As more and more customers invest in the full Power Platform, we’re seeing growth not only in citizen development, but also in the use of the platform by professionals modernizing core business processes across a range of departmental use cases.
Today, we’re helping accelerate that trend with the public preview release of new enterprise application templates for Power Platform — a family of end-to-end solutions that simplify and automate core business processes for a range of common departmental use cases. We’re starting with pre-built solutions for Procurement and Human Resources, and will expand to additional departmental use cases in the coming year.
These new templates are not training tools for beginners — they are designed to be accelerators for rapid transformation in production. They connect to enterprise systems like SAP and Microsoft Dataverse, showcase great user experiences, and are directly based on apps that are already successfully deployed inside Microsoft and other global customers. You can use these applications with existing Power Platform premium licenses, and they can be customized, configured and extended by your own technical team or system integrator partners.
The first Power Platform application template is the SAP Procurement template, which improves the procurement process by simplifying vendor management, purchase requisitions, and purchase orders. It consists of procurement-focused Power Apps, corresponding Power Automate cloud flows, and the new Power Platform SAP Connector announced in December 2022.
This SAP Procurement template dramatically simplifies fundamental and time-intensive procurement processes (like adding vendors or creating a PO) for any customer running SAP. SAP is a complex ERP (financial system of record) often requiring significant training and expertise to complete basic tasks like creating a new vendor. Beginning all the way upstream at vendor management and ultimately finishing downstream with vendor payments, the SAP Procurement template enable customers to accelerate the PR/PO process, drive down days payable outstanding, reduce manual invoice reconciliations, and capture early payment discounts. By using a user-friendly, one-screen, modern Power App UI, Power Platform customers who also use the SAP ERP will reduce the time required to complete these procurement activities and increase employee satisfaction.
We will release additional capabilities for the SAP Procurement template including goods receipt, vendor invoices and vendor payments apps in the near future. Over time, we will add templates for additional finance and procurement processes. Learn more.
The productivity of a company’s human capital has never been more important, due to tight labor markets and persistent inflation. Enterprises must empower their employees to do their best work in hybrid and mobile environments. Human Resources must be re-imagined and extended to meet the new challenges of a global, diverse and hybrid workforce. The Power Platform templates for Human Resources enable the modern CHRO or VP of Human Resources to recruit, manage, reward, and retain their top-performing talent in our constantly changing business environment.
This initial release is composed of three initial application templates for Human Resources: the Employee Kudos template which enables individual teammates to celebrate co-workers for their contributions, the Employee Awards & Recognitions template which enables employees & managers to nominate individuals for special awards, and the Employee Onboarding template which partners new employees with current employees and mentors to enable new employees to onboard and ramp as quickly as possible. The Employee Kudos template is available today. Awards & Recognitions and Employee Onboarding templates will be available in the near future.
Employee Kudos is one of the most used Power Apps solutions internally at Microsoft. Now every customer can leverage the best practices from Microsoft in their own company. We will continue to release more relevant templates to improve the employee experiences over the course of 2023 for the entire Hire-to-Retire process. Learn more.
The Power Platform will revolutionize the enterprise through employee empowerment with AI, rapid low code application development, and automation of time-intensive processes. We will be releasing additional application templates for other areas of the enterprise over time, including Sales, Marketing, IT, and Supply Chain.
Customers and Systems Integration Partners can get started by accessing the template offers on Microsoft AppSource:
Learn more about the templates and how to get started here. If you have any questions regarding the templates, please let us know in the comments below.
