Immediate ROI with Microsoft Power Apps

With the COVID world crisis driving digital transformation faster than ever before, if you haven't jumped on the Power App band wagon you need to start. Ill give you a few scenario's recently where we worked with a customer to calculate immediate ROI benefits. It's perhaps my favourite use case story - Document Generation/Automation!!

Customer Requirement: Document Generation for an Investment Brief

This government customer's requirement was to automate the creation of specific document templates, that related to the approval and significant spend of projects. A physical word document was required with multiple approvals and signatures. We'll share with you how we helped this customer calculate the ROI:

# 1. Identify current state

We identified the user audience @ 500 people.. We surveyed end users and asked how much time they spend on :

• Searching and  updating templates
• Understanding framework requirements
• Chasing approvals
• Completing templates  

We also asked the audience if they thought automating the process would save them time and how much time do they think could be saved.

# 2. Review results

The results came back quite significant and this customer was indeed shocked at the level / cost of productivity loss due to manual document creation. I suppose you won't know until you ask the audience right.. The results looked like this:

For 500 end users, there was approximately 2 hours a week spent on manually interacting, updating investment briefs.

# 3. Build the business case

We immediately knew that automating the document, the process and approvals with a Microsoft Power App would save significant time, and not to mention offer other immediate benefits. Let's take a look:

• Centralised approval register for all documents
• Connected to data-verse for power bi reporting
• Built in process within Power Apps to manage next steps
• Connected to Teams for increased productivity
• Auditing/back-up/and version control managed within Power Apps
• Template editing and control by a customer

# 4. Calculate the ROI

The ROI was simple to calculate. The current operating cost of managing an investment brief across 500 users:

• Average rate for staff (estimated at $700 per/day) x 48 weeks of a year = $84M / Year
• Cost of total staff time spent in producing manual documents per year = $4.2M / Year 
• Cost to Develop App + Change / Training / Ongoing Support = $50-100k ish
• We can see that 5% of a resource cost was towards producing documentation/templates per week

The Return on Investment Breakdown for the Business Case

There is a lot of value and return on investment scenario's with Power Apps, and the best place to start the evaluation is to survey your teams and get visibility of time exhausting processes. If you need help you can always reach out to me to discuss further I'd love to hear from you daniel.colarossi@thedigitalproject.com.au