User Review
( votes)Power Platform, a robust set of low-code and no-code tools by Microsoft, can help businesses skyrocket their productivity, efficiency, and transparency while streamlining processes and business operations.
What is Power Platform? It is a set of five tools: Power BI, Power Automate, Power Apps, Power Pages, and Power Virtual Agents (now Copilot Studio). When combined, these tools can help businesses manage their operations smartly. When it comes to manufacturing, Power Platform can give a paradigm shift to the way they conduct their operations. Manufacturing companies can swiftly address their operational challenges with Power Platform.
For example, Power Platform also empowers users with AI-powered tools and features that can help bring innovation and data-driven decision-making. A survey reveals that 93% of businesses see AI as a critical driver for growth and innovation in the manufacturing industry.
Why Power Platform to Streamline Manufacturing Operations?
Power Platform is also easy to learn, thanks to its low-code and no-code approach. You don’t have to be an expert developer to create, integrate, and automate Power Apps for various business operations. It empowers you to create custom apps for manufacturing processes to improve efficiency and productivity. It also allows businesses with advanced automation.
Furthermore, businesses can automate mundane, repetitive tasks, such as approvals, email notifications, data transfers, meeting reminders, etc. A study points out that automation of manufacturing processes can reduce downtime by up to 20%. Power apps are crucial to managing various processes and improving operational efficiency in manufacturing.
This post discusses a few Power Platform and Power Apps use cases for the manufacturing industry. We will cover how Power Platform empowers the manufacturing industry to boost productivity and efficiency while automating processes and making data-driven decisions.
7 Use Cases of Power Platform for Manufacturing
Predictive Maintenance with Power Automate
Predictive Maintenance can help businesses eliminate asset failure incidents within their manufacturing facilities. Businesses can collect and analyze asset condition data to find patterns to predict failures. With predictive Maintenance, companies can ensure uninterrupted manufacturing operations while monitoring asset health to avoid failures. Power Platform, with Power Automate and Azure IoT services, allows manufacturing companies to build and implement predictive maintenance models that can help them monitor asset performance and key health indicators and notify them when any irregularities occur.
Furthermore, businesses can use Power BI (Business Intelligence) to analyze historical data to identify anomalies in asset performance. Businesses can optimize their maintenance schedules while eliminating the possibility of asset breakdowns.
Power Apps for Inventory Management
Inventory management is a crucial challenge for manufacturing companies. Improper inventory management might lead to operational chaos, delayed delivery schedules, and harmed brand reputation.
Power Platform can help manufacturing businesses address this challenge by developing custom Power App solutions for inventory management. These apps can help track inventory levels, manage stock movements, set predefined thresholds, and automate reorder processes based on these thresholds.
Not only that, but Power Platform also empowers businesses to get inclusive supply chain visibility. Power BI can integrate data across suppliers, logistics partners, and other stakeholders to gain actionable insights into supply chain performance.
Quality Control and Assurance
Streamline quality control and quality assurance with Power Platform tools like Power Apps. Quality control and assurance are crucial to thriving in the competitive marketplace and retaining customers. Poor quality control might lead to low-quality products, damaged reputations, and financial losses.
With Power Apps, you can create custom apps for your manufacturing business for multiple purposes, such as inspections, data capture on the shop floor, data safety and quality compliance, etc.
Not just that, manufacturing businesses can use Power BI to monitor real-time manufacturing processes, tools, and assets to identify and address quality issues proactively to ensure uninterrupted operations and high-quality outcomes.
The Quality Assurance Process is one of the best examples of Power Apps for the manufacturing industry.
Resource Effectiveness with Report Management
Report management is one of the tedious exercises, especially when multiple human resources are involved in complex production and manufacturing projects spread across multiple locations.
Power BI can help here. With its unparalleled data visualization capabilities, businesses can build resource management dashboards to allocate resources properly. Furthermore, these dashboards can help businesses present valuable insights and detailed reports.
Power Apps and Chatbots for Better Employee Experience
A report by Gallup states that only 25% of American manufacturing workers feel engaged in their work. Keeping your employees motivated and engaging is another challenge the manufacturing industry faces. It is also crucial to retain employees and improve their productivity and efficiency.
Businesses can create a low-code, custom app with Power Apps with advanced features and functionalities to improve employee experience and manage various employee-related processes, such as recruitment, onboarding, knowledge management, and employee engagement.
They can also develop AI-powered chatbots to help employees imbibe the organizational culture and understand their roles and responsibilities. Keep your employees informed and motivated with Power Platform.
The Employee Onboarding App is one of the best Power Apps examples for employee management.
Document Management App with OCR
Managing your documents can become hassle-free and transparent with Power Platform. Recently, Microsoft introduced a new feature called the native text recognizer component, allowing users to extract text from user-uploaded images with an OCR model. With this feature, users can perform various document-related tasks, such as,
- Quick invoice and expense reimbursement request
- Quick contract management with quick document scans
- Faster onboarding with automatic identity documents and verifications.
Request Management App
Quick request submissions and approvals can save time and effort and improve overall operational efficiency.
Manufacturing businesses can create a low-code app through Power Apps with a user-friendly interface and features. Employees can quickly submit a request within the app through a standardized form.
Once the request is received, the app can validate it against their organizational policies and send it to the higher authority for approval. Furthermore, the app also prioritizes approved requests based on urgency levels.
This comprehensive request management process helps businesses to keep all stakeholders informed at various production, procurement, and delivery levels. This app also allows businesses to streamline workflows by increasing collaboration among departmental teams.
Businesses can also create a custom app for submitting maintenance requests. The app allows users to upload photos of defective assets and submit a maintenance request. The facility manager and other stakeholders will receive a request for further evaluation and remediation.
Conclusion
The cutthroat competition and ever-evolving market needs in the manufacturing industry push businesses to become more dynamic, tech-savvy, and advanced.
Power Platform, with its powerful tools, can help manufacturing businesses address their challenges and pain points. From creating custom apps through Power Apps to using Power BI for better data visualization and actionable insights, businesses can leverage Power Platform to automate mundane tasks, streamline processes, and improve efficiency and productivity.
The post 7 Key Use Cases of Power Platform for Manufacturing Industry appeared first on ERP Cloud Blog.
