January 14, 2021 Business Process Automation with Microsoft 365 Introduction For organizations to keep pace with rapid technological changes and advancements, it is crucial for them to enhance their capabilities and efficiencies by streamlining business processes. Outdated systems lead to poor development capabilities which acts as a barrier to innovation. Moreover, businesses need to be agile and super-competent to best serve their customers. All this demands better organization of personnel and processes through workflow automation which further helps in alleviating operational costs. Business Process Automation (BPA) BPA is a way of optimizing business operations and automating time-intensive and repetitive tasks to free up your employees to pursue intellectual roles that require critical thinking skills. To support BPA, business process automation software is used to modernize businesses today. Some of the common business processes that you can easily automate using BPA are document management, financial accounting, email marketing campaigns, payment reminders, inventory management, HR processes like document review and approval, management of employee requests, etc. Now, let’s learn how BPA benefits an organization by helping it to stay ahead of the curve – Better allocation of workforce and reorganization of business structureReduction in cost due to fewer hiring of people as by minimizing workforce, an organization can have the same level of output.Improved quality of work as managers can spend more time on employees, training and supervising them on valuable tasks.Reduction in human errors as automation ensures consistency and minimizes outages.Improved collaboration by ensuring proper flow of information, tracking project processes, updating or alerting teams about any task or process changes.Better customer support by automatic creation of tickets for quick handling of customer requests or queries. How M365 is an ideal automation solution Microsoft 365 created a paradigm shift toward business productivity for business process automation by offering a robust set of no-code solutions. The BPA solutions Microsoft 365 provides to streamline business processes are Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive for Business, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI. With Microsoft 365, you can collect and manage data and files, automate complex multi-stage processes, automate data exchange and synchronize files, connect to and integrate other sources and services, create custom apps that can interact with data in SharePoint elements, and more. So, if you adopt Microsoft 365 as a platform, you can automate your business workflows in 7 ways: 1. Capture Data: You can develop complex forms in Power Apps without having to write a code using Microsoft 365. 2. Business Logic: You can easily configure business logic directly in Power Apps for creating efficient forms. 3. Workflow: Power Automate can trigger events from within Microsoft 365, capture information, parse it, and then route it to a person, department, or where it needs to go. 4. Relevant and Secure Data Storage: Not just SharePoint but workflows can be triggered from other relevant and easy interfaces such as OneDrive after uploading a document. 5. Notifications and Task Creation: It allows the automatic creation of tasks and notifying users by sending reminders and alerts to indicate assigned tasks waiting in the queue. 6. Dashboarding and Management Views: Custom views can be configured for each user using SharePoint to show work in progress through which it is easy to monitor any bottlenecks. 7. Reporting and KPIs: Power BI is used for reporting and data visualizations in real-time to be shared with teams which empowers them to make data-based decisions if any abnormality is detected. Automate MS Teams using TeamsHub.io MS Teams, a subset of Microsoft 365, is a must-have collaboration platform for every organization today. We know that it is an integrated ecosystem of many useful tools and apps such as SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, Yammer, and more. Hence, to keep Teams environment in control that has thousands of users, efficient governance around it can’t be neglected. Managing user rights and access, user requests, teams lifecycle, naming and classification, data security, notifications, etc. are, both, complicated and tedious for an administrator. Hence, it is imperative to automate business processes and workflows to allow a seamless collaboration across MS Teams platform. As such, TeamsHub.io, an automation software, extends Microsoft Teams’ capabilities to enhance your business productivity by streamlining governance for an enriching user experience. With a user-friendly and unified interface, TemsHub.io provides you a comprehensive and no-code solution for all your business collaboration needs. If you want to learn more about TeamsHub.io, please visit https://teamshub.io or contact sales@cyclotrongroup.com to request a demo