Scaling up can feel like a rite of passage for many organisations, but it’s also a time when it’s easy to trip yourself up if you’re not careful. Manual, siloed processes that sufficed for small teams can quickly hold you back rather than support you as volumes increase, opportunities multiply, and headcount grows.
Newpath works with clients across sectors, from professional services and creative agencies through public sector, healthcare, and education to enterprise businesses, and one of the commonalities among those who’ve scaled successfully is that their people don’t work harder, they work smarter.
Microsoft Power Platform is a transformative set of tools for organisations looking to connect people and processes with automation. It can be leveraged to streamline operations, gain visibility, and build digital workflows that can scale to meet new demands and adjust to the future.
The right path for Microsoft Power Platform
The Microsoft Power Platform enables customers to improve by automating manual, disconnected processes that make life more difficult, not easier.
Clients we work with typically have repetitive processes with multiple human or manual gatekeepers in the form of clicks and keystrokes, approvals handled by sending emails, data input being re-keyed into different systems, or reports being created on top of Excel spreadsheets, all of which are extremely inefficient, introduce risk, and create unnecessary friction when scale is needed.
Our team at Newpath work closely with all business stakeholders to understand how work actually happens in an organisation. We’ll capture and map existing processes to understand every click, keystroke, approval, and report, and how work is currently done. This involves discussing in detail the activities that need to be completed on a daily, weekly, monthly, or ad-hoc basis.
Microsoft Power Platform consultants identify bottlenecks, touchpoints, and opportunities for automation to remove friction and enable more value-added activities, rather than focusing on admin. This includes approvals, notifications, escalations, data sync, and other manual, disconnected processes. With Power Automate workflows, we can design intelligent automation that closely replicates existing workflows until changes can be implemented and communicated.
Solutions at scale
At the heart of automation is a well-designed solution. Automation efforts tend to fail when they’re rushed without attention to quality. While low-code/no-code tools like Power Apps and Power Automate empower people to solve their problems quickly and easily, that doesn’t mean it should be done in isolation.
Newpath build all of its Microsoft Power Platform solutions with scale in mind. Our Power Apps are focused on creating real value for users, whether they’re being used for operations support, remote workforce, or service delivery.
We start with well-thought-out design principles and structure every solution, process, and flow with an eye for usability, performance, maintainability, and — most importantly — the business use cases it is meant to address.
By building solutions at scale, we avoid the need to rebuild from the ground up when requirements change or new opportunities arise.
Enabling insights
One of the real benefits of automation is to enable better decision-making, and at Newpath, we do this by connecting data. Many organisations use a combination of on-premise, cloud-hosted, or desktop systems that can be really disconnected. Making real-time, informed decisions and gaining visibility into critical business activities can feel like a minefield when underlying data is incorrect or inaccessible.
To remedy this, we work closely with clients to map and connect data to Power Platform tools via Dataverse and ensure they’re integrated with other existing tools and systems for data consistency, especially for a single source of truth, data security, and compliance.
Newpath ensures all customer data is designed, modelled, and governed to work for the business, whether that’s to meet reporting and analytics requirements or to drive future integration with other systems. We’ll also leverage Power BI for dynamic reporting so customers and stakeholders can see real-time insights that inform, instead of impress.
Long-term viability
Automation has to last, and to do that, we have to govern it. Without appropriate governance, data and application management are at risk of reverting to an ad hoc, manual, disconnected state. Instead, it’s critical to set clear, agreed-upon standards.
The Newpath governance strategy includes not only people and processes but also appropriate technical implementation and lifecycle management, which means stakeholders know exactly where responsibilities and ownership lie, data is structured, modelled, and governed, security roles and capabilities are defined, and data loss prevention policies are in place to protect and govern client data on an ongoing basis.
This allows stakeholders to know exactly where they sit in the development lifecycle as part of an agile, iterative approach, while still being confident that they can safely build and test apps, flows, or integrations.
Growing and empowering your workforce
Empowerment is another outcome our Microsoft Power Platform implementation can help clients achieve by enabling teams to quickly solve their problems while maintaining oversight, architectural, and operational control with IT. To do this, though, it’s important to have clear collaboration models that align technology and business teams with automation strategies that sit within broader digital strategies.
The Newpath consultants work closely with customers to achieve this balance, so workloads can be moved to where they should be for maximum value without putting undue pressure on internal IT departments.
Clients benefit most when we do what we do best at Newpath, which is to start with the business outcomes they want to achieve and identify how automation and connected, intelligent processes can help them get there.
Automation has become table stakes for businesses that want to scale, but without guidance and a deep knowledge of business operations, it can quickly devolve into a technical endeavour that loses sight of the value it is meant to support and enable.
At Newpath, our technical and functional Power Platform experts have helped many organisations move from disconnected, manual processes to future-ready, long-term, scalable automation that works for them.
