In the fast-paced world of marketing and sales, efficiency and agility are key. That’s why the Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS) organization has embarked on an exciting journey to better understand internal processes by monitoring them, uncovering inefficiencies, and optimizing them to excellence.  The threefold approach using combined capabilities of Power Automate, Process Mining and Copilot have become a staple, internally.

The Power Automate Process Mining solution helps the organization get the full lifecycle visibility into their processes, understand the inefficiencies and targeted improvements to drive via process alignments and automation. Microsoft’s Process Mining offering is easy to use with powerful features including rework detectors, root cause analysis, custom reporting, and seamless integration and automation.  The power of Copilot and general ease of use of the platform allow the team to not only scale across all of its processes quickly, but also augments the products owner toolkit to drive process optimization as a critical lever for accelerating digital transformation.

Given the large coverage of the customer base, Marketing execution is inherently complex, involving multiple roles and activities. By focusing on the demand generation process step, the MCAPS team was able to delve into the nested processes and uncover areas for improvement.

By utilizing Power Automate Process Mining, the team gathered event log data, transformed it using Power Query, and completed data attribution. The resulting process map was then analyzed with the help of Copilot, which provided insights and identified bottlenecks that could be addressed through automation.

The analysis revealed that the average duration of this process component was ~60 days, with five different variants spanning across 33 activities. Notably, 20% of the cases required rework activities, indicating a significant area for potential optimization. Roles such as event lead marketing Operations and Integrated Marketing Manager were found to be the most involved in the process, contributing to 80% of the executional activities. By zooming in on individual activities, the team discovered that the intake for content creation averaged 8 days to complete, accounting for about 10% of the total time spent in the process.

With the insights provided by Copilot, the team identified the review loop as the longest-running activity and a major bottleneck. But Copilot didn’t stop there; it went a step further by leveraging Power Automate to automate the process steps, providing improvement suggestions along the way.

The team chose to create digital process flows, and Copilot seamlessly handed it off to Power Automate with a prompt to build the automation. As the flows were built out, Power Automate Copilot continued to refine then until they were ready to be published.

Through iterative process mining and the acceleration provided by Copilot’s automation recommendations, the team projects an outcome of reducing the timeline from 12 weeks to 8 weeks.

“With the recommendations using Power Automate with Process Mining, we project accelerated time in our demand generation process from twelve to eight weeks. Copilot has given us a lot of confidence as it allows us to scale process simplification as the tip of the spear for our digital transformation!”, says Sandeep Bhanot, Corporate Vice President within Microsoft Customer & Partner Solutions.

This case study is just one example that showcases the power of AI in transforming organizational processes. Within Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions organization, process mining is being scaled to all business-critical sales processes to realize accelerated efficiencies through process simplification, improved seller productivity, increased compliance and accelerated time to value for Microsoft and our Customers. The team is projecting at least $20 million+ labor productivity improvement across these process areas.

By embracing Process Mining with AI-powered Copilots, businesses can achieve greater efficiency and agility, paving the way for innovation and success.

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