Microsoft Power Platform is a suite of low-code tools that helps IT and business teams jointly build, automate, and analyze business solutions while staying within enterprise governance standards. It includes five main components:

• Power Apps: A low-code environment to build and deploy custom business applications.
• Power Automate: Workflow automation to handle repetitive tasks and connect processes across systems.
• Power Pages: A low-code way to create secure, modern business websites.
• Power BI: Business intelligence and analytics with interactive dashboards and reports.
• Microsoft Copilot Studio: An AI-powered environment to build and deploy virtual agents for support and assistance.

With over 1,000 connectors, Power Platform links data across many applications so teams can:

• Streamline processes like data entry, reporting, invoicing, sales lead tracking, and applicant screening.
• Give business users tools to build solutions themselves, while IT maintains governance, security, and compliance.
• Reimagine how work gets done by combining low-code development, automation, and analytics in one platform.

This combination helps organizations close the gap between demand for new applications and limited professional developer capacity, while reducing the risk of shadow IT and unmanaged tools.

Forrester’s Total Economic Impact (TEI) study, commissioned by Microsoft in July 2024, analyzed organizations using Power Platform at scale and built a composite company with 30,000 employees and $10 billion in annual revenue. Over three years, this composite organization experienced:

• $118.2 million in total, risk-adjusted benefits (present value).
• $36.5 million in total, risk-adjusted costs (present value).
• $81.7 million net present value (NPV).
• 224% ROI.
• 6-month payback period.

Key quantified benefits over three years included:

• $44.4 million in employee time savings, driven by solutions built on Power Platform that save up to 25% of time per impacted employee.
• $14.8 million in operational cost savings from better visibility into spend, inventory, and supply chain inefficiencies.
• $15.4 million in additional operating profit from faster time to value on use cases that improve sales and customer engagement.
• $43.6 million in avoided development and IT costs by embracing citizen development and retiring legacy automation and web tools.

On the cost side, the three-year, risk-adjusted costs included:

• $24.1 million in Power Platform licensing.
• $6.1 million for initial implementation, training, and experimentation.
• $4.6 million for ongoing management by a 10-person team.
• $1.6 million for ongoing training and experimentation on solutions built with the platform.

Beyond the numbers, organizations also reported unquantified benefits such as reduced shadow IT, improved employee satisfaction, and a stronger culture of digital innovation and upskilling through low code.

Organizations in the Forrester study reported similar challenges before adopting Power Platform, and used the platform to systematically address them:

1. Limited developer capacity
   Many teams faced a large backlog of requested applications and automations that professional developers could not keep up with. Power Platform helps by:
   • Enabling citizen development, so business users can build apps, workflows, and pages for everyday use cases.
   • Using low-code tools to reduce development time for both IT and business users.
   • Letting IT focus on high-priority, complex solutions while still governing what business users build.
2. Manual and inefficient processes
   Before Power Platform, organizations relied heavily on manual data entry, repetitive admin work, and duplicate effort across teams. With Power Apps and Power Automate, they:
   • Automated repetitive tasks and end-to-end workflows.
   • Reduced rework across engineering, R&D, manufacturing, and other functions.
   • Achieved up to 25% time savings per impacted employee, contributing to $44.4 million in time savings over three years for the composite organization.
3. Lack of visibility into operational costs
   Data was often siloed, making it hard to understand inventory, supply chain, and operational spend. Using Power BI and connected solutions built on Power Platform, organizations:
   • Consolidated data from multiple sources using built-in connectors.
   • Identified issues like overstocked or underutilized inventory, excessive sourcing costs, and unreturned equipment.
   • Rightsized operational spending, leading to $14.8 million in cost savings over three years for the composite organization.
4. Shadow IT and technical debt
   Teams often turned to unauthorized tools or complex Excel workarounds, creating security and continuity risks. Power Platform helps organizations:
   • Provide a sanctioned, user-friendly platform for building solutions, reducing the need for unsanctioned tools.
   • Apply governance guardrails and security policies across apps, automations, and pages built on the platform.
   • Retire legacy automation and web development solutions, contributing to $43.6 million in avoided development and IT costs over three years.

Together, these capabilities help organizations rethink how they deliver digital solutions, improve process performance, and manage risk, while keeping IT and business teams aligned on a single platform.