Analyze the current business process
If you're making your first app with Power Apps, consider your business, and the work that you and your team do daily. Then, identify a business problem that you're currently using a manual process to solve. Then you can even ask Copilot to help you pick the right Power Platform solution, based on your problem.
Potential use cases for automation are gaps, complaints, or inefficiencies that exist in your current work environment. Processes that still require paper or email, and processes that require you to manually move data from one place to another (from an email to a database or from one spreadsheet to another), are likely candidates for solving with an app.
Knowing how the app that you have in mind benefits your colleagues and managers is important, especially when you're asking for cooperation when making or using the apps. The following list describes the types of issues that the platform can solve:
Availability - Accessing apps anytime, anywhere.
Mobility - Allowing people to work with an app while on the move.
Consolidation - Gathering data in a more automated way to minimize manual consolidation.
Training - Getting people up to date and tracking their training results and certifications.
Democratization - Enhancing the ability to self-solve problems within the department or section.
Inclusion - Reducing friction for employees who have different work environments from other employees (such as remote workers or people with disabilities).
Efficiency - Reducing time that's required for getting the desired outcome, reducing unnecessary steps.
Productivity - Increasing the throughput of a process.
Timeliness - Increasing the speed of end-to-end collaboration among different stakeholders.
Scalability - Allowing more throughput.
Analysis - Gathering required extra information and storing it in a way that allows for easier analysis.
Reporting - Enabling faster or more complete reporting to management.
Security - Storing and working with data in a more secure way.
Compliance - Solving issues around handling personal information, meeting legal or accounting requirements.
Sustainability - Reducing waste (such as paper and electricity) and pollution.
Identify key contributors
Evaluate everyone who contributes to this process, including people in your department and other departments who work together on this problem. Familiarize yourself with what they do in context of the business problem that's being solved.
When you start documenting the business process, you want to rely on these people to help you understand each step. You most likely learn along the way, and you might need to add new people to your project team to provide their perspectives.
In this module's example scenario, key contributors have already been identified, as shown in the following screenshot.
Example: The cost of the current gear service process
In the scenario with the scuba shop's service department, you have already analyzed the cost of the current gear service process. As a result, you've discovered that:
It takes the sales staff roughly 15 minutes to check in a service customer. Each sales representative captures an average of six customers each day for gear service. The average cost of each salesperson is roughly USD 26.00 each hour.
(4 sales members x 6 requests) 24 service requests each day equals \$156 daily to create these service requests manually, or \$1,092 each week.
52 weeks x \$1,092 = \$56,784 a year
Tom and Steve in the service department spend, on average, one hour servicing each piece of gear. Due to the manual nature of service order intake, they can only complete six service orders each per day, even though they work nine hours a day.
Because the service team is only able to complete 12 service orders a day, but get an average of 24, they're backlogged in orders. As a result, customers have taken their business elsewhere or the team has had to outsource some of the service orders to competing dive shops in the area.
The average revenue for each service transaction is \$125, so the dive shop's service daily potential revenue is \$3,000.
Tom and Steve's average cost is \$30 each hour, which equals \$540 per workday.
The dive shop spends an average of $74 in parts daily to service the gear.
The total cost of service to the shop is $770 per day.
If the shop only completes 12 service orders each day, then the revenue for the day is \$1,500 or \$546,000 a year minus \$280,280 for the cost of parts and labor. This calculation equals a \$265,720 profit for the shop.
Now imagine deploying an app from Power Apps that would minimize the cost of entering orders into the system while giving the service team members more time to fulfill more orders. If you cut the costs on intake by half (taking 7.5 minutes to capture what's needed and collect pictures and a customer signature, all from one device), then the same solution brings a centralized and streamlined system that Tom and Steve can follow to increase the number of orders that they can fulfill daily to eight each.
Those numbers would resemble the following example estimation:
New cost: (\$78 for data entry, \$770 for the service team, \$98 for service parts) \$344,344 annually, but the revenue goes to \$728,000 for a profit of \$383,656.
\$383,656 - \$265,720 = \$117,936 per year is the potential cost of doing nothing
How Copilot can help
If you take the discoveries from the scenario above and use the Ask Copilot function in Bing AI or Copilot in Windows you can get a fast recommendation for a Power Platform solution. Copilot was made to help you jump start your problem solving!
You can try out Copilot with our example above by prompting something along the lines of this:
"I'm trying to create a Microsoft Power Platform solution to automate processes for my scuba shop's service department. I've already analyzed the cost of the current gear service process. As a result, I've discovered that: [and paste in the bullets from our example above]. How can I use the Power Platform to help me with this problem?"
Within seconds, Copilot will give you some recommendations for how you can use the Power Platform to automate your service requests, manage your service orders, track revenue and forecasts, manage parts and procurement, analyze profitability, and even gauge customer satisfaction and retention.
Even if you're experienced in using the Power Platform, using Copilot can quickly help get you on the track to a solution to your problem.
Recommended content
For more information, see the following resources: