My Experience with Power Automate
I’ve used Power Automate extensively over the past several years working in leadership roles. Our organization uses Microsoft 365 and Azure tools for our business functions, so Power Automate has been an accessible tool for automating both my own workflows and broader organizational processes.
Power Automate isn’t great for everything. It can be slow and unwieldy for certain tasks and at times will have you wishing for the time and resources to build a dedicated app. But for those of us working in the military balancing a dozen responsibilities and limited in resources, it’s often unrealistic to build a custom app for every workflow problem.
That’s why Power Automate has been fantastic. It’s simple enough to build quickly, flexible enough to solve real issues, and doesn’t require a dev team to make a big difference.
Leave & Absence Tracking
One of my most impactful uses of Power Automate was streamlining our student leave and absence approval system. At peak times, we received over 30 requests per day, each requiring individual review by leadership. The existing process was highly manual, prone to delays, and frequently resulted in dropped or forgotten requests.
To resolve this, I designed a Power Automate workflow built around Microsoft Forms and SharePoint. Students submitted their leave requests via a standardized Form, which populated a SharePoint list and immediately triggered automated routing to the leadership team. From there, comments and status updates could be added directly to the item, which in turn triggered conditional email and Teams notifications based on the selected status:
- Additional info required: Automatically emailed the student with requested details.
- Approved/Denied: Notified the student and sent receipts to leadership for record.
- Escalation needed: Routed directly to the appropriate authority level without spamming the full chain of command.
These automated messages included personalized status updates and next steps, reducing confusion and significantly improving turnaround. Students were far more responsive to the automated Teams notifications. Automated emails kept everyone on the same page and keep record of status changes and approved requests.
The result: we eliminated redundant communications, ensured no request fell through the cracks, and reached a 100% same-day response rate, often replying within the hour. This system not only improved transparency and accountability, but also gave leadership back valuable time while creating a better user experience for students.
In-processing Emails
I also automated our student in-processing workflow using Power Automate. Each week, we onboarded dozens of new students, and every arrival required multiple emails, all of them with the same set of attachments, personalized details like report dates and class information. Even though this data was already stored in SharePoint, our team was spending hours manually copying, formatting, attaching files, and sending out these messages.
I built a workflow that pulled all relevant information directly from SharePoint, added attachments from a designated folder (which could be easily updated if policies changed), and auto-generated emails to complete these tasks. With a single click of a button, the workflow sent:
- A student welcome email with all required attachments and personalized content
- A second email to the IT team with the details to create the student's account
Instead of spending up to a full day on manual email prep and error-checking, our team now only needed to verify the SharePoint entries and hit send. This reduced the entire process to just a few minutes per week and allowed the team to focus on more valuable tasks like student support.
