The CEO's Guide to Evaluating Microsoft Products

As a Chief Executive Officer (CEO) in your business, the majority of your organizational pain points most likely circle around lack of visibility, proper tooling for process-enhancement, along with typical time and resource constraints. Microsoft offers an ecosystem of products that can offer insights into existing inefficiencies, help optimize productivity, and better the collaboration between teams- essentially offering you a high-level overview of your business, and giving you streamlined ways to optimize it. 

Microsoft Power Automate

Build agile business processes across your organization by modernizing business applications, driving business intelligence and automating day-to-day functions.

According to a 2019 Forrester survey on digital process automation, 37% of organizations are still using paper to manage critical processes. Piggy-backing this statistic, 69% of organizations say that accelerating digital innovation and transformation is the number one reason they embraced low-code application development. The critical need for low-code software and tooling derives from shared challenges CEO face everyday. 

CEO Challenges:

  • Crisis Response: Lack of quick crisis-response capabilities and support for your customers
  • Technical Limitations: Limited in-house technical skills that can be applied to to process enhancement
  • Outdated Business Processes: Need for more agile business processes to support delivery of solutions 
  • Lack of Transparency: Unclear visibility and data insights to assess current situation and forge CEO’s path forward
  • Cash Flow Pressures: Cash flow pressures and/or economic uncertainties- notably in a post-COVID world

By reducing development costs and increasing business efficiency, CEOs can focus on driving new business endeavors forward. Microsoft Power Platform products like PowerApps and Power Automate have helped Chief Executive Officers drive business transformation by offering low-code solutions to build agile business processes across an organization. With the use of Power Apps, interviewed customers saw a 74% reduction in app development costs, and a 188% ROI in three years. With the use of Power Automate, customers saw an average of $1.41M worker time savings over three years. Customers also reported a 27.4% reduction in errors due to increased system automation. 

Build and automate at speed by combining Microsoft's Power Platform with Dynamics 365

Combining the Dynamics 365 ‘a la carte’ ecosystem of applications with Power Platform products can help CEOs optimize business efficiencies, without the overhead in development cost, and security concerns. For example, a sales director who pulls the same ‘Sales Pipeline’ report on a weekly basis, could create a Power Automate Flow that generates a report and automatically sends it to his inbox on a weekly basis. That’s the beauty of the Power Platform- citizen developers can now take control of their tooling and drive immediate action.  With 65% of organizations reporting an app development backlog, it’s clear that providing low-code solutions helps speed up process enhancement. 

Microsoft’s Power Platform, when used alongside Dynamics 365 can help businesses streamline every-day functions while offering centralized insights to a CEO. 

  • Scale: Accelerate and automate at scale with intelligence and ease. 
  • Integrate: With Microsoft’s Power Platform, you can easily connect important Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications to process enhancement tools like Power Automate.
  • Modernize: Modernize legacy tasks and processes in a secure low-code platform
  • Adapt: Rapidly adapt to changing business needs with built-in solutions.  
Microsoft Power Automate Screen Example

Accelerate and automate at scale with intelligence and versatility

Businesses today rarely use a single product suite across their entire organization. Microsoft validated this idea with their development of the Dataverse- a database built on the Common Data Model that supports integrations to 350+ 3rd party apps and services without APIs. This means building time-saving workflows into everything- from personal tasks to large-scale on-premise systems. By integrating and unifying data across all business processes, CEOs can enable interoperability among applications and gain a holistic view across their business- unlocking reporting that previously was not possible.  

Evaluating Microsoft Products as CEO

When evaluating Microsoft products as a CEO, you can refer to the question-set below this paragraph to open up conversations with your colleagues. By uncovering organization-wide pain points, you can begin to understand your employee’s needs and how they match up with your own. 

  • Does your organization have the agility required to respond to a crisis?
  • Are you able to scale with your customers’ rapidly changing demands?
  • Are you able to communicate and execute on said changes with your existing arsenal of tools?
  • Do your teams clearly know their roles and responsibilities when it comes to platform and software?
  • Does your reporting offer a centralized view of all business areas, or is your data siloed?
  • How are roles and responsibilities defined within your organization? Is there enough functional knowledge to empower users to generate their own tooling?
MIcrosoft Power Automate 101

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