A recent report by Forrester, The Total Economic Impact™ Of PowerApps And Microsoft Flow, stated that the average cost to develop an application is 70% less with Microsoft PowerApps and Flow. That’s a massive saving!
The reduced cost of development comes about in various ways:
- Reducing application development time through the ability to build apps fast with a point-and-click approach to app design
- Empowering non-developers to create applications reduces the costs associated with using professional developers
- The Workflow functionality greatly reduces development costs and streamlines business processes
These process improvements deliver business benefits such as reduced time-to-market, better customer service, and increased revenues.
Additionally, the effort to maintain code and manage applications is less. Over the life of the study, £2.7million in application development and management costs are avoided.
The PowerApps model
No need for code
Historically, mobile app development has involved creating apps for each operating system they need to run on (one for iOS, one for Android, one for Windows). This essentially triples your development work, triples your support costs, and increases the development resources you need to create business apps.
With PowerApps mobile apps, all the PowerApps you create run through the PowerApp application. The PowerApps platform manages the requirements of different operating systems, allowing you to run your app without any extra development effort. Essentially, PowerApps is a container that makes mobile apps much easier to use across all the different mobile platforms.
In addition to the app version, PowerApps offers a web version of the system. It works in the same way but is pre-configured to run through any modern web browser instead of a mobile app.
Apps influenced by user experience
Rather than building from the back-end, like traditional application development, developers can start with the user in mind and build a customised interface. The blank canvas functionality provides plenty of room for innovation, aligned branding and tailored experiences. Building the app itself is made very easy with the aid of the drag and drop interface.
Model-driven apps influenced by data selection
With model-driven apps, the interface and layout of the apps are influenced by the data selection and format. These apps are automatically generated from your pool of Common Data Service (CDS) data. The apps are still very user-friendly and easy to navigate. The combination of components such as forms, charts, dashboards and views make the apps compelling resources for when information is needed at a glance. Users who are familiar with Microsoft Dynamics 365 or Office 365 will likely find the most affinity with model-driven apps.
Easily integrate data from third-party sources
The Power platform brings data in from over 230 connector applications. Slack, Salesforce, DropBox, Oracle and SharePoint Online are all compatible. There’s no coding required to connect to these apps, and it’s likely that your business will be even stronger for having the additional data.
PowerApps is great for creating apps for problems or processes where there isn’t the budget, need or resource for a traditional application development project. However, when combined with complementary platforms like Microsoft Flow, Power BI and Dynamics 365 there is massive potential to take the performance of your business to the next level.
Get a PowerApp designed, developed and deployed in less than a week
More good news! Our new fixed cost PowerApps Development Programme assists you in getting a PowerApp designed, developed and deployed in less than a week.