Microsoft has announced it will be taking its first steps into the Robotic Process Automation market with UI Flows, part of the Power Automate application, providing enterprise organisations with a range of automation for their business and customers. 

It enables end-users and developers alike to build workflows that automate highly repetitive, manual, time-consuming tasks, also enabling automation across legacy, on-premises, and cloud apps and services. This has the potential to offer automation for your entire IT landscape.

Why Power Automate?

The enterprise application landscape is filled with a mixture of legacy applications and modern services, some running on-premises and some running in the cloud. In some cases, the use of such applications is at the surface level, while in some cases cognitive skills like natural language processing (NLP) and vision understanding are required. In an increasingly connected, quicker, and app-heavy world, there is a strong customer demand for rich automation capabilities that allow customers to do more with less. Microsoft believes this should be a core capability of the Power Platform and are therefore adding new capabilities to Power Automate.

What is the new RPA feature in Power Automate?

UI flows is an RPA capability in Power Automate that enables enterprise customers including business users, technical users, and end-users to automate repetitive tasks across legacy applications — to simplify how they work in a scalable, secure way. They can streamline how they work by recording mouse clicks, keyboard use, and data entry and automate the replay of the steps to be included in more complex process automations.

What are the key benefits of the RPA feature called UI flows?

UI flows within Power Automate is Microsoft’s feature for UI automation. Previously, Flow played primarily in the digital process automation (DPA) space where one could use the service to automate business processes that provided APIs. With UI flows, the Power Automate platform extends to also automate legacy applications that can only be driven from their front end. This allows customers to create complete business process automation. With UI flows, customers can record step-by-step UI actions—such as mouse clicks, keyboard use, and data entry—and then replay those actions.

This enables organisations to:
• Automate in a single platform across apps and services that do not have APIs
• Customize, build and manage UI flow scripts in a secure cloud environment
• Low-code experience with a step-by-step record and playback experience
• Seamlessly Integrate UI automation with API based automation by combining UI flows with regular flows.

Amillan and Power Automate

Microsoft Partner Amillan is ready to support organisations looking to be the early adopters of Power Automate and UI Flows. With experts in Microsoft Robotic Process Automation in-house, we can create tailored and bespoke systems to elevate your business processes.

Contact us today to start your RPA journey!