Office process automation

These days, more than ever, we wanted some of the activities carried out even at home to be automated. Working from home is not easy, and the need for some of our office activities to be automated has become more acute.

Even if we work from home, we still have a series of repetitive or time-consuming jobs (reading emails, extracting data from emails, responding to emails, obtaining approvals, preparing reports). Statistics say that a third of work time is spent on repetitive and time-consuming activities.

When we talk about automation, our thoughts run more towards RPA - Robotic Process Automation, but the purpose of this article is not to reach this level. You don't have to be a big company to implement a Microsoft 365 solution to which you can add Power Platform components: Power Apps, Power BI, Power Automate and, why not, Power Virtual Agents.

With Office 365 we have become accustomed to having access to the Office application package (the Office 365 version benefits from permanent updates with the latest news, compared to the classic Office 2019/2016 / etc. licensing), to the Exchange mail server, at SharePoint sites, storing OneDrive, creating Forms, or communicating through Teams. Along with these applications, I think we should look more often at Power Apps and Power Automate (formerly Power Flow).

Sharing the "power" of these applications helps us realize ourselves, without using code (but with support in access management), or extracting data from email and populating a list, or creating an approval flow or creating a mobile application list management. These lists are nothing more than our data (contacts with all their details, management elements, results from the collection forms) that we are used to managing in Excel, but which can be better shared and used in a SharePoint intranet. With Power Platform solutions we can build and customize applications for data collection, creating and modifying existing data, extracting, analyzing and sharing reports.

Until a replacement of the traditional way of working, let's use technology to improve the way of working, increase productivity and, why not, reduce costs.