Velosys

Revolutionizing Small Business Operations: The Power of Microsoft’s Power Platform Over Traditional Software Development

/ Business, Technology / By
Brandon Berndtson
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In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, small companies often face the challenge of optimizing their back-office operations without incurring significant costs or delays. Microsoft’s Power Platform emerges as a game-changer in this scenario, offering a robust, low code or no code solution that transcends the limitations of traditional custom software development. Here at Velosys we always look to leverage Microsoft’s platform to remove the overhead of internal workflows or repetitive tasks to allow custom development time for our client facing projects.

What is Microsoft’s Power Platform?

The Power Platform is a suite of Microsoft applications – Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents – designed to enable businesses to create custom solutions for their unique needs without extensive coding knowledge.

Advantages Over Traditional Software Development

  1. Cost-Effective and Time-Saving: Traditional custom software development can be a costly and time-consuming endeavor, especially for small businesses. The Power Platform, on the other hand, significantly reduces development costs and time, allowing businesses to deploy solutions rapidly.
  2. Ease of Use: With its intuitive interface and drag-and-drop features, the Power Platform democratizes app development. Employees with minimal coding experience can build and modify applications, breaking the dependency on specialized IT skills.
  3. Scalability and Flexibility: As small businesses grow, their software needs change. The Power Platform offers scalable solutions that can be easily adapted to evolving business requirements, unlike traditional software which might need extensive redevelopment.
  4. Integration and Connectivity: The Power Platform seamlessly integrates with a wide range of Microsoft products and third-party services, ensuring smooth data flow between different applications and systems.
  5. Empowering Decision Making: Through Power BI, companies gain access to powerful analytics and data visualization tools, enabling them to make informed decisions based on real-time data insights.

Real-World Impact for Small Businesses

Case Study: Streamlining Data Management and Analytics in a Retail Business Background Consider a small to medium-sized retail business that operates both online and offline stores. The company uses different systems for its sales (e-commerce platform), inventory management (inventory tracking software), and customer relationship management (CRM). Each of these systems generates vast amounts of data, but the lack of integration makes it challenging to get a unified view of business performance.

Challenge: The primary challenge is to consolidate data from these disparate systems to enable comprehensive analysis and make data-driven decisions. The business needs to understand sales trends, inventory levels, and customer preferences across all channels.

Solution with Power Platform

    1. Creating Data Flows in Power Platform:
      • The business sets up data flows within Power Apps, part of the Power Platform suite.
      • Data flows are configured to extract data from the e-commerce platform, inventory management system, and CRM software. This can be achieved through direct connectors available in Power Platform or through APIs if custom connections are required.
    2. Aggregating Data in Microsoft Dataverse:
      • Extracted data from different sources is then aggregated and transformed as needed using Power Query, a tool integrated into the data flows.
      • This cleansed and transformed data is stored in Microsoft Dataverse, a scalable and secure data storage solution within Power Platform.
    3. Importing Data into Power BI:
      • With the data now available in the Dataverse, it’s easily connected to Power BI.
      • Power BI is used to create interactive dashboards and reports, offering insights into sales performance, inventory levels, and customer buying patterns.
      • These reports can be shared across the organization, providing departments like sales, marketing, and inventory management with real-time data insights.

Outcome

  • The retail business now enjoys a streamlined process for data integration and analysis.
  • Decision-makers get a 360-degree view of the business operations, leading to more informed strategies.
  • The process reduces manual data handling, saves time, and significantly improves data accuracy.

For small businesses, the Microsoft Power Platform offers a transformative opportunity. By leveraging its low code or no code solutions, these businesses can not only save on development costs and time but also achieve a level of efficiency and agility that was previously attainable only by larger enterprises with deeper pockets.