Smooth business operations are dependent on a lot of factors such as materials, product finishing, and customer satisfaction. No matter what the industry, there will always have room for improvement. Smooth business operations are especially important in the logistics industry, given their direct relationship with the customer experience and service quality.
If you want to achieve your operational goals, automation is a good first step. A smart business organization should incorporate multiple elements like the Internet of Things, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to improve efficiency. Luckily, Microsoft can help you automate and optimize your business’ supply chain to make production processes more efficient.
If you want to learn more about how much of an efficient tool Microsoft Power Automate is and how it can be used for logistics process automation, keep reading.
What is Microsoft Power Automate?
Logistics is a resource-exhaustive business that utilizes a great chunk of both manual efforts and operational costs. Smart solutions like process automation can drastically decrease the amount of manual effort required and the costs incurred as well.
Microsoft Power Automate, previously known as Flow, can help you with process automation. The software is built to automate the flow of business processes. It is a cloud-based service that is used to automate workflows. The software employs powerful robotic process automation and is helping revolutionize the course of logistics process automation by providing efficient solutions to complex problems.
The platform is being leveraged by multiple industries to minimize operational costs, increase workforce productivity, and improve the efficiency of business processes. The best part is that it is very easy to use given that there isn’t a need for any experience or training.
How Will Microsoft Power Automate Help You?
Microsoft Power Automate can boost the productivity of your business processes by a significant margin with its multiple workflow automation options. Power Automate enables you to make ‘flows,’ which are interconnected items in a defined sequence. These may be apps, tasks, or even other flows.
Users may create a Desktop Flow that will enable logistics process automation for users, which are processed on the desktop or over the web. Cloud Flow is another useful feature that can be used to automate routine tasks or create scheduled flows.
In contrast with these two, Business Flows act as a user guide to help users understand the software. With Microsoft Power Automate, you can achieve a streamlined process flow with a consistent user experience throughout all business levels.
Other Flow Types
Using Power Automate, you can create several flow types. These include the following:
- Button Flows: These are instant flows to run a particular task repetitively at just a tap of a button
- Scheduled Flows: These are flow charts that automate the performance of multiple tasks at a certain date and time specified in the system
- Automated Flows: These flows allow you to create a flow chart right from scratch, enabling you to perform multiple tasks automatically at the occurrence of a predefined event
- Approval Flows: The approval workflows add the action “Approvals – Add an Approval” to any of the flows made
- UI Flows: These combine robotic process automation capabilities with Power Automate to automate recurring tasks. Automated flows can be created for web apps, and desktops with UI flows
How Will Businesses Benefit From Using Power Automate?
A study by Forrester claims that almost 122580 hours can be saved if organizations opt for business process automation. This is only one of the many benefits of process automation, but how can Microsoft Power Automate help your logistics company? Here are a few ways:
Automation and Streamlining of Routine Activities
Logistics companies have various operational tasks lined up each morning that need to get done. These items often tend to take a significant amount of time, which may leave you with little to no time to focus on other important items. Automation is a solution for this.
Power Automate will streamline your company’s daily or weekly routine tasks, which consume most of your time, to help you focus more on critical business operations with more dedication. You can create logistic process automation workflows for your tasks using the available templates. You can also create one of your own from scratch and connect it to applications of your choice. The application you connect to will automatically perform the said task, and you won’t have to perform it manually each day.
Boost Productivity
The main purpose of Microsoft Power Automate is to help save time and enhance the productivity of your workforce. Companies can use Microsoft Power Automate to optimize their workflows and attain efficiency in their operations.
Many tasks can be completed automatically using automated workflows, as per the predefined triggers (which are predefined events on whose occurrence a subsequent action takes place) occurring as a result of another task or event. The software also enables you to automate large-scale systems and complicated workflows using the ‘Logic apps’ feature in addition to regular individual tasks.
Quick Accessibility to Business Data
You can create automated workflows that are linked with important business applications and systems for file synchronization, rapid data collection, and alert enablement. You can also connect Microsoft Power Automate with all your applications and software systems from where data can also be collected and analyzed, along with report generation.
Ease of Integration with Other Applications
Power Automate is a tool based on triggers, which allows workflow integration with multiple business apps using connectors. Connectors are applications that can be connected in Power Automate flows. They help you integrate the workflows in various internal and external apps, automating many business processes.
Some of the most popular connectors are Office 365, Slack, Dropbox, Google Drive, Salesforce, Twitter, GitHub, and Mail Chimp. These platforms can also create customized connectors by defining APIs to the apps you wish to connect them with.
Who is Using Power Automate?
Healthcare Industry
The healthcare industry involves a lot of paperwork. A lot of information is typically collected and stored in paper forms right from patient registration, which makes it challenging to store and find the information timely. However, since the adoption of cloud-based technologies in the healthcare industry, like the Internet of Things and Robotic Process Automation (RPA), their entire way of working has transformed.
Power Automate has delivered multiple benefits to the healthcare industry, including automating the collection and storage of patient test results, transferring patient data in the electronic health record system, processes of patient support and helpdesk, patient registration, admission, and discharge. The healthcare staff can also onboard and are provided with work schedules through automated systems. A workflow for validation and approvals of patient documents can also be also developed, in addition to automating billing, claims, and user authorization.
Manufacturing Industry
Process automation has significant importance in the manufacturing industry as well. It has played a significant role in purchasing, selling, managing inventory, and other activities related to delivery. The Microsoft Power Platform can use its advanced capabilities to accelerate the efficacy of manufacturing units while reducing the resources being used. It can also improve the response time, quality, and workflow altogether.
Moreover, other operational activities like processing company documents and data, streamlining order management and production processes, providing prompt customer support, automating the tracking of distribution and logistics are also some of the uses of Power Automate in the industry.
Retail Industry
The retail industry has undergone massive transformation ever since they have started leveraging the digital landscape. Customers now receive exceptional experience with the use of Artificial Intelligence, POS software solutions, ERP systems, and RPA retailers. Retailers enabled with automation technologies gain particular benefits by streamlining the customer service activities and business processes.
Power Automate offers high-level automation that will help retail businesses optimize their processes, reduce labor hours, inventory challenges, and complex data. In addition to these, automated product return process, management of sales, shipping and inventories, staff onboarding and offboarding, payrolls, product promotions, sales analytics, and loyalty management, inventory control, and processing real-time information across the POS systems are some more benefits that the retail industry can reap using this.
Finance Industry
Process automation is considered a lucky charm in the finance and banking sector. Power Automate is being used in the industry to make their processes more resource-efficient, help process bottlenecks and minimize data-related errors.
Moreover, it can also help transform the core financial sector operations like customer data management, business processes, business compliance application, processing accounts payable, rapid customer validation, capturing and processing credit card applications, and accounting formalities.
Conclusion
Microsoft Power Automate is a one-stop solution for all your logistics process automation needs that will help you optimize and streamline your business processes smartly. Your supply chain will help achieve organizational goals faster by contributing more towards it.
However, if automation sounds scary to you, don’t worry! At Integratz, we’re committed to making complex IT solutions easy for you. So, our team can help your logistics company implement process automation easily. If that’s what you’re looking for, schedule a meeting today.
References:
https://dynamics.microsoft.com/en-us/supply-chain-management/overview/
https://www.saglobal.com/en-us/business-solutions/enterprise-erp-applications/supply-chain-management.html
https://www.avantiico.com/microsoft-dynamics-365/dynamics-365-for-supply-chain-management/
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