Power Platform becomes important component for business success

With strong practices in Microsoft Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, and Azure, Mint Group has been expanding its expertise in Microsoft Power Platform in recent years to help its teams deliver faster, more flexible and more cost-effective solutions for its clients. While client engagements often involve multiple technologies, 60 percent of its current project pipeline includes elements of Power Platform, with these low-code technologies playing a key role in enabling automation, app development and integration. “Power Platform has been essential in extending and enriching our customer engagements,” said Sugeshni Subroyen, Head of Marketing at Mint. “We’ve built a large and growing catalog of customer apps for clients, many of which integrate with Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, and Azure. This is in addition to actively leading Center of Excellence engagements to help organizations build their own Power Platform capabilities with best practices and governance in place.”

Power Platform has also been important for onboarding new team members, as the low-code platform gives new hires a way to add impact to a project very quickly. “With fundamental-level Power Platform skills, there is quite a lot that becomes accessible for solution development and process automation without introducing high levels of complexity or demanding deep technical expertise,” said Ntsike Magwaza, Microsoft 365 Consultant at Mint.

Copilot Studio POCs unlock new opportunities for growth

With the introduction of Microsoft Copilot Studio, Mint only sees Power Platform’s role increasing across the Microsoft stack. While working on a Power Apps and Power Automate project with a government supply chain specialist based in the United Arab Emirates, Mint was asked to help the client explore how Copilot Studio could automate and streamline a manual, Microsoft Excel-based Request for Proposal (RFP) generation process. The proof of concept (POC) would embed a custom copilot within a canvas app to assist users in filling out RFP requests. An agent would be created to populate contextual data from an Oracle database into Form Wizard hosted in Dynamics 365, offering intelligent suggestions on evaluation criteria, RFP timelines, vendor identification, project requirements, and other RFP requirements.

The Mint team was able to build a working POC in three weeks, demonstrating that the Copilot Studio solution could improve both speed and quality of RFP creation. “The great thing about POCs with Power Platform, whether that is Copilot Studio or just a basic Power App, is it gives us a foot in the door and shows that we can deliver value in a very short timeframe,” said Magwaza. “Especially with generative AI where clients are perhaps more hesitant, we are able to address real business challenges in a new and meaningful way.”

Using generative AI to redefine existing processes

Mint conducted another Copilot Studio engagement for one of the largest banks in South Africa, who was looking to advance its risk reporting process. The Mint team had worked with the bank for several years on developing a solution that could gather critical risk information associated with any given customer into a single, comprehensive report. This involved reviewing all accounts and transactions in the past year associated with the customer, including those belonging to associated parties, along with public domain information. While Mint was able to help streamline the reporting structure for this information, each report still required multiple days of manual effort by researchers to pull together the underlying data.

When Copilot Studio became available, Mint used generative AI to evolve the solution, so reports can be delivered in just two to five hours. To achieve this result, the team built a canvas app that allows bank staff to simply type in a unique customer identifier and a custom connector for the canvas app to interact with the banks’ internal systems, using Power Automate to orchestrate all of the necessary processes based on defined business rules. Once the identifier has been entered, an AI agent works to gather all the account information and conducts an online search, then populates this data into a Microsoft Word document report. A language model is used to ensure that the content in the document meets company standards, after which it is converted to a PDF document. “This was the first AI project that the bank had pursued, and it was a great use case for how manual tasks can be shifted to AI for rapid results so staff can focus on the real work of risk analysis,” said Abrie van Wyk, Microsoft 365 Specialist Consultant at Mint. “The customer now runs five to ten reports a day, something that would have taken weeks in the past.”

Built-in advantages of Power Platform, skilling support AI success

As we enter the AI era, Mint wants to ensure that it can deliver on the promise of generative-AI solutions in a secure manner. “The two customer examples we’re discussing have very strict security requirements given they deal with sensitive financial and government data. In the case of the bank, we actually had to ensure that no data would leave the country of South Africa,” said Amanda Ellis, Modern Workplace and Adoption & Change Management Lead at Mint. “The fact that Power Platform – including Copilot Studio – builds right on the security platform of the Microsoft Cloud means that those security mechanisms are already baked in. It makes it quite easy for us to build solutions that are secure without having to build out the security infrastructure itself.”

Mint is also setting itself up for success by investing in Power Platform skills. Today 80 percent of Mint’s Johannesburg delivery team is trained on Power Platform, with 20 dedicated, highly skilled specialists. “Power Platform is probably the biggest focus for extending our Modern Work business. We see Power Platform as the glue that connects our Microsoft Cloud offerings, and with innovations like Copilot and AI integration, it’s becoming even more impactful. We see a strong future for Mint and Power Platform,” concluded Ellis.

"Power Platform has been essential in extending and enriching our customer engagements. We’ve built a large and growing catalog of customer apps for clients, many of which integrate with Dynamics 365, Microsoft 365, and Azure."

—Sugeshni Subroyen, Head of Marketing, Mint Group

"We see Power Platform as the glue that connects our Microsoft Cloud offerings, and with innovations like Copilot and AI integration, it’s becoming even more impactful. We see a strong future for Mint and Power Platform."

—Amanda Ellis, Modern Workplace and Adoption & Change Management Lead at Mint Group

Mint Group drives growth with Power Platform and Copilot Studio