Process automation shouldn’t come at the expense of your IT team

As an IT leader at a midmarket organization, your focus is pulled in a dozen directions at once.

You need to support the business. You need to support your team members. You need to modernize your operations and prove your function’s value. But what you’re actually doing is fending off an ever-growing list of requests, playing whack-a-mole with unexpected SaaS costs, and trying to keep the entire business secure, compliant, and operational.

You’ve built a team of talented programmers, but they’re swamped. The IT backlog is a mile long, line-of-business leaders are getting frustrated at a perceived lack of progress in their initiatives, and your C-suite is lobbing new, buzzword-laden suggestions your way every sprint.

You know the technology investment decisions you make directly impact the health of your organization, the health of your team, and your impact on business growth.

All that to say … you’re under a lot of pressure. And you’re just not sure how to get it all done. But there is a way – and it doesn’t have to come at the expense of your IT team.

You need to harness the power of scalable, extendable process automation.

Driving a culture of process automation is one of the most impactful ways to improve both business operations and the organization-wide perception of the IT function.

Choose to put the power of process in the hands of your line-of-business leader colleagues, position your programmers as strategic partners (not just order-taking coders), and use your process expertise to choose an automation platform that empowers its users.

When Microsoft Power Platform isn’t the best bet for your business

We’ll be blunt: When you want to truly empower your users and make a real difference in the day-to-day work of teams across the business (not just your own IT team), Microsoft Power Platform isn’t always the way to go.

End users can build a simple form in Microsoft, sure. But once they want more complexity from their processes (like branding, looping dynamics, and conditional statements), those end users will need to come back to your coders. That’s not sustainable, nor is it scalable.

Tasking IT with code-heavy process automation programming then handing those processes back to the business doesn’t work. Your IT team doesn’t have expertise in the processes themselves, and the end users don’t have expertise in the coding it takes to make them run in Power Platform.

That disconnect just sets your teams up for frustration, because the automated processes aren’t scalable, extensible or iterative without additional heavy coding and deep workflow knowledge.

And when your business does start operating under a process automation model, and employees want to create thousands of intersecting workflows, Microsoft doesn’t make it easy for even the most technical of users.

You’re looking for a platform that doesn’t consume your professional coders’ time and energy – a low-code/no-code platform that allows business users and citizen developers to complete their own projects faster and more completely. You’re looking for the Nintex Platform. And you don’t have to drop your existing Microsoft affiliations to derive value from Nintex.

“We have other tools; we’re a big Microsoft shop,” said Tye Eyden, Collaboration Business Systems Analyst at New Belgium Brewing. “But I know I can do it simpler and easier, and get it done faster, with Nintex.”

Get to know Nintex

Nintex is the best choice for organizations like yours, with limited IT resources and a need to not just automate but document and manage complex, cross-departmental processes. Here’s why:

Nintex is … 

1. The fastest, easiest way to automate simple-to-complex processes (forms, apps, workflows, documents) for rapid business innovation​. With Nintex, both IT and business users can rapidly automate processes, accelerating time-to-value and freeing up valuable IT resources. Empower your business users to quickly and easily automate processes in varying stages of complexity, including:
   • Dynamic digital forms
   • Modern apps, including portals
   • Non-linear workflows
   • Document generation​
      

   Nintex includes a full set of features to quickly build forms, apps, and workflows, without code or complicated scripting, that support complex needs like:​

   • Advanced forms logic
   • Looping and redirects​
   • State Machines​
      

   Most businesses cannot build processes like approval routing, employee on- and off-boarding, quoting, invoicing or any other process that requires branched logic without these capabilities.​​

2. Designed to discover, document, & optimize ​processes you automate for improved efficiencies, governance, and compliance​. Nintex knows that SaaS sprawl burdens many midmarket organizations, especially after the pandemic. That means to effectively automate processes, you first need to discover, document, and optimize those processes. With Nintex Process Manager, you can standardize your processes, drive efficiencies and compliance, and continually iterate on your workflows with capabilities that allow you to:
   • Capture: Easily and quickly capture or import your business processes
   • Plan: Identify and define the processes that will make the biggest impact to your organization
   • Map: Design both simple and more complex process maps in collaboration with colleagues across departments
   • Manage: Govern process participants to drive continuous process improvements​
      
3. Enterprise-ready ​​for improved governance and reduced total cost of ownership​. Nintex gives you more centralized control over your processes, without the hidden costs. Built-in connectors and an extensible integration framework make it easy to integrate Nintex-built processes with your existing infrastructure, whether you’re using cloud-based systems, on-premises systems, or working in a hybrid model. Seamless workflow-integrated forms, apps, robotic process automation (RPA), document generation and signature capabilities mean you can automate all tasks within a workflow using an integrated platform.
    
4. Transparently, predictably priced f​or better business planning​ and budget predictability. Our pricing model is easy to understand, built on clear feature and consumption tiers, with no hidden costs. That means:
   • You’ll never hit an unexpected paywall within the Nintex platform
   • You don’t have to pay for premium connectors or databases
   • No extra cost surprises for storage, computation, or memory
      

   Compare this model to Microsoft Power Platform, which acts like a Trojan Horse for a lot of midsize orgs: Microsoft gets you hooked on its product, but as soon as you try to scale beyond very simplistic process automation, you hit a wall. The capacity and capabilities you actually need are paywalled, and you’re faced with unexpected licensing costs to actually move the needle in your process optimization.

   We are transparent. About cost, about the product, what you see is what you get. It’s the main stuff. With MSFT you get the appetite for it, but you get a lot of costs, features disappear. If you pay, you pay. Nothing is hidden, there are no limitations.

5. Focused on you. We’re a midmarket business ourselves, so we know how important it is to choose vendors who are true partners. We offer personalized, specialized, responsive support that’s tailored to your unique challenges and goals. Because Nintex has less than 1,000 employees (compared to Microsoft, which has more than 200,000), you can develop real relationships with our people, and we’ll always have your back. For us, process automation isn’t just a drop in the bucket toward our bottom line. It’s what we do, where we focus our resources, and how we serve our customers.

When you talk about buying a platform, but you don’t want to restrict use cases based on budget. If you go with Nintex, you can scale unrestricted. 

While there are benefits to using Power Automate for simple processes, only the Nintex Process Platform can further extend those simple processes when they become complex- without creating a bottleneck for your IT team.

Nintex includes a full set of features and capabilities that empower your line-of-business users to quickly build workflows, integrate with legacy systems, and increase efficiency for their own teams.