Microsoft's latest blog post introduces an innovative approach that helps businesses prosper with the power of the Power Platform. The post shares experiences from customers who have witnessed significant time and cost savings through automation, insightful analytics, and other benefits.
The technology company Lumen Technologies serves as the centerpiece of the blog post. Formerly CenturyLink, their impressive products range from network and cloud services to application management solutions. Through the use of the Power Platform, they were able to create a community of developers, the “Lumen Makers”. These experts used the platform to increase productivity by over 90%.
In the height of the Covid-19 crisis, Lumen used automation to reduce the time spent on processing discounts by a whopping 90%. The process included account verification, eligibility checks, and subscriber data download for each request. To simplify this, they used over 57 Power Automate cloud flows.
In a case of damaging their infrastructure, Lumen relied on the [Microsoft 365 Admin Center](https://www.hubsite365.com/en-ww/pro-office-365/?id=e83a74e9-71e3-ed11-a7c7-000d3aac68b4&topic=8904d497-c2da-ec11-bb3d-000d3a4860eb&theater=true) to create a mobile solution for efficient claim submission. By improving and automating this process, damage claims are finalized faster, reducing the wait time from 90 days down to just 10 days.
One of the blog post's significant revelations is the introduction of Managed Environments and Pipelines capabilities. Lumen leveraged these features to enforce governance and application lifecycle management, managing over 120 production environments with 3,000 developer environments. Struggling with Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) adoption, Lumen adjusted by simplifying it and making it more low-code friendly. This initiative helped boost their citizen developers' productivity, fostering trust in their business process management.
Lumen further enriched the ecosystem with their 1,400-strong Lumen Makers community, fostering a collaborative environment where best practices and new features of the Power Platform are shared. They've also leveraged premium features and Dataverse, opening more doors to improvements.
The success stories shared in the blog also serve as a strong testament to the Power Platform's efficiency. Several companies including T-Mobile, Equinor, Johnson Controls, and more, have adopted the platform and visibly improved their process efficiency while cutting operating costs.
Microsoft's Power Platform is helping businesses scale up their operations quickly and effectively. Companies across industries, like Lumen Technologies, have harnessed the platform's features, allowing them to innovate and adapt business processes. Power Platform is not just a tool; it is a venue to bring about significant change and capitalize on opportunities. With its flexible features, it can accommodate various business needs- from process automation to seamless claim submissions, thereby increasing efficiency. The transformational stories of Lumen and others underscore the potential of the Power Platform, a key offering from the technology stalwart, Microsoft.
Read the full article Official Guide: Latest Microsoft Managed Environments Features
As a technology company, Lumen Technologies, previously known as CenturyLink, provides cloud, network, and security services to its clients worldwide. The firm's services range from network and data center services to managed hosting, cloud infrastructure services, and application management solutions.
They have fostered a lively community of "Lumen Makers" – more than 800 professional and citizen developers company-wide building solutions using the Power Platform. Their efficient solutions have led to significant improvements in their business processes, some even up to 90%.
The company utilized the recently launched Managed Environments and Pipelines capabilities within the Power Platform, along with the CoE kit. This has enabled their IT team to efficiently oversee low-code innovation on a large scale while experiencing an increase in the quantity of new makers and digital solutions.
The introduction of the Emergency Broadband benefit during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic in the United States was a game changer. Customers could request discounts from internet service providers. Program administrators had the task of processing such requests, including verifying customer accounts, checking for qualification criteria, and many others for each request.
The result of this revision has led to processing approximately $30 million in damages. Significantly, there was a considerable reduction in the overall time for claims to be billed – from 90 days to just 10 days.
All the innovations were made possible thanks to how Lumen set up their environment strategy. One of the struggles Lumen faced was to enable citizen developers to follow an ALM strategy.
To manage and deploy their solutions, Lumen needed the citizen makers to use mature ALM practices. To achieve this, Lumen turned to pipelines in Power Platform – a feature that allows easy setup of ALM.
Currently, over 800 app makers and 1,400 flow makers are part of the Lumen Makers community, reviewing new features of the Power platform and sharing best practices. What started as a simple Teams channel in late 2019 turned into a valuable resource with the help of the internal Change Leadership team at Lumen and an external vendor.
If you want to know more about Lumen's journey and how they utilize the tools provided by the mentioned platform, you can listen to the podcast where Andrew Gaskins delves deeper into the subject. You can also further explore Managed Environments and Pipelines in Power Platform or even join the Global Power Platform Admins User Group led by Andrew Gaskins.
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