A plant controller at a mid-sized automotive parts manufacturer spent the first two hours of every Monday morning pulling data from SAP Business One, copying it into Excel, formatting reports, and emailing them to five department heads. The process was manual, error-prone, and consumed roughly 100 hours per year of high-value labor. Within a single afternoon, Synesis built a Power Automate workflow that eliminated this task entirely. The reports now generate automatically, pull real-time data, and arrive in each manager's inbox before they finish their morning coffee. This is not an exceptional case. It is a representative example of what Power Automate delivers for manufacturers who understand how to use it. This article walks through the technology, its core components, and the practical steps required to create and update workflows that transform manufacturing operations.
What Is Microsoft Power Automate?
Microsoft Power Automate is a cloud-based automation platform within the Microsoft Power Platform ecosystem. It enables organizations to create automated workflows—called "flows"—that connect applications, synchronize data, and execute business logic without writing traditional code. Power Automate operates on a trigger-action model: something happens (a trigger), and the system responds by performing one or more actions in sequence. For manufacturers, this means connecting SAP Business One, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, Outlook, Excel, SQL databases, and hundreds of other services into seamless, automated processes.
Power Automate offers three primary flow types. Cloud flows run in Microsoft's cloud infrastructure and respond to events across connected services. Desktop flows use robotic process automation (RPA) to automate tasks on local machines, including legacy Windows applications that lack modern APIs. Business process flows guide users through multi-stage processes with defined steps, ensuring consistency and compliance. For most manufacturing automation scenarios, cloud flows provide the foundation, with desktop flows extending automation to legacy systems where needed.
Core Components of a Power Automate Workflow
Every Power Automate workflow consists of four fundamental building blocks: triggers, actions, conditions, and connectors. Understanding these components is essential before building your first flow.
Triggers: What Starts the Workflow
A trigger is the event that initiates the workflow. Power Automate provides two categories of triggers. Automated triggers fire in response to external events: a new email arrives, a SharePoint list item is created, a file is uploaded, a form is submitted, or a database record changes. Scheduled triggers run on a defined cadence: every hour, every morning at 6 AM, every Monday, or on the first of each month. Manufacturers commonly use automated triggers for real-time responses—such as routing a purchase order approval the moment it is submitted—and scheduled triggers for periodic reporting, data synchronization, and compliance checks.
Selecting the right trigger is the most important design decision in any workflow. A poorly chosen trigger can result in flows that run too frequently (wasting resources and generating noise), too infrequently (missing critical events), or on the wrong conditions entirely. For manufacturing operations, common trigger choices include: "When an item is created" in a SharePoint quality issues list, "When a new email arrives" from a specific supplier, "Recurrence" set to daily for inventory reconciliation, and "When a row is added" in an Excel table tracking production metrics.
Actions: What the Workflow Does
Actions are the individual steps the workflow performs after the trigger fires. Power Automate offers hundreds of pre-built actions across its connector library. Common actions for manufacturing environments include: sending emails and Teams messages, creating and updating SharePoint list items, reading and writing Excel rows, posting data to SQL Server or Dataverse, generating PDF documents, calling REST APIs, and running approval processes. Actions execute sequentially by default, but Power Automate also supports parallel branches where multiple actions run simultaneously—useful when you need to notify multiple departments and update multiple systems at the same time.
Each action accepts inputs and produces outputs. The output of one action becomes available as "dynamic content" in subsequent actions, enabling you to pass data through the workflow. For example, when a trigger detects a new quality nonconformance in SharePoint, the first action might read the details of that record, the second action formats an approval request, the third action sends it to the quality manager, and the fourth action updates the record status based on the manager's response. This chaining of inputs and outputs is what makes Power Automate workflows powerful and flexible.
Conditions and Control Flow
Conditions allow workflows to make decisions. A condition evaluates an expression—is the purchase order amount greater than $5,000? Is the supplier on the approved vendor list? Did the quality inspection pass?—and routes the workflow down different paths based on the result. Power Automate provides several control flow options beyond simple yes/no conditions: Switch statements handle multiple possible values (routing different product categories to different approval chains), Apply to Each loops iterate over collections (processing every line item in a purchase order), and Do Until loops repeat actions until a condition is met (polling a system until a status changes).
For manufacturers, conditions are essential for building workflows that handle exceptions and edge cases. A purchase order approval flow, for example, might route orders under $1,000 for automatic approval, orders between $1,000 and $10,000 to a department manager, and orders above $10,000 to the CFO. Without conditions, every flow would follow a single rigid path, limiting its practical value in the complexity of real manufacturing operations.
Connectors: Bridging Your Systems
Connectors are the bridges between Power Automate and external applications. Microsoft provides over 1,000 pre-built connectors covering enterprise software, cloud services, databases, social media, and more. For manufacturers working with Synesis, the most relevant connectors include: Microsoft 365 connectors (Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Excel, OneDrive), SQL Server and Azure SQL for database operations, HTTP connectors for calling REST APIs (including SAP Business One Service Layer), Dataverse for Power Platform data storage, Adobe Sign and DocuSign for electronic signatures, and custom connectors for proprietary or legacy systems.
The distinction between standard and premium connectors matters for licensing. Standard connectors—covering Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Teams, and many popular services—are included with most Microsoft 365 licenses. Premium connectors—including SQL Server, HTTP requests, custom connectors, and many third-party services—require a Power Automate Premium license. For manufacturers connecting Power Automate to SAP Business One through the Service Layer API, the HTTP connector (premium) is typically required. Synesis helps clients evaluate licensing requirements as part of workflow design to avoid unexpected costs.
Creating Your First Power Automate Workflow: Step by Step
Building a workflow in Power Automate follows a consistent process. Start by navigating to make.powerautomate.com or accessing Power Automate through the Microsoft 365 app launcher. From the home screen, select "Create" and choose your flow type. For most manufacturing automation scenarios, select "Automated cloud flow" or "Scheduled cloud flow" depending on whether your workflow responds to an event or runs on a timer.
Name your flow descriptively. Manufacturing teams manage dozens of flows, and names like "Flow 1" or "My Flow" become unmanageable quickly. Use a naming convention that identifies the process, the trigger, and the scope: "PO Approval - Over $5K - Production Dept" or "Daily Inventory Sync - SAP to SharePoint." This convention pays dividends when troubleshooting, auditing, or handing off flow management to other team members.
Select your trigger and configure its parameters. If you chose "When an item is created" in SharePoint, specify the site address and list name. If you chose "Recurrence," set the frequency, interval, time zone, and start time. Every trigger has configuration options that determine exactly when and how it fires. Take time to configure these precisely—a workflow that triggers on the wrong list or at the wrong time creates problems rather than solving them.
Add your first action by clicking "New step." Search for the connector and action you need—for example, "Send an email (V2)" under the Outlook connector. Configure the action parameters: recipient, subject, body, and any attachments. Use dynamic content from the trigger to personalize the action. If your trigger was a new SharePoint item, you can insert the item's title, created-by user, and any column values directly into the email body. This dynamic content capability is what transforms a generic notification into a contextualized, actionable message.
Continue adding actions, conditions, and branches until your workflow is complete. Use the "Test" button to run the flow manually and verify each step executes correctly. Power Automate's run history shows the status of every action—green for success, red for failure—along with the inputs and outputs at each step. This visibility makes debugging straightforward: you can see exactly where a flow failed, what data it received, and what went wrong.
Updating and Managing Existing Workflows
Workflows are not static. Business processes change, systems get upgraded, team structures evolve, and new requirements emerge. Power Automate makes updating flows straightforward, but managing changes across production workflows requires discipline.
To update an existing flow, navigate to "My flows" in the Power Automate portal, select the flow, and click "Edit." The visual designer opens with your current flow configuration. You can add, remove, or modify any step. When modifying actions that other steps depend on, check downstream references carefully—renaming or removing an action breaks any step that references its output as dynamic content. Power Automate highlights these broken references with red indicators, but it is better to check proactively before saving.
For flows running in production, Synesis recommends a disciplined update process. First, use "Save As" to create a copy of the flow before making changes. This preserves the working version as a rollback option. Make your changes in the copy, test thoroughly using the built-in test functionality, and only then disable the original flow and enable the updated version. This approach prevents downtime and ensures you always have a known-good version to revert to if the update introduces issues.
Version management matters as flows become more complex. Document the purpose, trigger conditions, and expected behavior of each flow. When multiple team members manage workflows, establish clear ownership and change procedures. Power Automate's built-in "Flow checker" validates your flow for errors and warnings before you save, catching common issues like missing required fields, broken dynamic content references, and deprecated actions.
Configuration Options and Settings
Power Automate provides several configuration options that affect how flows behave in production. Understanding these options is important for building reliable manufacturing workflows.
Concurrency Control: By default, Power Automate processes trigger events sequentially. For high-volume scenarios—such as processing hundreds of incoming purchase order lines—you can enable concurrency on the trigger to process multiple events in parallel. Set the degree of parallelism based on your downstream systems' capacity; SAP Business One's Service Layer, for example, has connection limits that parallel processing can exceed if not configured carefully.
Retry Policies: When an action fails—due to a network timeout, a locked database record, or a temporary service outage—Power Automate can automatically retry the action. Configure retry count, interval, and backoff strategy under each action's settings. For manufacturing workflows that interact with SAP or SQL databases, retry policies prevent transient failures from causing data gaps.
Timeout Settings: Each action has a configurable timeout period. For long-running operations—such as generating complex reports, processing large files, or waiting for human approvals—adjust the timeout to prevent premature failures. Approval workflows in particular may need timeout extensions, since a plant manager may not respond to an approval request for hours or even days.
Run After Configuration: By default, each action runs only if the previous action succeeded. Power Automate allows you to configure "run after" conditions: run after success, failure, skip, or timeout. This is critical for building error-handling logic. For example, if an action that posts data to SAP fails, you can configure the next step to run after failure and send an alert to the IT team, rather than having the entire workflow fail silently.
Environment Variables: Store configuration values—server URLs, email distribution lists, approval thresholds—as environment variables rather than hardcoding them into flows. This makes it easy to update a value in one place rather than editing every flow that references it, and it simplifies promoting flows between development and production environments.
Real-World Results for Manufacturers
The practical impact of Power Automate in manufacturing operations is measured in hours saved, errors eliminated, and response times reduced. Purchase order approval workflows that previously required days of email chains and paper signatures now complete in hours with full audit trails. Quality nonconformance reports that sat in inboxes awaiting attention now trigger immediate notifications, escalation paths, and corrective action tracking. Inventory discrepancy alerts that depended on someone remembering to check a report now fire automatically the moment counts diverge beyond tolerance thresholds.
Synesis has deployed Power Automate workflows across manufacturing clients that automate supplier onboarding, route engineering change orders, synchronize production data between SAP Business One and SharePoint dashboards, generate and distribute compliance reports, manage employee onboarding checklists, and coordinate scheduled maintenance notifications. Each of these workflows replaced manual, error-prone processes with reliable, auditable automation. The common thread across every successful implementation: a clear understanding of the business process, careful workflow design, thorough testing, and ongoing management as the business evolves.
Getting Started with Power Automate at Your Organization
The most effective approach to Power Automate adoption is starting with a single, high-impact workflow. Identify a process that is manual, repetitive, error-prone, and involves multiple systems or people. Build and deploy that workflow, measure the results, and use the success to build organizational momentum for broader automation. Synesis works with manufacturers to identify these high-impact opportunities, design workflows that integrate with existing SAP Business One and Microsoft 365 environments, and train internal teams to manage and extend automation independently. Power Automate is not a one-time project; it is a capability that grows with your organization as you discover new processes to automate and new ways to connect your systems.
