Power Platform Use Cases

Power Platform Use Cases

Most of the time, when I mention Power Platform to people, the first question they ask is “What is it used for? Or what can it do?”, and I’m like durrhh, but I didn’t want to stop at that anymore, so I figured I could just write an article about it.

So,

Power Platform is used for building enterprise driven applications, running automations to cut down redundant tasks, analyze data, build websites and powerful virtual agents(bots).

While what you’ve read on the internet might sound high-level explanation, in this article, we’ll discuss examples of real life use cases of Power platform that you can relate to, as well as the specific tools used in building each of them.

In my introduction to power platform, I discussed power platform use cases briefly, but in this article, I’ll talk about it in specifics: what platform tool can be used to build what.

Now, let’s dig in.

1. A Custom Inventory Tracking App

Tool Used: Power Apps

Use Case: A small business, (picture the retail store or a warehouse you buy goods from often), needs to track inventory levels, that is, knowing how many products are available, to avoid buying too many products than needed (overstocking) or buying less than the quantity needed (understocking).

So, instead of purchasing expensive off-the-shelf software, the business can hire power platform engineers or train their staff to create a custom inventory tracking app using Power Apps.

How It Works:

• Power Apps is used to build a simple app with features like adding new items, updating stock levels, and generating low-stock alerts.

• The app connects to a data source like Excel, SharePoint, or Microsoft Dataverse to store inventory data securely.

• Employees can use the app on their smartphones or tablets to update inventory in real-time as items are sold or received.

• With this App, the business manager can know the exact number of products available in the store, and the one that has to be restocked.

2. An Automated Employee Onboarding Workflows

Tool Used: Power Automate.

Use Case: An HR department of an organization wants to streamline the onboarding process for new employees, which involves multiple repetitive tasks such as sending welcome emails, assigning training sessions, and setting up IT accounts. This helps to reduce manual work for HR staff, ensures consistency in the onboarding process, and speeds up the time it takes for new employees to become productive.

How It Works:

• HR creates an automated workflow using Power Automate.

• When a new employee's details are added to a SharePoint list or Dataverse table, the workflow is triggered.

• The workflow automatically:

  • Send a welcome email with onboarding details.

  • Assigns the employee to a training schedule in Teams.

  • Notifies the IT department to create necessary accounts and grant access to tools.

  • Tracks task completion in a central dashboard.

3. Visualizing Campaign Performance in Power BI

Tool Used: Power BI

Use Case: A marketing team needs to analyze the performance of their campaigns, including metrics like website traffic, lead generation, and conversion rates, to make data-driven decisions. This helps to provide actionable insights to optimize campaigns, saves time by consolidating data from multiple sources into one dashboard, helps demonstrate marketing ROI to stakeholders.

How It Works:

• The team connects Power BI to various data sources, such as Google Analytics, CRM systems, and social media platforms, using built-in connectors.

• They create interactive dashboards to visualize key metrics like:

  • Campaign ROI.

  • Engagement rates by channel (e.g., email, social media).

  • Conversion rates by demographic or region.

• The dashboards update in real-time, giving the team an up-to-date view of campaign performance.

4. IT Support Using Chatbots for Ticket Triaging

Tool Used: Power Virtual Agents

Use Case: An IT department receives numerous support requests daily, many of which are repetitive, such as password resets or FAQs about software. They want to reduce the time spent on these routine queries.

This helps to reduce the workload on IT staff by handling routine queries automatically, improves response times for employees needing assistance and allows IT teams to focus on higher-priority technical issues.

How It Works:

• The IT team uses Power Virtual Agents to create a chatbot that can handle common support queries.

• The chatbot integrates with Microsoft Dataverse or other IT ticketing systems.

• When an employee asks a question, the chatbot can:

  • Provide immediate answers for common issues (e.g., "How do I reset my password?").

  • Log a ticket in the IT system for more complex problems.

  • Route the ticket to the appropriate support team based on the issue type.

Conclusion

There are several other solutions that can be built with the Microsoft power platform tools, but I thought it wise to limit it to one per tool, to avoid information overload.

I hope that by now, you can explain at least three use cases of the power platform.

Got any questions? Or maybe you need me to write out more use cases, please do not hesitate to comment below.

Till I write you again, stay learning.