What are the benefits of working with a consultancy like PTR?

When you partner with us, you gain access to the decades of collective experience of our entire team to support you in making the most of your people, data, and technology. Our collaborative approach and absolute commitment to transparency, knowledge sharing, and client owned solutions, means we very much work with you rather than for you, and we would like you to see us as an extension of your team. The Return on Investment can often be directly compared to that of recruiting an internal hire - by working with us, the knowledge and skills of our whole team are there on tap, as much or little resource as you need, with little or no long-term commitment. Once you have matured your capability, it may well be that we can support you recruiting that internal hire a little further down the line.

Where are your consultants based?

Our in-house team of full-time consultants are all based in the UK, with our offices and training centre based in Wokingham, just outside Reading. The vast majority of our delivery work takes place remotely, taking full advantage of cloud based technologies to provide the most flexible service possible. We do also love to get out and meet people in person though, and are very happy to join you onsite at your own premises as requirements suit.

What types of engagement do you offer?

We offer very flexible engagement terms to suit any scale and budget and to reflect the fluid nature of business intelligence requirements. In simple terms, we typically work on one of the following bases: - Statement of Work/Project Fee - Ad-Hoc Daily Rate Consultancy - Monthly Retained Services - Diagnostic Support Contract

Business Process Automation Consultancy

PTR Power Platform Consultancy Services

As a Microsoft Solutions Partner we are involved in the latest technologies from Microsoft that assist with improving and automating our business processes. Our Power Platform consultants are expert in their field and execute a collaborative and mentoring approach to consultancy enabling you the client to stay in control of your projects, but with us at your side to guide and nurture you through a new world of tools that can help you build powerful interactive end to end solutions.

Combining the Power Platform with Power BI and Microsoft Fabric connects your data directly to everyday business actions. Fabric stores all your company's data in one secure place, allowing Power BI to show live, ultra-fast reports without any loading delays. The Power Platform can then instantly read this live data to trigger automated workflows, update business apps, or alert your team the moment your numbers change. This means your business can stop manually moving data around and start making instant, data-driven decisions.

Do you fit into one or more of the following categories?

A business seeking a custom solution for business needs such as customer management and process management
An organisation using SharePoint but seeking a more user friendly interface for your applications
A company with a range of IT needs and limited development resources
A business focused on efficiency and aiming to streamline operations such as employee onboarding, inspections, sales intakes
A business wanting to automate processes but struggling because their data is split across Azure, AWS, Google Cloud, or local servers
An organisation wanting to use Azure OpenAI and Copilot but needing to clean, consolidate, and unify their data architecture in Fabric first
A company looking to automate immediate operational responses based on live sales, logistics, or machinery data

In fact do you have any requirement to create a user friendly front end app to everyday business processes and/or a desire to automate repetitive business processes?

The Microsoft Power Platform is perfect for any organization or business unit looking to quickly develop custom, low-code applications that integrate with Microsoft's data platforms, especially those seeking to improve operational efficiency, enhance SharePoint usability, or automate business processes.

What is Microsoft Power Platform?

Microsoft Power Platform is a toolset of utilities and applications that enable end to end business processes to be automated and controlled via user friendly front end applications (apps). There are four core components to the Power Platform:

Power BI
Power Automate
Power Apps
Power Virtual Agents

Microsoft Power Platform now connects directly to Microsoft Fabric, which is a system that brings all your company's data together into one secure place called OneLake. Because everything connects to this single data source, your Power BI reports load much faster, and your automated tasks can instantly react to live business information.

PTR provides consultancy services that bridge fragmented processes with modern data architecture, aligning Power Platform solutions with Microsoft Fabric for secure, scalable, and automated business operations. Services cover end-to-end architecture, application development, and governance, ensuring data is actionable and secure across the ecosystem.

What Is Power BI?

You are quite possibly already familiar with Power BI as reporting and dashboard delivery platform. Power BI provides support for the ingestion and transformation of source data through dataflows, and the development and publishing of semantic models which can be referenced by Power BI reports to deliver insight to and uncover hidden data stories for users, and drive data driven decision making within an organisation.

Power BI no longer needs to import data or copy it into scheduled refreshes. By pointing directly to Microsoft Fabric’s OneLake, Power BI reports can instantly visualise millions of rows of live data with sub-second performance.

What Is Microsoft Fabric?

Microsoft Fabric is a single platform that brings all of a company's data and analytics tools together into one place.

Think of it as a digital warehouse where all your business information is securely stored, cleaned, and organized.

Instead of using many different systems that do not talk to each other, Fabric allows your teams to easily analyse data, build reports, and connect to AI tools using one shared system.

What Is Power Automate?

Power Automate is a platform that allows workflows to be created that connect apps and services and trigger events. For example, you might achieve the following with Power Automate:

Automate data entry
Automate the sending of emails
Automate spreadsheet updates
Create an approval workflow for business processes such as project sign off
Automate customer service workflows and procedures
Automate business processes for HR activities

When an action in one app is dependent upon an action in another app being completed it is likely that Power Automate can help with connecting these events via a workflow. For example:

An email arrives and that should trigger a business activity such as customer on boarding, work approval
A spreadsheet is updated and that should trigger an upload to blob storage
A document is updated and an email should be triggered to send to interested parties
A new record is submitted through a data entry app and an email notification and report should be sent to impacted users
A new SharePoint document is created in a specific folder and this should be added to Dynamics
An expense approval is submitted which should trigger an approval process for the employee's manager
A customer feedback survey needs to be sent automatically after a course or seminar

The list could go on, but in short, whenever one business event depends upon another completing and human beings are being relied upon to make the next action happen Power Automate can most certainly help to remove the manual element and remove the risk that the workflow may not take place.

Traditional Power Automate relies on user actions or static database changes to trigger a workflow. With Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence, Power Automate workflows can now be automatically triggered by complex data patterns, threshold anomalies, or real-time IoT streaming data inside the lakehouse.

What is Microsoft PowerApps?

Power Apps is a tool offered by Microsoft that allows people, whether they have technical skills or not, to create custom applications for their business needs. We can think of it as a set of building blocks that can be used to create software applications without needing to know how to code.

These building blocks include pre-made forms, connections to many common business systems and databases, and the ability to add your own data. This means you can easily put together an app that helps with tasks like managing inventory, tracking customer feedback, or organizing team projects, all without writing a single line of code.

Power Apps is designed to be user-friendly, enabling anyone to bring their app ideas to life quickly and efficiently, thereby solving business problems or improving processes within their organization.

Within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, Power Apps offers comprehensive integration with Power BI and Power Automate, creating a unified platform that enhances data visualization, maintenance, and the automation of complex tasks. This integration facilitates a streamlined user experience, enabling users to leverage the strengths of each application within a single, cohesive environment.

Furthermore, Power Apps supports an extensive range of native connectors, providing seamless connectivity to a wide variety of systems and services. This connectivity empowers users to easily interact with and draw data from multiple sources, thereby significantly enhancing the application's versatility and utility across diverse business scenarios.

Instead of apps pointing to disparate Excel sheets, SharePoint lists, or isolated SQL databases, custom Power Apps can write back directly to or read from Microsoft Fabric's unified data lake via Microsoft Dataverse, ensuring enterprise-wide data governance.

What Is Power Virtual Agents?

Power Virtual Agents is an AI chatbot tool enabling businesses to create their own chatbots without coding.

Power Virtual Agents was rebranded to Microsoft Copilot Studio.

You can build custom AI assistants and helpful bots using Microsoft Copilot Studio.

These AI bots connect directly to your secure data inside Microsoft Fabric. This means your staff and customers can ask regular questions in plain English to get quick answers from your business data.

Fabric Plus Power Platform

PTR can help you build the complete system for your data.

Combining Microsoft Fabric and Power Platform you can bring data into Fabric from all your different sources.

Then, we use powerful tools to clean and organize that information. Finally, we display that data in simple apps and reports that your team can use easily every day.

How Can PTR Help?

Our team of Power Platform and Fabric consultants are here to guide you through your Power journey. We can help you identify which areas of your business can benefit from Power Platform solutions and work with you to design, develop and implement your business process and automation solutions.

PTR bridges the gap between raw data and automated business action.

At PTR we can not only help you with your Power Platform journey, but we can also offer consultancy, mentoring, support and training in Power BI, Azure and Microsoft Fabric.

Why Choose PTR?

We take a collaborative and mentoring approach to consultancy - encouraging, educating and supporting them at every step of the way.

With 35+ years of data and data engineering expertise, and a Microsoft Solutions Partner Azure data & AI, PTR accelerates data modernisation through end-to-end Microsoft Fabric consultancy, implementing everything from strategy and infrastructure to automated Medallion pipelines and DirectLake semantic models to BI, AI and Business Automation services. We ensure long-term independence by providing tailored training workshops and mentoring that upskill internal teams on Lakehouses, data engineering, and robust governance frameworks to put you firmly in control of your BI solutions.

If you would like to discuss your business needs further and explore how we can help give us a call on 0118 979 4000 or email us at info@ptr.co.uk.

Business Process Automation Consultancy Services