6 Top Use Cases of Microsoft Power Apps

Organisations today need to constantly adapt to new technology and digital advancements in order to remain competitive. Microsoft’s Power Platform offers organisations an easier way to stay ahead with the power of low code/no code development. Power Platform is made of up five components; Power Apps, Power Automate, Power Pages, Power BI, and Power Virtual Agents. Named a leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Low-Code Application Platform, Power Apps enables business users to innovate and develop simple business applications faster without the need for coding knowledge. These applications can help organisations accelerate growth or time-to-market and optimise business processes.

For today's article, we will focus on Power Apps. Designed to remove the heavy lifting associated with application development and empower citizen developers, Power Apps also works for professional developers who can use Power Apps to take care of the basics while focusing on more complex functionality or features. Using this type of development can eliminate the long build process for a new business application and allow organisations to focus more time on important value-added business tasks.

With so many possibilities for what Power Apps can help businesses achieve, often it can be hard to know where to start. Below we have compiled some of the top common use cases of Power Apps to show just how easily it can be applied.

Employee Onboarding App

One top use of Microsoft’s Power Apps is for employee onboarding. Any HR department can use an onboarding application to automate the onboarding process with a number of features that can be set up within a Power App, such as adding new employees, assigning tasks, reminders, attendance management, and providing an onboarding progress screen. An onboarding app can help HR ensure that the proper onboarding procedures are outlined and followed by all new staff more easily. It also reduces the risk of human error, for example, a busy HR team member forgetting one onboarding step with an employee. It can also reduce paperwork with all information stored within the app.

Service Request App

Another common use of Microsoft’s Power Apps is a service requests app. By creating a digital ticketing system with a Power App, organisations can streamline any internal service requests. Take for example the IT support help desk, with Power Apps, IT teams can view, allocate tickets or even reassign tickets, while employees who submit the service request can track the ticket progress. Helping organisations manage the complete ticket lifecycle and streamline requests. Further, if organisations would like to use this for external clients they can do so using Power Pages.

Time Off Request App

Power Apps can also be used to manage time off or annual leave requests. A Power App can help streamline the process for both the employee and approving manager. Having a dedicated application can help everyone stay organised. Users can even set up triggers in the background that will notify the manager when a leave request has been made and also notify the employee when their leave request has been approved or denied. The Power App can also note each employee's leave balance, include a company calendar to include public holidays or company closure days, and allow employees to track the status of their leave request at any time.

Site Inspection Apps

Within real-estate, property management, insurance, construction, or any other similar industry, the use of low code to develop site inspection apps has grown in popularity. Users can easily create a Power App that can catalog all types of inspections with space for images, location pins, site details, and other inspection notes. This information can then be stored and easily pulled when reports need to be created or when deeper analysis is needed.

Expense Approval Apps

Another popular use of Power Apps is for expense approvals. Using Power Apps to streamline this process can save time and the manual effort of chasing up emails and searching for all the information required to process a request. Users can create a custom form to input required details, approval workflows can be set up in the background and an option to track the status of the expense claim can be helpful for employees. There is also an option to pull quick reports on the expense data for review by departments or even employees quickly and easily.

Office Booking App

In today’s hybrid working world, office booking apps are commonplace. Power Apps can help organisations manage office space more efficiently by allowing employees to book in to use the office or even book a particular desk. Power Apps can also let employees see which other employees are planning on coming on any particular day. This information can help the company organise office-based events when they have the number of employees booked in. These events may be social events or even just providing an office lunch on a certain number of days, this all unique to each organisation.

If you would like to learn more about how your organisation can make Power Apss work for you, get in touch to speak with one of our experts today.

James Donohoe, Microsoft Business Applications Account Manager Dec 05, 2023