How a Power Platform can improve and benefit your business

Microsoft Power Platform brings low code/no code development, workflow, and business BI tools to business users. These capabilities enable individuals to develop their own business apps with Microsoft Power Apps, build and design reports with Power BI, create automations and integrations with Power Automate and even build their own AI chatbots with Power Virtual Agents.

It is important to highlight that Power Platform is not a single tool; it is a suite of tools operating on a single platform. The best part about these tools is that they can be used by non-developers as well.

Power Apps – Build custom business apps that connect to your business data stored either in the underlying data platform or in various online and on-premises data sources.
Power Automate – Create automated workflows between your favorite apps and services to streamline your business, save time, and work more efficiently.
Power BI – Enable anybody in your organization to view analytics to gain insights, with AI built into the system.
Power Virtual Agents – Create and build powerful intelligent chatbots that will answer question posed by your customers, other employees, or visitors to your website or service.

Forrester Total Economic Impact™ Study, February 2021.

In 2021 February, Microsoft commissioned Forrester Consulting to conduct a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study and examine the potential return on investment (ROI) that may be realized by deploying Power Platform. Total Economic study examines and quantifies the benefits connected with the Power Platform citizen developer story and enhanced business outcomes.

Read the full Forrester Total Economic Impact study to learn how organizations reduce development costs and increase overall business efficiency and ROI by using Power Platform.

In order to better understand the costs, benefits and risks, Forrester interviewed 10 decision-makers from seven organizations with experience using the Power Platform. The interviewees highlighted that prior to using Power Platform, their organization did not have the tools and methods for business users to create their own applications and workflows. All organizations, after investing in Microsoft Power Platform were able to introduce and democratize development and BI. This allowed corporate IT and data analytics teams to concentrate and put their focus on initiatives that required their skills. The overall outcome was faster and less expensive development efforts, increased revenues, and a more agile organizations.

Quantified Benefits of using the Power Platform

Citizen developer projects completed using low-code/no-code tools cost less

Microsoft Power Platform is used to complete projects of different sizes and complexity. The study shows that, medium-sized projects were reduced by 50% post-implementation of Power Platform. While large projects were reduced by 70% post-implementation. The risk-adjusted net savings is $2.0 million, or 48% according to a Total Economic Impact study.

The organizations replaced third-party business applications and BI tools with the Power Platform

Based on the interviews, Forrester highlighted that some of the needs filled with business-user-developed solutions would otherwise have been met by buying vendor solutions. Power BI also replaces other business intelligence tool licenses. As a whole the three-year risk-adjusted savings are about $829,000, says study.

Solutions built with Power Platform made users more efficient

For the compound organizations of the study, each medium-sized project benefits 50 users, and each large project benefits 300 users. During the study of using the Power Platform the efficiency reached from 3% in year 1, to 5% in year 3, says study.

Power Platform improved organizations business outcomes

The interviewees of the Total Economic Impact study described benefits of reduced operating costs, increased revenues, which resulted 1% increased revenues and operating margins from 12.0% to 12.5% by 3 years of the study with Power Platform initiatives.

Unquantified Benefits of using the Power Platform

Decisions by employees made more quickly.

The workflows and applications built with the Power Platform help to gather and spread the information faster and with more efficiency. In addition, with the help of Power BI, it empowers the organizations to generate insights that can benefit the business.

Improved IT-security with the Power Platform

As the Power Platform is integrated into the Microsoft security stack, it makes it easier to include necessary security into all development initiatives. Organizations who uses Microsoft Teams as their main collaboration solution, benefit from integrating in all parts of Power Platform, according to the Total Economic Impact study.

Maximized value with other Microsoft solutions

The interviewees of the study said that they benefited from expanding other Microsoft solutions and optimizing them by extending their capabilities and fully integrating by using Power Platform.

Elimination of traditional development effort

Power Platform reduced costs and effort for projects, regardless of which platform components the interviewees of the organization used for low code/no code development.