Well-Architected Operational Excellence Checklist and Tradeoffs Context: Without a customizable checklist for achieving operational excellence, enterprises may face inconsistent workload quality and inefficiencies. The lack of standardized processes can lead to variability in performance and increased errors. Additionally, team cohesion may suffer, resulting in miscommunication and fragmented efforts. Overall, the absence of such a checklist can hinder the organization's ability to maintain high standards and achieve optimal operational performance. Solution: This customizable checklist, adopted from Well-Architected Framework, presents a set of recommendations to help build a culture of operational excellence. It starts with a fusion development and DevOps approach to integrate specializations from multiple disciplines. This approach creates a rigorous design and development practice that leads to repeatable, reliable, and safe deployments of infrastructure and code. This approach also prioritizes human intervention in areas that benefit from it, and incorporates automation in other areas. Observability serves operational excellence by monitoring health events and validating the current workload design and implementation to inform future product development. Impact: The Operational Excellence dimension of Power Platform CoE defines processes for development practices, monitoring, and release management. The goal is to establish standards that reduce development time, human error, and user disruption. By following fusion development practices, the Power Platform Engineering team collaborates more effectively. Previous Item Next Item

Streamlining IT & Procurement Asset Operations with Copilot Automation Context: In many organizations, IT and procurement operations remain manual, fragmented, and heavily email-driven. Employees are often unsure where to request hardware, licenses, or software, leading to delays, miscommunication, and inefficient tracking. Traditional ticketing systems feel rigid and impersonal, failing to match the modern need for conversational, self-service automation. Solution: The AssesDesk Agent for IT/Procurement Copilot Agent is a low-code conversational solution built using Microsoft Copilot Studio— combining Agent Flows, SharePoint, and Dataverse. It empowers users to request assets, track request status, and check inventory in real time — all through a natural chat interface. The Agent stores asset requests in SharePoint, retrieves availability from a live SharePoint list, and dynamically routes notifications to the finance or procurement team using information from a centralized Dataverse table. The agent provides guided, friendly interactions with intelligent branching, real-time responses, and seamless backend integration. Impact: This AssestDesk agent transforms internal service operations by streamlining asset procurement into a smart, conversational experience. It reduces manual intervention, improves request turnaround time, and increases transparency for employees and IT admins alike. By using Microsoft’s secure, enterprise-ready infrastructure, organizations gain a scalable, automated solution that improves employee satisfaction and operational efficiency — without needing custom development or external ticketing systems. Previous Item Next Item

Alarm Triage & Health Prioritization: Turning Alarm into Actionable Intelligence Context Industrial networks—especially in gas distribution, process plants, and utility operations—generate thousands of alarms every day across assets, zones, and control systems. Operators and supervisors must quickly understand which alarms truly matter, identify emerging patterns, and assign the right field actions without delay. However, manual review of logs, repeated nuisance alarms, inconsistent documentation, and disconnected corrective workflows make it difficult to maintain situational awareness and ensure timely intervention. Teams need a clearer, more intelligent way to consolidate alarms, detect root causes, and prioritize the actions that protect safety and uptime. Challenges Traditional alarm management relies heavily on human judgment and fragmented reporting. Operators struggle to navigate alarm floods, planners lack a structured mechanism to translate alarm trends into maintenance actions, and leaders have little visibility into recurring issues or systemic vulnerabilities. Without automated clustering, prioritization, or guided recommendations, teams risk overlooking early indicators of equipment malfunction, process instability, or configuration issues. This leads to reactive decisions, delayed responses, increased operational risk, and weak feedback loops for alarm rationalization or preventive maintenance planning. Solution Alarm Triage & Health Prioritization transforms alarm handling into a streamlined, intelligence‑driven process. The solution combines a unified operational dashboard with an AI‑powered Copilot agent that analyzes incoming alarms, identifies meaningful clusters, summarizes root causes, and generates prioritized, role‑specific recommendations. Technicians can capture new records with evidence, supervisors can review and assign corrective actions, and planners receive structured tables that translate alarm clusters into preventive maintenance tasks with clear next steps. By providing operators, leaders, and planners with timely, contextual guidance, the solution reduces alarm noise, accelerates response, strengthens maintenance planning, and enhances overall operational reliability. Previous Item Next Item

Integrate Zendesk with Microsoft Teams Context: Customer support teams often struggle with managing and responding to tickets efficiently across multiple platforms. This can lead to delays and miscommunication, affecting customer satisfaction. Solution: The Microsoft Power Automate solution integrates Zendesk with Microsoft Teams, automatically posting support tickets to designated Teams channels. This ensures that all team members are promptly notified and can collaborate in real-time to resolve issues. Impact: By centralizing ticket notifications in Microsoft Teams, this solution improves response times, enhances team collaboration, and ultimately boosts customer satisfaction. It streamlines workflows, reducing the risk of missed or delayed responses. Previous Item Next Item

Gift Review App Context: A nonprofit heavily reliant on individual donor contributions, faced challenges with its gift officers managing over thousands of donors. The existing system lacked real-time visibility into donations, leading to delays in acknowledgment and stewardship, which could affect donor relations and satisfaction. Additionally, the manual process of checking donation details against campaign specifics, fund assignments, and gift types was cumbersome and prone to errors. Solution: To address these issues, we developed the Gift Review App within Power Apps, which integrates seamlessly with organization's existing infrastructure. This app allows gift officers to immediately view incoming donations, add notes, and ensure correct assignment to campaigns and funds through an intuitive checklist. The app's dashboard provides a 360-degree view of each donor's portfolio, enhancing the understanding of donor behavior and preferences. Furthermore, the tool includes features for direct communication with the Org DevOps team to clarify any discrepancies or queries, streamlining the process. Impact: The implementation of the Gift Review App has significantly improved the efficiency of gift management. Donation processing time has been reduced, leading to more timely donor acknowledgments, which can positively influence donor retention and giving rates. The app's clear task completion visibility for managers ensures accountability and fosters a culture of continuous improvement. By automating and optimizing the donation review process, the organization not only enhances its operational capacity but also builds stronger, more informed relationships with donors, potentially leading to increased donations and a more engaged donor base. Previous Item Next Item

Data Policy Impact Analysis for Power Platform COE Context: For any company or organization, it is necessary to prevent data loss in any scenario. Not only does this impact security but also day to day business and hampers customer satisfaction. Solution: Data Policy Impact Analysis App has been configured as part of Power Platform Centre of Excellence (COE). This app reads and updates data loss prevention (DLP) policies while showing a list of apps and flows that are impacted by the policy configurations. Impact: The Data Policy Impact Analysis can view all the apps and flows in the specific tenant that are impacted by Data Policies. The administrator can review the impact and take preventive measures for avoiding data loss. Also the administrator can review non-compliant tasks list and get it actionized. This ensures compliance as well as business continuity Previous Item Next Item

Customer Voice Survey Context : This solution is ideal for organizations leveraging social media for customer feedback or research. By targeting users with larger audiences, businesses can gather insights from those with higher influence, aligning feedback collection with marketing or product strategies. Solution : Automated Workflow: Use Power Automate to monitor tweets from specific users. Follower Count Check: Add a condition to verify if the user has more than 100 followers. Survey Distribution: If the condition is met, send a Microsoft Customer Voice survey to the user through direct messaging or email. Data Tracking: Log survey responses and user details in a central repository like SharePoint or Excel for analysis. Impact : Enhanced Engagement: Helps businesses interact with influential users on Twitter, turning them into valuable feedback contributors. Targeted Feedback Collection: Focuses on users with significant reach (more than 100 followers), increasing the likelihood of actionable insights. Improved Customer Experience: Demonstrates responsiveness and interest in the user’s opinions, fostering trust and loyalty. Previous Item Next Item

Training Chatbot with Excel Context: Chatbots are usually lacking when responding to specifics (like when was an invoice sent), as that information is maintained in excel sheets across the organization. Can a chatbot be trained on excel data as well, while sourcing info from PDFs and Databases? Solution: Power Automate can be leveraged to retrieve data from excel and then feed into the training of Chatbot with the help of Copilot Studio, which can source data from PDFs and Databases. Impact: Having excel data feeding into chatbots, enhances them from simple pdf readers to assistants that can give relevant information from multiple excel sheet sources. Industries: Financial Services, Healthcare, Manufacturing, Retail, Media & Communications, Education, Other Functions: Finance, Sales, Marketing, Customer Service, Operations, IT, Other Offerings: AI Builder & Automations, Copilots & Conversational AI Previous Item Next Item

Adding enterprise knowledge to Generative AI prompts using information in Dataverse Context: Leveraging enterprise knowledge in AI prompts is essential for generating accurate and relevant responses. However, integrating this knowledge into generative AI models can be challenging as it is embedded in Enterprise Databases. Custom prompts enable makers to use generative AI models addressing various types of content generation scenarios. These models use their default knowledge included in their training data to answer. However, this knowledge isn't sufficient to deal with use cases requiring business specific data context. Solution: Using Dataverse to add enterprise knowledge to generative AI prompts ensures that the AI has access to comprehensive and up-to-date information. Dataverse provides a centralized repository for storing and managing enterprise data, which can be seamlessly integrated into AI models. With this capability, makers can add Dataverse data records as an input source to their AI Builder GPT prompts. This allows users to customize the knowledge from GPT with enterprise data stored in Dataverse. In prompt builder, an option is available to add knowledge to GPT prompts. For example, you can select specific Dataverse records to include in the prompt, along with specific instructions to filter the data according to the target scenario. This enables you to amplify GPT with data knowledge. You can also perform key scenarios like data summarization and classification through prompts that can be triggered from copilots, Power Automate, and Power Apps. Impact: Here Data Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) allows enterprises to provide external information to augment the knowledge of the model. This augmentation can result in getting the answers. This integration enhances the accuracy and relevance of AI-generated responses, leading to better decision-making and more efficient operations. It also ensures that the AI can provide insights that are aligned with the organization's knowledge base, improving overall productivity and effectiveness. The number of scenarios enabled by this capability is limited only by creativity! The following list provides some examples. 1. Create a summary of the account named Name using only these columns: Account.Name , Account.Description , Account.Orders (Order).Name , Account.Orders (Order).Amount . 2. Classify the Email into one of these Category.Name matching based on Category.Description . 3. Draft a reply to this Problem matching data from FAQ.Topic and getting inspiration from FAQ.Solution . Previous Item Next Item

RAG Conversational chat with Azure AI Search & Python Context: Organizations often struggle to extract meaningful insights from vast internal data repositories. Traditional search systems fall short in delivering conversational, context-aware responses. With the rise of large language models (LLMs), there's a growing need to integrate these capabilities with enterprise data securely and efficiently. Solution: The Azure Search + OpenAI Demo showcases a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) application that combines Azure OpenAI Service with Azure AI Search. It enables users to interact with their own documents through a ChatGPT-like interface. The solution indexes documents using Azure AI Search and retrieves relevant content to ground GPT model responses, ensuring accuracy and relevance. It supports multi-turn chat, citations, and customizable settings, and is deployable via GitHub Codespaces or local environments. Impact: This demo empowers businesses to build intelligent, domain-specific assistants that enhance knowledge discovery, reduce information retrieval time, and improve decision-making. By leveraging Azure’s scalable infrastructure and OpenAI’s language models, organizations can create secure, production-ready AI experiences tailored to their internal data. Previous Item Next Item

Integrity CRM-Plumsail Documents Integration in Power Automate Context: Managing projects often involves repetitive document creation tasks that can slow down productivity and increase manual errors. Businesses need a streamlined approach to automate document generation from CRM data. Solution: By leveraging Power Automate, this integration automatically triggers document creation using Plumsail Documents when a new project is added to Insightly CRM, supporting multiple document types like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF. Impact: This solution significantly reduces manual workload, minimizes errors, and ensures that project documentation is consistent and timely, thereby enhancing operational efficiency and project management. Previous Item Next Item

Project Portfolio Management Context: In an environment where managing numerous projects across various geographical locations is crucial, there was a need for an efficient, centralized system that could reduce administrative overhead and improve visibility into project statuses. Retail businesses, especially, required a tool to manage everything from project timelines to the integration of store-specific equipment like refrigerators. Solution: The Project Portfolio app was created using Microsoft Power Apps to address these challenges. It provides a tailored dashboard for each user showing relevant project statistics, tracks all project components such as tasks, issues, and purchase orders, and even monitors the IP addresses of installed devices for maintenance or troubleshooting. The app also allows for the upload of critical documents like HVAC system blueprints, enhancing document management. Additionally, it automates many administrative tasks through custom business logic, such as automatically updating dates when statuses change, ensuring data integrity and reducing manual entries. Impact: Since its implementation, the app has significantly improved project management efficiency, reducing the time spent on administrative tasks by automating routine processes. Project managers and regional store managers now have at-a-glance access to all necessary project data, leading to quicker decision-making and problem resolution. The transparency provided by the app's features has enhanced collaboration and accountability across teams, resulting in better project outcomes, higher ROI on individual projects, and a noticeable increase in operational efficiency across managed stores. Previous Item Next Item