Jan 31, 2022
7 min read

How to Accelerate Innovation with Low-Code Applications

Do you streamline your business workflows, optimize resources, and strive to provide a seamless user experience? Are you prepared to implement a low-code app development platform for cost savings and agility?

According to Gartner, by 2023, around 50% of large and medium organizations will embrace low-code app platforms. So don’t miss this new wave for quicker app development and optimal business performance.

Microsoft Power Apps, a no-code solution by the Microsoft Power Platform, enables users to modernize workflows and build apps to transform business operations and processes. And you don’t need to have the technical expertise to get the most from Microsoft Power Apps.

Business users can build mobile, multi-channel, and web applications within minutes, with seamless user experience, responsive tech stack, and design. But is it the right fit for your business?

Microsoft Power Apps: Key Differentiators to Provide Business Value

Critical requirements for apps include seamless data connection, responsive design, code simplicity and, workflow automation as some of the acclaimed requirements.

A low-code app development platform like Power Apps uses Microsoft Dataverse, Microsoft Power Automate, AI-Builder, and Portals to rapidly build custom and feature-rich applications for business at scale.

Moreover, Power Apps have a more accessible interface for custom applications, unlike conventional app development software. A low-code application improves agility and productivity; besides these benefits, you require a solid development approach to align with your goals and challenges.

Microsoft Dataverse

The platform shares the same data backend along with other Microsoft services such as Dynamics 365. Also, you can custom-build apps from the data and make reusable business logic and rules in Dynamics 365.

In addition, Microsoft Dataverse is secure, easy to manage, with rich metadata that you can use in Microsoft Power Apps directly.

Microsoft Power Automate

It makes powerful applications that require more than just a simple user interface, data connectors, and drag and drop actions. It would be good to have triggers and workflows to perform actions per the business needs and application purpose.

To modify or create existing entities, you can trigger custom or defined flow from Power Automate, low-code automation solutions in the Microsoft Power Platform.

As a user, you can also trigger another action depending on pre-defined guidelines or conditions in the preceding action to automate the reasoning in the app and send out notifications accordingly.

AI-Builder

Even though this is an optional add-on, it has considerable advantages to use artificial intelligence with no data scientists.

AI-builder has some pre-built AI-powered models that you can use right away for everyday use cases. Moreover, it also facilitates custom AI models that you can build and train by developers with minimal effort and technicality.

The ability to use artificial intelligence without technical expertise is another benefit of using Microsoft Power Apps.

Portals

For stakeholders leveraging Power Apps Portals, you can generate impactful external websites. Improve your self-service features to meet the demand of employees, suppliers, customers, and partners through these customizable and easy-to-use portals.

Microsoft Power Apps: Common Use Cases

Microsoft Power Apps caters to various common challenges companies encounter in their systems and processes.

While new and emerging technologies draw attention via demonstrative assertions from early adopters, the use cases on the ground drive longevity.

New low-code app platforms’ use cases are springing up lately, and there has been a greater emphasis on diversity across companies, industries, and teams. 

Here are some simple use cases for Microsoft Power Apps:

Employee Onboarding

With Power Apps, you can connect to data from other sources like Microsoft services and interact easily. You can also leverage the pre-defined templates to generate onboarding workflows and tasks for standard orientation actions such as assets, policy guides, and payroll.

Helpdesk

The support required from different departments in a business is unorganized primarily. Be it HR issues or IT service or Finance issues, or operations help – Microsoft Power Apps has in-built flows that you can tailor as per your need.

You need a proper organizational structure, and you can effortlessly generate the applications within just a few minutes.

Inspections/ Quality Checks

Power Apps amalgamates with camera-backed devices to build applications for image processing features.

Retailers, manufacturers, construction, and mining companies can capture the worksites/product images for inspection and quality checks. In addition, image integration provides various other use cases such as text recognition, resource management, and facial recognition.

Invoice Processing

Text recognition capabilities and multiple workflows need to be supported to process invoices in less time. As a business user, you can design with the AI-Builder, using its front-end capabilities to get data when and as required. And for any workflow automation, you can leverage Power Automate.

Moreover, it’s possible to streamline complex processes with all the Power Platforms’ capabilities instead of individual parts.

Fundraising

Using and incorporating a model-driven approach can help you design fundraising apps with intricate entities such as donors, campaigns, users and, recipients. In this case, the entities rely on and use the underlying database or CRM data.

Wrapping Up

Today, many companies have robust compliance and security features that empower developers without risking their organizations. As a result, a low-code app provides enterprise-level performance, scalability, security, resilience, compliance, and security.

Since the inception of these low-code app development platforms, businesses have been correctly concerned regarding the potential risks of offering untrained developers unbound access to crucial systems.

Whether you are looking to develop existing processes or build new systems, Definity First can provide value and deliver solutions that scale efficiently with your business.