The Top 7 Things you Should Know About Power Apps

Ready to take your business to the next level?  The problem is you’re being held back by processes that are manual and time consuming. You can’t find any off-the-shelf apps or solutions to solve your specific challenges and you lack the resources to develop a custom-built app from scratch. Introducing Microsoft Power Apps!

Power Apps is a powerful solution that allows you to build custom applications for your business needs, enable digital transformation, drive automation and cost savings across your business. With Power Apps, you can quickly and easily create apps, without writing a single line of code. The power to transform your business is now in your hands.

Microsoft Power Apps is a suite of apps, services, connectors and data platform that provides a rapid application development environment to build custom applications. Apps built using Power Apps provide rich business logic and workflow capabilities to transform your manual business processes to digital, automated processes. Further, apps built with Power Apps have a responsive design and can run seamlessly in browser or on mobile devices. Power Apps “democratizes” the custom business app building experience by enabling users to build feature-rich, custom business apps without writing code.

Benefits of using Power Apps

So, what are the main benefits of using Power Apps?

1. Get started quickly: Now you can build apps in hours – not months – that easily connect to data, using pre-built templates, drag-and-drop simplicity, and quick deployment, and then roll out continuous improvements as needed.
2. Enable your business to innovate: Build apps that transform your business. Power Apps enables a broad range of app scenarios to be created that infuse digital transformation into manual and outdated processes. You can use both canvas and model-driven apps to build Power Apps that solve business problems for task and role-specific scenarios such as inspections, field sales enablement, and integrated marketing views.
3. Automate! Automate! Automate!: Power Automate allows you to automate repetitive tasks and paper-based processes. Combine Power Apps and Power Automate and you have a powerful set of tools available in your Office 365 subscription that you can use to streamline and automate your business processes.
4. Scale Your Business: Using Microsoft Azure, you can extend low-code apps built with Power Apps and create enterprise solutions that scale to meet your organisation’s needs. You can continue to grow your business without having to worry about your business applications ability to scale to support it.
5. Connect Your data: Microsoft Power Apps allows you to connect to hundreds of data sources using a library of connectors, bringing all your data together for a single source of truth while you uncover insights as well as customise and extend Office 365, Dynamics 365 and Azure capabilities.
6. Enhance the User Experience: Rather than building from the backend, like traditional application development, developers can start with the user in mind and build a customised interface using Power Apps. Starting with a blank Power Apps canvas, you can customise every detail of your app to optimise for specific tasks and roles, putting the user at the centre of the design process.
7. Reduce Costs: Reduce application development time by the capacity to create apps fast with a point-and-click approach to app design. You can empower non-developers to build and manage applications, reducing the expenses associated with full-time application developers. Additionally, your workflow functionality dramatically lowers development costs and streamlines business processes.

Well all of this is great, but where do you go from here?

How can my business use Microsoft Power Apps?

If you’re taking the first step with Power Apps, think about your business and the work that you and your team do every day. From there, identify business problems that you currently use a manual process to solve. Processes that require manually moving data from one place to another (from paper to email or spreadsheet to database), are likely candidates for solving with an app. Once you’ve identified these, you can start to automate these processes using custom built apps through Power Apps.

For example, if you’ve highlighted that your paper-based processes are affecting the overall efficiency of your business, then this is something you can tackle and innovate using Power Apps. More and more we are starting to hear that Microsoft Power Apps can help people and businesses be more efficient and innovative. Below are some examples of apps that can be developed in Power Apps for your organisation:

• Visitor Sign-In App: Manage who is coming in and out of your offices, using a Visitor Sign-in app. This allows you to screen visitors, manage maximum capacities, gather visitor contact details and then push out important safety information in the case of an emergency.
• Site Compliance App for Construction: Secure construction sites with a Site Compliance app. Specific to the construction industry, visitors must complete a COVID19 survey and provide their unique CIF induction number before entering an active construction site. This app could support many in the industry getting back to business quickly and safely.
• Room Bookings App: Efficiently manage meeting room bookings with a simple Room Booking app. This allows you to better organise your meeting spaces, whilst complying with health and safety regulations.
• Staff Communications App: Reach your staff wherever they are with an internal communications app. This can support your organisation in enhancing internal communications, sending safety messages to all staff via their individual devices, creating a safer workplace for your team.

So what does that actually look like? Below is the story of how Codec helped Failte Ireland to transform their business processes using Power Apps:

Fáilte Ireland – Embracing Change with Rapid Innovation Through Power Apps

When people first think of Power Apps, one of the most common use-cases that often comes to mind is paperless automation. The amount of time organisations waste asking people to fill out forms and paperwork manually can be staggering. For Fáilte Ireland, this was no exception, and so together, Codec and Fáilte Ireland set out to transform their business processes using Power Apps.

Codec recently supported Fáilte Ireland in moving to the cloud, integrating solutions into a new environment that provided a seamless user experience. The arrival of COVID-19 increased the urgency for Fáilte Ireland to migrate all manual processes into a new cloud-based solution, Microsoft Power Apps. Due to the urgency to rapidly deliver solutions that could quickly adapt to changes in the business, a low-code tool like PowerApps was essential.

Previously, the HR functions in Fáilte Ireland were heavily reliant on on-premises solutions and were in need of being modernised. HR staff were constantly chasing managers for sign-off on documents, but now we have been able to automate reminders thus ensuring prompt sign-off. Overall this has generated time-savings across the business, as well as enhanced user experience. Not only were Codec able to support Fáilte Ireland in quickly migrating and modernising legacy solutions, but were also able to help the organisation quickly adapt to the changing work environment presented by COVID-19 by automating paper-based solutions using Power Apps.

Read the Full Case Study: Fáilte Ireland Case Study

Fáilte Ireland are just one example of how Codec have used Power Apps to transform businesses and drive results.

Ready to get started with PowerApps? How can Codec help?

If you’ve just started using Power Apps, you might find it a little overwhelming to create an app from a blank screen. You might have an idea in your head, but perhaps you haven’t fully thought through all the details required to create an app. Or you might be a business owner or IT manager who has never designed or built an application before. Regardless of your background, we’ll take you through the steps to convert your ideas into a fully working solutions using Power Apps.

At Codec, we’ve developed a Power Apps bundle that allows you to work smarter and achieve goals faster. We’ve taken a design thinking approach, focusing on user-centric design which generates creative solutions to solve well-defined problems. Our bundle offering consists of an App in a Day (for up to 9 people), a centre of excellence workshop with IT, an Ideation & Design workshop to empower users to identify and design solutions, a Hackathon to build your first apps, a Proof of Concept (for 3 days, for 3 apps), as well as licenses (max 120) for the first 3 months to start using the developed applications immediately.

Webinar: De-Mystifying Power Apps – Empowering Users to Build Everyday Apps

Join Codec for a dedicated Power Apps webinar on Tuesday 24th Nov at 10am where we aim to de-mystify Power Apps and show you how to get started with using them in your department or organisation. This webinar will feature an interactive demo as well as highlighting a recent customer success story (Fáilte Ireland).

For more information on the Codec Microsoft Power Apps offering, please contact us at (01) 603 4300 or write to us at info@codec.ie