How do you use Microsoft Power Automate in your work?

[JonL]

Hey Power Automate Community!

We are wondering, Do you use Power Automate at work? In production? 

If so, tell us a bit about it! Tell us how you use the flows, what they help achieve, and if they help make life easier!

Thanks!

- Jon

[darkestpage]

Hello Jon,

We are using Power Platform to automate most of our processes to reduce the rather laborious manual tasks such as creating documents, generating reports, converting the documents from one format to another, etc. Our business processes earlier were quite rigid due to involvement of a lot of manual office activities, however, with Power Platform we have managed to bring some flexibility.

There are some hurdles such as onboarding and educating people in the use of Power Platform, which sometimes become the impeding factor.

Regards,

Kedar

[PlasticArmyMan]

I am just going to assume that spelling errors make up a lot of the failed flows for this one...

[isaac1]

I partially tend to agree with this post. I think in my opinion it sounds to me from reading different post that those who think that flows is just as good as anything else and don't really get what he is saying, have probably never used SSIS or SQL agent / other Microsoft ETL/server/scheduler/batch jobs..... some of the obvious flows predecessors and alternatives. If you've never used those things, you don't have a gold comparative standard as reference, and you don't know how good to expect it, so it's hard to understand someone saying this thing is not nearly as good...

[stevenls]

We do the same thing by triggering the sign process when a document is placed in a folder (we do it for invoice sign off).  I have another flow that detects when the agreement is signed, it renames the file and puts it in an approved folder and then goes and deletes the original from the pending folder.

[hemrhk]

https://365stack.in/index.php/category/power-automate/ 

Most of the use cases mentioned in the above site are implemented in production and working fine.

[patycmt]

Hello everyone:

Power Automate helps us save too much time on our repetitive work tasks. In our company we are part of the education sector, and we have automated use cases such as the following:
• Management of registration documents
• Portfolio management
• Weekly sending of institutional agenda
• Notification or reports of student academic status• Invitations to institutional events.
Thank you.

Elena Giraldo

[jnernst]

I work at Eastern Illinois University as a student worker. I am the only one that knows how it works, along with Power Apps and it comes in handy, big time!

We use it to push out emails, automate the menial work in Active Directory, it makes SharePoint into a SUPER useful tool.

While I did get angry a few time, whilst figuring it out, it has made a lot of the staff here happier!

Thanks all,

Josh

[stevenls]

What sort of work in AD, I was looking to see if there are ways to leverage some group membership when a user department or production changes, just can't see if there is a way to manipulate memberships that way.

[LimeLeaf]

Hi @JonL,

we are using power automate and power apps since the beginning of 2021 in our organisation.
Since then the quantity of widly used produtiv power automate processes almost doubled every half year for us.
We are pretty amazed how we can push the digitalization in our organisation with the tools of the power platform.

How we use power automate...

• Free us from paperbased work - by using multiple approval flows combined with MS Forms, SP Lists and the population of word documents
• Create, share, copy and manage sharepoint libraries/documents/folder - by using sharepoint capabilties of power automate
• Managing mails in share mailboxes to process mail attachments in multiple ways (e.g. by checking if a certain attachment is already in a sharepoint library) 
• Create, delete, change items in SP Lists - to make life easier to the users of SP Lists as collabaration tool or even to track certain approval processes or other work
• Export data from Dataverse tables filled by Power Apps to create excel report files
• Call REST APIs outside from our organisation or even provide an API endpoint to be called from inside of our organisation - with further processing in power automate
• Managing MS Planner Task - by creating tasks email content or even move tasks if they reach a certain state

Even if we already implemented and developed a lot of productiv power automate flows and a hand full of apps we still think we are just scratching on surface of power automate. The power platform already has a huge impact on our organisation due to the speed of delivering solutions to the process owners. It helps us to free our employees from boring repetetive tasks. We now to start implementing power automate desktop to even push this hole topic further.

But we also still see some problems in regards to administration topics and power automate process owning that we face - here we think Microsoft should extend it's efforts a bit. 🙂

[jmarinuk]

Good day.  I know this is an old post but I'm pretty new here.

The main use for Power Automate so far is with a document approval process.  I've set up dynamic buttons on the lists so that users can trigger a review process if necessary.  The buttons will change function based on the status of the approval process.  It'll also schedule reviews based on due dates.

That's the simple explanation.  The result is that we have gone from a fully manual approval process to a simpler, almost fully automated process.

[David-]

One of the most common Power Automate flows I create is for SharePoint lists where the process owner wants reminders sent based on a date field. I use a scheduled flow to run each day and get all of the items in the list where the trigger date is equal to today and then send out the reminders based on the requirements of the project.

This works great so far. I include a count feature to count how many messages are sent, and then each day the process owner gets notified of how many notifications went out, which also serves to catch an issues with the workflow. For example:

Attention:

The Canada Contract Pricing escalation notifications workflow has run May 25, 2022. The workflow runs on the Canada Contract Pricing site. It has sent the following number of notifications:

• Escalation Date 1: 0
• Escalation Date 2: 0
• Escalation Date 3: 0
• Escalation Date 4: 0

Regards,
North America IT