White Paper

The Power Platform Discover the art of the possible in digital transformation

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The : Discover the art of the possible in digital transformation

By Paul Saxton, Chief Technology Officer, DXC Technology UK and Ireland, Microsoft Business Applications

If you’ve not recently taken a look at Microsoft’s Power Platform, then perhaps you should. It’s all too easy to over-use words like ‘revolutionary’—but Microsoft’s Power Platform really does revolutionise what it’s possible for organisations to achieve in terms of digitalisation and process automation. Quickly. Simply. Safely. And at a lower cost than you might imagine. So what is Microsoft’s Power Platform? And what does it do?

At DXC, we see Microsoft’s Power Platform as an innovation platform: a means of reducing the barriers to the creative development of productivity-enhancing software.

It brings power to the people by providing organisations with the ability to solve business problems that were previously seen as prohibitively expensive. And it delivers the ability to automate processes and integrate disparate systems—and with enterprise-level data governance and control.

• Does your organisation have manual processes which cost a lot to run, yet which are important—or even mission-critical—and yet which cannot be readily or cost-effectively automated through conventional means?

• Would your organisation benefit from having existing business processes supplemented by additional data from new data sources—time-stamped digital photographs, say? With the • And would your organisation benefit from low-cost yet sophisticated analytics or Microsoft Power other data derived from pulling together information from two or more enterprise Platform there’s no systems—ERP, CRM and a specialist line-of-business system, say? more ‘spreadsheet hell’; no more multiple versions of the truth; Deployed agilely, rapidly, and at low cost no more unmaintainable In each case, Microsoft’s Power Platform is the low-cost and flexible development user-developed systems platform of choice, delivering enterprise-level control and governance, combined with built by long-departed simple robust software developed and deployed agilely, rapidly, and at low cost. employees. Moreover, unlike user-developed systems based on spreadsheets and desktop databases, Microsoft’s Power Platform can scale, accessing enterprise-level Active Directory-powered data sources.

Meaning that organisations can build reliable and robust tools that are properly documented, linked to live enterprise-level data, and straightforward to extend and maintain. No more ‘spreadsheet hell’; no more multiple versions of the truth; no more unmaintainable user-developed systems built by long-departed employees.

Microsoft’s Power Platform: it’s the future of rapid-rollout low-code deployment—available today.

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Power Apps in action—how real customers have used Microsoft’s Power Platform

What could Microsoft’s Power Platform do for your business? The easiest way to see the potential of Microsoft’s Power Platform is to look at how other organisations have deployed it.

Case study

At renewable energy firm Mainstream Renewable Power, the world’s leading independent developer of utility-scale wind and solar power assets, two core Dynamics 365 business processes were taking a considerable length of time— up to 35 minutes to set up a new customer, and 1½ hours (for two people) to set up a new legal entity.

No longer: Microsoft’s Power Platform entirely automated both processes. A Power App extracts the relevant data into a single page; Power Automate robotically executes the process through Robotic Process Automation, and notifies users with an email once it is complete; while Power BI carries out analytics on the process, and creates alerts.

Case study

Genus, a world-leading animal genetics company, was experiencing difficulty in onboarding new employees. The problem? Complex back-end systems, which slowed down Genus’ HR professionals, combined with the need to manually format and validate employee-derived information prior to entry.

The solution: a self-service data entry application created with Microsoft’s Power Platform, used by employees themselves, which dramatically reduced the involvement required from Genus’ HR professionals.

Case study

An international distributor of building materials to trade customers, Grafton Group required a robust, secure, and fool-proof way to request financial transactions (specifically currency exchange) between individual business units within the group.

The solution: Microsoft’s Power Platform, which allowed the creation of a Power App application offering full control of the validation process from within the app, enabling a robust auditable solution providing a consolidated view of all interactions with partners, employees, customers and suppliers.

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Case study

Managing 775 miles of coastline, 635,000 acres of land, and over 500 historic sites, the 4.2 million-member National Trust is a 120-year-old conservation charity dedicated to preserving Britain’s heritage. A strategic internal metric is the Trust’s Conservation Performance Indicator, a property-by-property insight into a property’s condition and conservation needs. Built up on Excel spreadsheets, many of them filled-in by volunteers, the spreadsheet-based system was time-consuming and laborious, providing no easy way to look back through performance history and track trends.

To the rescue: Microsoft’s Power Platform, with data entry into a tablet-based Power App, requiring employees to simply enter CPI scores into pre-populated templates, together with Microsoft Power BI integration for data visualisation and interrogation, and providing Azure SQL interoperability. The result has been a significant increase in efficiency, combined with CPI data that was both more complete and more internally consistent, as well as providing data access and insight that was close to real-time.

Case study

Transport for the North is England’s first sub-national transport body, formed to transform the transport system across the north of England, and provide the infrastructure needed to drive economic growth. With central government mandating that the new authority be operational within a matter of months, time was of the essence. One immediate priority: a system, linked to the authority’s 365 ERP system, to capture and monitor employees’ working hours, in order to support its flexible working initiative.

The solution: a Microsoft Power Platform-based digital flexitime employee timesheet, embedded within the core HR solution so that it appeared as a seamless part of that platform, and with data visualisation capabilities delivered through a Power BI dashboard. The application required an extensive amount of configurable, complex logic in order to validate behaviour and implement rules—rules which special administration screens provided a capability for amending and adapting over time, providing a fully future- proofed flexitime platform.

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What is Microsoft’s Power Platform? Low-code development explained

Microsoft’s Power Platform is a suite—but also a suite that adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Individual components of the Power Platform can be connected together, but also connected to Office 365, Dynamics 365, Azure, and hundreds of other apps and end-to-end business solutions.

Connect your apps to hundreds of data sources, too, using a library of more than 260 connectors and Microsoft’s Power Platform Common Data Service—bringing your data together to deliver a single source of truth while you modernise processes as well as customise and extend Office 365, Dynamics 365, and Azure native capabilities.

The ROI of Microsoft’s Power Platform?

According to Forrester Consulting, a typical organisation deploying it can expect a 188% ROI over three years, a 74% reduction in app development costs, and a 3.2 hours/week average improvement in line-of-business employee productivity. (Source: The Total Economic Impact™ of Power Apps, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting, March 2020.)

Microsoft Power Platform

The low-code platform that spans Office 365, Azure, Dynamics 365 and standalone applications

Power BI Power Apps Power Automate Power Virtual Agents Business analytics Application development Process automation Intelligent virtual agents

Data Common AI Builder connectors Data Service

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Power BI: Your organisation can make better-informed, confident business decisions when data-driven insights can be put into everyone’s hands. Doing that is the job of Power BI, a tool that’s intuitively obvious to experienced Excel users, yet which provides a seamless analytics platform that scales from individuals to the organisation as a whole. Accompanied by hundreds of data visualisations, built-in AI Power BI capabilities, tight Excel integration, and pre-built and custom data connectors, Power BI turns information into insights. Business analytics

Power Apps: Rapidly building low-code apps that modernise processes and solve tough challenges, Power Apps empowers users—not IT professionals—to start building and launching apps right away using pre-built templates, drag-and-drop simplicity, and quick deployment techniques. If required, professional developers can provide extensibility via seamless connectivity to Azure Functions and custom connectors to proprietary or on-premises systems. Power Apps Application development

Power Automate: By streamlining repetitive tasks and paperless processes with Power Automate, organisations and teams can build time-saving workflows into everything from individual tasks to large-scale systems, achieving seamless integration using hundreds of pre-built connectors. Secure workflows, a no-code guided experience, and cloud-based data loss prevention, identity, Power Automate and access management services—Power Automate is a ready-to-use robotic process automation solution, boosting productivity and freeing teams to focus Process automation more on what really matters to your business.

Power Virtual Agents: Chatbots are the future, enabling organisations, teams and individuals to self-serve and benefit from guided decision-making. With Power Virtual Agents, it’s easy to build chatbots to engage conversationally with both employees, customers and suppliers—with no coding required. A guided, no-code graphical interface coupled to hundreds of pre-built connectors makes building a chatbot Power Virtual Agents simplicity itself, while chatbot performance can be monitored and refined through AI and data-driven insights available in an easy-to-read dashboard. Intelligent virtual agents

AI Builder: An adjunct to the regular Power Platform suite, AI Builder enhances your organisation’s apps and business processes with AI that’s easy to build and configure from within Power Apps. Move into the world of hyper-automation and AI-driven analytics, simplifying tasks such as prediction, form processing, object detection, category classification and entity extraction, via a simple, intuitive interface. As with AI Builder the rest of Microsoft’s Power Platform, benefit from pre-built AI scenarios including key phrase extraction, language detection, sentiment analysis, text recognition, Task simplification a business card reader, and entity extraction.

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The Common Data Service and the Common Data Model—the digital data underpinnings of Microsoft’s Power Platform

Powering the rapid deployment and low-code capabilities of Microsoft’s Power Platform are two powerful data paradigms.

The Common Data Model is a cross-industry multiple-vendor initiative that provides a shared data language for business and analytical applications to use.

The Common Data Model metadata system makes it possible for data and its meaning to be shared across applications and business processes such as Microsoft Power Apps, Power BI, Dynamics 365, and Azure.

Integration Common Data Service:

What’s in the box Storage

Data

Logic

Security

API

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In addition to the metadata system, the Common Data Model includes a set of standardised, extensible data schemas that Microsoft and its partners have published. This collection of predefined schemas includes entities, attributes, semantic metadata, and relationships. The schemas represent commonly-used concepts and activities, such as Account and Campaign, to simplify the creation, aggregation, and analysis of data.

Meanwhile the Common Data Service lets you securely store and manage data that’s used by business applications. Data within the Common Data Service is stored within a set of ‘entities’—a set of records used to store data, similar to how a table stores data within a database.

The Common Data Service includes a base set of standard entities that cover typical scenarios, but you can also create custom entities specific to your organisation and populate them with data using Power Query. App makers can then use Power Apps to build rich applications using this data, as well as quickly and safely carry out tasks such as adding new data columns without requiring SQL skills.

Powerfully, Microsoft has also created industry-specific templates using the Common Data Model and Common Data Service—making it easy to build out Power Platform applications that fit the typical needs of particular industries.

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Microsoft’s Power Platform: licensing and costs

Power Apps Power Automate

Run single apps: run applications around a single business Per user plan: Allow individual users to create unlimited flows scenario for an individual user. based on their unique needs

Run single apps for $10 per user/app/month $15 per user/month

Run unlimited apps: run unlimited applications for multiple Per user plan with attended robotic process automation: Allow business scenarios individual users to create unlimited flows, plus automate legacy applications through robotic process automation and AI Run unlimited apps for $40 per user/month $40 per user/month

Power BI Pro Power Virtual Agents

Create and maintain intelligent chatbots without Power BI Pro: $9.99 per user/month having to code • Self-service and modern BI in the cloud $1,000 per month for 2,000 sessions • Collaboration, publishing, sharing, and ad-hoc analysis (A session begins when a user topic is triggered and ends when • Fully managed by Microsoft one of these conditions is met: Either the user’s questions are answered, or the conversation exceeds 60 minutes or 100 turns.)

Power BI Premium AI Builder

Power BI Premium: $4,995 per month per dedicated cloud Add AI Builder to your existing Power Apps plan for $500 per compute and storage resource with annual subscription unit/month

• Enterprise BI, advanced analytics, big data analytics, (Each AI Builder add-on unit is a pack of 1 million service credits cloud and on-premises reporting pooled at the tenant level.)

• Advanced administration and deployment controls

• Dedicated cloud compute and storage resources

• Allows any user to consume Power BI content 9 White Paper

Want to find out more?

Please call the DXC Microsoft Business Applications Practice on +44 (0)8455 441 441 or email [email protected]

UK Head Office

DXC Technology Microsoft Business Applications Practice (eBECS Ltd) Manor Offices, Old Road, Chesterfield, Derbyshire S40 3QT United Kingdom

About DXC Technology

DXC Technology, the world’s leading independent, end-to-end IT services company, manages and modernises mission-critical systems, integrating them with new digital solutions to produce better business outcomes. The company’s global reach and talent, innovation platforms, technology independence and extensive partner network enable more than 6,000 private- and public-sector clients in 70 countries to thrive on change. For more information, visit www.dxc.technology.

www.dxc.technology © 2020 DXC Technology Company. All rights reserved. June 2020