Can Power Automate and Power BI tools boost the competitive edge of your factory?

Problems of contemporary manufacturing plants and enterprises

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, many factories continue to face multiple challenges, such as disruptions in supply chains, growing production costs, shortages of skilled workforce, market changes and changes in work models, the absence of digitisation and automation and an inflexible approach to production.

It goes without saying that all the above contribute to lowering profits in manufacturing plants and enterprises. Restructuring efforts have been made in many areas, but you would do well to answer the following question: how to boost results and which elements should you focus on?

“Improve your competitiveness and your results will soon improve”. This common slogan sounds like the way to go. But what can you do to actually boost your competitive edge?

Power Automate – applications

Microsoft Power Automate (previously known as Microsoft Flow) is a business process automation service within the Microsoft Power Platform ecosystem, which allows users to create, manage and monitor automated workflows and integrate various apps and services in order to optimise and streamline many aspects of daily work.

As it allows you to automate many processes, the Power Automate service helps eliminate low-performance areas and frees your employees from repetitive tasks so that they can focus on more difficult or creative assignments.

Power Automate functionalities

Here are some example tasks you can automate with Microsoft Power Automate to streamline daily workflows in your factory:

• Document management: Power Automate can automatically process and classify documents such as invoices, purchase orders and inspection reports, and then pass them on to designated teams for further analysis.
• Warehouse stock monitoring: based on logs and production reports, Power Automate can regularly check your warehouse stocks, send usage alerts, generate automated delivery orders and then track them and notify you of their arrival.
• Production order management: workflows can be configured so that production orders are automatically assigned and tracked; you can also generate automated reports on production progress.
• Machine performance monitoring: Power Automate can read out data from IoT sensors installed on production machines, analyse them and generate reports in the event of glitches, low performance, excessive power consumption, overheating or slowdown, which allows you to react promptly and limits the risk of equipment failure.
• Employee work time management: Power Automate services allow employee card and workflow data to read for automated employee presence monitoring. The tools can also calculate overtime hours and generate reports on work time or performance.
• Repair and maintenance management: Microsoft Power Automate can plan and schedule maintenance work on production machines.
• Production quality management: Power Automate monitors production quality data (such as, e.g., use of materials, number of discarded products, increased resource use) to generate quality reports that can help you identify problems.
• Customer order management: workflows may automatically process new orders, delegate them to dedicated departments, monitor completion progress, generate automated order confirmation, monitor order status and delivery time, and send alerts: all this will allow you to boost customer service quality and ensure timely delivery.
• Failure reporting management: automated workflows can handle failures reported by the production team, refer it to dedicated departments and monitor repair status.
• Production process management: if the production process (or the warehousing method) depends on weather conditions, Power Automate can automatically download data from weather forecasting websites and use them to manage processes and send alerts.

Power Automate — benefits

If you decide to deploy automated processes with Power Automate, it won’t be long before you begin to notice many benefits for the competitive edge of your factory:

• Fewer errors and better operational effectiveness: automating repetitive and routine tasks helps minimise, if not eliminate, human error. This allows you to waste fewer resources and produce fewer defective products. In addition, automating the process of information and data flow (e.g. automated assembly line notifications and failure alerts or automated e-mails/text messages) means that these tasks are done instantly, without any undue delay.
• Higher employee performance: when some processes are automated, employees can focus on more important assignments, while Power Automate will take over all routine tasks, such as data collection or document processing.
• Cost reduction: process automation lowers work costs, especially for tasks that previously required additional staff.
• Better resource management: Power Automate allows you to manage your human resources, materials and machines more effectively. It will process data on resource warehouse availability and their use-by date instantly and automatically; it will also calculate the time until the next delivery, and even place an order. Once deployed, the system can also automatically organise work and assign tasks to employees based on their skills.
• Integration with existing systems and scalability: Power Automate can be used to integrate different systems and applications, which enables smooth information flow between your systems. Power Automate-based solutions are easily scalable, so they can be dynamically adapted to the changing needs of your factory.
• Data tracking and analysis: another advantage of Power Automate, which can be easily integrated with different kinds of software, is data collection. Thanks to data collected by Power Automate, you can get a better insight into your production processes and combine data from different sources. And this is just a step away from better analysis and more efficient work!

Data is not everything. Discover the potential of Power BI

As you can see, by using Microsoft Power Automate, you can significantly speed up your process and improve your resource management, as well as take routine tasks off human shoulders. All this will boost the competitive edge of your factory, but Microsoft tools still have much more to offer. We have already mentioned that Power Automate, thanks to its adaptability to other software, is excellent at data collection. It collects data from production line sensors, IoT devices, employee cards, websites and data bases.

“Information is the oil of the 21st century, and analytics is the combustion engine”. Taking these words of Peter Sondergaard further, collecting data, or fuel, alone will not get us off the ground, we also need an engine. One such engine is Power BI (a business intelligence service), i.e., a data analysis and visualisation tool also offered by Microsoft.

Power BI – modern reporting

Among other things, Microsoft Power BI is a platform for creating interactive reports – you can read more about this solution in our previous post: Data analytics: Excel v Power BI tools.

Reports created in Power BI can take on different forms and touch on various aspects of factory operation.

Power BI is so modern and unique that your report data can be updated in real time without the need to involve your employees. As a result, once designed, a report can be refreshed and fed with new data from automated processes. This will help you be sure that your decision-making is based on a complete set of up-to-date information. Power BI reports can also be shared online in accordance with all security standards.

Power BI allows you to create:

• KPI reports: by creating key performance indicator (KPI) reports, you can monitor process effectiveness on many levels. The reports may deal with resources (including human resources) and raw materials. Data collected by Power Automate will be used by Power BI to create process visualisations. Thanks to their accessible form, including interactive diagrams, tables and dashboards, you will easily track the data you need and take informed performance-related decisions.
• Quality analysis (QA) reports: thanks to Power BI reports, you can analyse product quality data and detect trends related to defects or quality issues. Power Automate automatically transmits the data in real time, and Power BI automatically updates your report. Integrating these two tools will allow you to spot process anomalies quickly and react immediately.
• Resource management optimisation reports: by integrating Power Automate and Power BI, you can easily and quickly analyse resource use in your production process. Your employees do not need to devote any extra time to analysing current resource stocks and their use, since the integration of the two systems will give them an exact reading presented in an attractive visual form. Thanks to this ability to compare current data with historical records, you will be able to predict usage trends. Integrating these systems will allow you to monitor warehouse stocks and manage inventories so as to avoid a shortage or surplus.
• Sales reports: integrating these two tools allows you to extract data about orders, refund requests, website traffic, sales profits and production costs. A good report helps you analyse the impact of advertising on sales. And a good sales report helps predict trends and align production with actual needs.

Power BI – what are the reports like?

Microsoft Power BI reports can take on different forms. Processed data can be presented as interactive maps and diagrams; the user can click, drag and interact with visualisations to extract the information they need.

You can also create Dashboards, which are often the first page users will see when they log into your app and which give you a quick idea of the state of your business. Power BI also allows you to create a tile report, which presents various data as tiles, where each tile contains a different visualisation.

Moreover, Power BI allows you to embed reports in time; temporal reports focus on data analysis in the context of time. All Power BI reports may be personalised, adjusted to specific users, taking into account different authorisation levels.

Comprehensive business solutions for factories

Going back to Michael Porter’s words quoted above, we would like this post to serve as a guide on how you can use Power Automate and Power BI tools to open up new opportunities and enhance business processes in your factory so as to fuel its growth and competitive advantage.