. Supported with additional Power Platform features such as managed environments (governance), AI models, a centralized data source, a low code excel-expression-like language, and over 750+ data connectors. 

Power Apps for web and mobile application development

Power Automate for process or workflow automation and integrations

Power Virtual Agents for chatbots and conversational agents

Power Pages for building secure, data-centric business websites

Power BI for data exploration, analytics and reporting

Bring Scalable Solutions to Life
With Power Apps

Power Apps is a comprehensive suite comprising apps, services, connectors, and a robust data platform. It offers a rapid development environment that enables you to create tailored applications to meet your specific business requirements. With Power Apps, you can swiftly build custom business apps that seamlessly connect to your data, whether it resides in the underlying data platform (Microsoft Dataverse) or various online and on-premises sources like SharePoint, Microsoft 365, Dynamics 365, SQL Server, and more.

Unlocking the Potential of Power Apps

Applications built using Power Apps offer extensive business logic and workflow capabilities, facilitating the transformation of manual business operations into streamlined, digitized processes. These apps are designed with responsiveness in mind, allowing them to seamlessly run on web browsers and mobile devices such as phones and tablets. By democratizing the business-app-building experience, Power Apps empowers users to create feature-rich, custom business apps without the need for coding.

An Extensible Platform for Developers

Power Apps serves as an extensible platform that enables professional developers to interact programmatically with data and metadata. They can apply business logic, create custom connectors, and seamlessly integrate with external data sources. This flexibility empowers developers to extend the capabilities of Power Apps and tailor it to their specific requirements.

Boost Productivity & Processes
With Power Automate

Microsoft Power Automate is a powerful tool designed to assist users in creating automated workflows between various applications. Its purpose is to synchronize files, provide notifications, and collect data seamlessly. This intelligent, cloud-based solution leverages triggers and actions to trigger a chain reaction within a workflow, eliminating the need for manual and time-consuming tasks.

By utilizing Microsoft Power Automate, users can significantly enhance their productivity. They gain the ability to automate tasks securely and efficiently, effortlessly implementing intelligent workflows. With the help of pre-built connectors, users can create time-saving workflows that range from individual tasks to complex, large-scale systems, all seamlessly integrated.

Discovery the Benefits of Microsoft Power Automate

These secure workflows encompass cloud-based integrations, including data loss prevention and identity and access management services. The platform’s built-in AI capabilities enable the automation of manual tasks, freeing up valuable time to focus on strategic and high-value opportunities within the business.

A Platform Designed for Integration and Accessibility

One of the major advantages of Microsoft Power Automate is its integration capabilities with a broad ecosystem of services, providing organizations with a head start on hyperautomation. Additionally, the platform offers low-code AI functionality, enabling users of all technical backgrounds to leverage these capabilities in their automated solutions.

While Microsoft Power Automate caters to citizen integrators and IT professionals, it is also designed with non-technical business users in mind. This inclusive approach places automation tools in the hands of every employee, empowering individuals to create their own solutions within an intuitive and user-friendly platform.

Seamless Integration with Diverse Data Sources

As an advanced integration tool, Microsoft Power Automate seamlessly connects to over 300 out-of-the-box data sources and 750+ data connectors. Whether it’s Google Sheets, Twitter, Dynamics 365, SharePoint, Salesforce, OneDrive, or many others, the platform provides extensive connectivity options to streamline data flow and enhance automation capabilities.

Empowering Modern External-Facing Websites
With Microsoft Power Pages

Microsoft Power Pages is a highly secure, enterprise-grade, low-code Software as a Service (SaaS) platform specifically designed for creating, hosting, and managing modern external-facing business websites. Whether you’re a low-code maker or a professional developer, Power Pages equips you with the tools to swiftly design, configure, and publish websites that seamlessly adapt to various web browsers and devices.

Unleashing the Potential of Power Pages

With Power Pages, you gain access to a wide range of rich and customizable templates, offering the flexibility to tailor your websites to match your unique business requirements. A redesigned design studio provides a fluid visual experience, enabling you to effortlessly create visually appealing sites. Additionally, Power Pages includes an integrated learning hub, empowering you to quickly familiarize yourself with the platform’s features and capabilities.

A Cohesive Member of the Power Platform

Power Pages is the newest addition to the Microsoft Power Platform family. By leveraging Power Pages, you can build websites that utilize the same shared business data stored in Microsoft Dataverse. This means that you can seamlessly integrate your websites with other Microsoft Power Platform components, such as apps, workflows, intelligent virtual agents, reports, and analytics, within your organization.

Find Clarity in Business Decisions
With Power BI

Power BI encompasses a range of cloud-based applications and services designed to assist organizations in consolidating, managing, and analyzing data from diverse sources through a user-friendly interface. As a business intelligence tool, Power BI serves multiple purposes. Its primary function is to aggregate and process data, transforming it into comprehensible insights presented through visually appealing charts and graphs. This empowers users to generate and share clear and valuable snapshots of their business activities.

Power BI seamlessly integrates with various data sources, including Excel spreadsheets, databases, as well as cloud-based and on-premise applications. Power BI is an umbrella term encompassing different components, such as Power BI Desktop, a Windows desktop application; Power BI Service, an online Software as a Service (SaaS) platform; and mobile Power BI apps for Windows, iOS, and Android devices.

Built on the foundation of Microsoft Excel, Power BI boasts a gentle learning curve for Excel users. However, it surpasses its spreadsheet counterpart in terms of functionality and power.

What Can Power BI Do?

Microsoft Power BI enables running reports and surfacing insights based on an organization’s data. It connects to a wide range of datasets and streamlines the information to enhance digestion and comprehension. The resulting reports and visualizations can be shared with other users.

Power BI not only provides visibility into past and present activities but also offers predictive capabilities for the future. Infused with machine learning, it identifies data patterns and employs them to make informed predictions and conduct “what if” scenarios. These estimations allow users to generate forecasts, prepare for future demand, and evaluate other key metrics.

Why Businesses Choose to Use Power BI?

Power BI serves as the next level of business intelligence for companies seeking advanced reporting capabilities and analytical strength beyond what Excel offers. By utilizing Power BI, businesses can gather, analyze, and visualize data from various sources within the organization, granting them deeper insights into their operations and performance. This, in turn, enables more informed decision-making based on real data.

  • Data Processing Power: Power BI can handle large volumes of data that may pose challenges for other platforms, allowing businesses to input extensive datasets for analysis.
  • Machine Learning Features: Power BI incorporates built-in machine learning capabilities, empowering users to analyze data, identify valuable trends, and make educated predictions.
  • Visual Data Representation: Power BI offers powerful templates for visualizing data, enabling businesses to gain a clearer understanding of their information through compelling visualizations.
  • Cutting-Edge Intelligence: Being a cloud-based solution, Power BI provides users with access to state-of-the-art intelligence capabilities and regularly updated powerful algorithms.
  • Personalization and Dashboards: Power BI enables users to personalize their experience by creating customized dashboards, facilitating quick access to the data they need.
  • KPI Alerts: Users can set up alerts on key performance indicators (KPIs), ensuring they stay up-to-date with important metrics and measurements.
  • User-Friendly Interface: Power BI offers an intuitive interface that is more user-friendly and easier to navigate compared to complex spreadsheets, enhancing usability and adoption.
  • Integration with Business Tools: Power BI seamlessly integrates with popular business management tools such as SharePoint, Office 365, and Dynamics 365. It also integrates with non-Microsoft products like Spark, Hadoop, Google Analytics, SAP, Salesforce, and MailChimp.
  • Data Security: With data security being a top concern for businesses, Power BI provides granular controls over data accessibility both internally and externally, ensuring data remains secure.

Get Started With Power Platform

It’s time to supercharge your business efficiency and drive innovation with Microsoft’s Power Platform! This powerful suite of applications enables you to analyze data, build solutions, automate processes, and create virtual agents in a simple, no-code environment. Whether you’re a business leader, IT professional, or developer, Power Platform puts the tools in your hands to transform your work processes, streamline operations, and drive better decision-making. Don’t let another day go by without harnessing this powerful technology. Dive into Microsoft’s Power Platform today and unlock your organization’s full potential. It’s time to create, not just consume. Your business transformation journey starts here!

Next Steps: Business + Solution Assessment

A business value and solution assessment using the Microsoft Catalyst IDEA framework is designed to assist your organization in achieving its desired business transformation. By working with a dedicated Avantiico consultant you can shift your organization from its current operational state to the future state you want and envision. This process begins with an IDEA and is broken into the following action-oriented steps:

Envisioning workshop:

Where Catalyst-trained Avantiico consultant will guide you through the process of identifying desired operational changes and co-creating an innovative business blueprint for your organization’s desired digital transformation.

Business Value Assessment (BVA):

This stage is guided by insights (blueprint) from the envisioning stage. Here you get to see the true benefits of your potential future state of operations. Your Avantiico Catalyst consultant will break down the quantifiable economic impact to be realized by your organization through the implementation of Dynamics 365 applications.

Solution Assessment:

This is a collaborative process where stakeholders are brought together to review the details of organizational objectives, current processes, and technology. Of course, your Avantiico Catalyst consultant will guide you through this process. The end result is “buy-in” across your organization and a custom-built strategic roadmap to guide your organization’s digital transformation from the current state to envisioned state.

Request a free Dynamics 365 demo

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