Workflow & Process Automation

Power Automate is Microsoft's workflow automation platform — included with most Microsoft 365 plans rather than sold separately. It connects systems and automates the steps a human would otherwise do manually: route an email arriving in a shared inbox to the right team based on subject content, push approval requests through a chain of managers with reminders and escalation, copy data between Microsoft 365 and external systems when a record changes, trigger a sequence of actions when a form is submitted, schedule reports to run and land in the right channel. The platform handles thousands of pre-built connections to other systems and dozens of trigger types, so the heavy lifting is choosing what to automate rather than building the plumbing.

Three criteria, ranked: how frequently the process runs (a daily process automated saves materially more time per year than a quarterly one), how many people the process bottlenecks (a process that depends on one person's approval steps deserves attention before one that runs entirely on one team), and whether the manual version is producing errors or compliance gaps that automation would close. Invoice approvals, leave requests, new-starter onboarding and customer-correspondence routing are the four processes that come up first in almost every organisation we work with. We run a short discovery to score your candidate processes against these criteria before recommending where to start.

Yes, for most workloads. Microsoft 365 Business Standard, Business Premium and the equivalent Enterprise SKUs include Power Automate and Power Apps capacity sufficient for internal-process automation within Microsoft 365 — flows that read and write Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive and the other M365 services. Premium connectors (used to reach third-party systems like Xero, Salesforce, SAP, custom databases) and high-volume scenarios require additional Power Automate or Power Apps per-user-per-month licences. We size what you actually need rather than recommending licences by default — most organisations build their first three to five automations entirely on the included capacity.

Yes. Power Automate has pre-built connectors for hundreds of third-party platforms — Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks, Salesforce, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Stripe, Shopify, DocuSign, Dropbox, Google Workspace and many more. Where a pre-built connector does not exist, custom HTTP integration is straightforward if the target system has an API (most modern SaaS does). For example, invoice approvals in Power Automate can post directly to Xero once approved; new customer records in Dynamics 365 can sync to your sector ERP. Where APIs are not available or are unreliable, we sometimes recommend Azure Logic Apps or a small custom integration component for the harder cases — the same platform family, different commercial profile.

RPA automates manual processes that run inside legacy software with no API — bots that drive the user interface like a human would, clicking buttons and copying data between screens. Power Automate Desktop (Microsoft's RPA tool) is the platform we use when this is the right answer. The honest answer for most Pacific businesses is that RPA is needed less often than vendors suggest — if your business runs on modern cloud platforms with APIs, native Power Automate is faster, more reliable and easier to maintain. RPA earns its place when you have a critical process running in old line-of-business software that nobody can replace this year, and the manual cost of running it is significant. We assess the case before recommending RPA rather than defaulting to it.

A focused first automation — for example, an AP approval workflow or HR onboarding sequence — typically goes from discovery to live in three to six weeks. Larger programmes that automate multiple processes in a coordinated rollout extend across two to four months, with each individual workflow going live in stages rather than all at once. We avoid the pattern of designing a perfect end-state and disappearing for three months to build it — the team gets nothing from work-in-progress automation. Smaller, faster waves of work that go live and start saving time immediately compound much more effectively.

Project pricing is fixed-fee against the specific processes being automated. A first AP-automation or HR-onboarding workflow for an organisation under 100 staff typically sits in the low five-figure range (NZD); a multi-process programme automating five or six workflows over a quarter is materially more substantial but proportionally cheaper per workflow. Most projects pay back inside the first year through reclaimed staff time, faster cycle times, and the reduction in errors that manual processes generate. We track the saving against the agreed metric so the ROI conversation is concrete rather than vibes-based.