Use case: How to automate your audit workflows with Microsoft Power Platform

Documentation and communication are the key drivers of any audit process. If either is not running smoothly, the entire process slows down. By defining an audit workflow in advance with fixed roles and a clear plan, you can significantly enhance collaboration and reduce turnaround time. In order to streamline the audit process at one of our customers, we’ve developed an innovative, automated audit tool.

The challenge

• Build an automated workflow tool to replace the existing legacy audit application
• Streamline communication and task management
• Create a standardized reporting format

The approach

To facilitate the creation and follow-up of internal and external audits conducted by our customer, we’ve developed a dual canvas app with Microsoft Power Apps:

• Audit leads can create audits, define actions and assign them to the right action owners
• Action owners can track their actions and report on their progress
  
  

To fully automate the audit process, we combined the canvas app with several other Microsoft apps:

• Information generated in the canvas app is sent to Microsoft SharePoint (backend) and stored there
• Microsoft Power Automate is used to set-up notification flows through automatic email alerts, for example when an action has been created by the audit lead or when a due date is near
• The data in SharePoint is passed into Microsoft Power BI to provide a daily accurate view of the status of all pending and closed audits

The results

The new automated audit tool allows audit leads and action owners to work faster and way more efficiently than before. Some major benefits include:

• a single application that connects audit leads and action owners
• a complete overview of all ongoing and completed actions
• automatic notification flows to signal due dates, status updates, issues and more
• a daily, standardized Power BI report to follow up on all actions
  
  

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