Ellie powers through “The Bee Sting” and the Power Platform

656. That’s the number of pages in “The Bee Sting”—the current selection for the Digital book club Ellie Beres helps lead. The club voted for the selection from the New York Times Best of 2023 list. And, while she admits that it’s a bit daunting, she’s up for the challenge. 

Speaking of challenges, a year ago, Ellie didn’t know about the Power Platform. She joined Baker Tilly’s Digital Cloud, Data, and Applications team after graduating from UW-Madison and started with business analyst work—strategy, building requirements, and improving processes. When a technical opportunity came along, it had been over a year since she’d put her BS in Computer Science to use.  

With a tight project timeline and Ellie feeling a little rusty with her tech skills, she jumped in and quickly learned the Power Platform. Using Microsoft templates and YouTube, Ellie created a dashboard for the client’s internal audit team, including automatic notifications using Power Automate. 

With one client project under her belt, she was able to expand her skills. A healthcare client was using an outdated system to manually send required reports to the state. Ellie and her team used Power Pages (which served as an interface for the client), Power BI, Power Automate, and Power Apps to modernize the system. A user would fill out five manual reports and then import a local file into the system. The file would be parsed and mapped to the right Dataverse fields using a Power Automate flow. With the data entered, the user could export the required set of reports using Power BI Report Builder and send them to the state. When asked why the team chose the Power Platform over other solutions, Ellie felt that the ease of use and integrations within the apps were particularly impressive. 

Her next challenge—creating a dashboard for internal project meetings. In their free time, Ellie and a coworker are building a dashboard to facilitate their team’s practice meetings so they can visually track projects in the pipeline as well as see where items are trending.  

Whatever challenges come her way, Ellie is ready to “float like a butterfly and sting like a bee!” 

By Cindy Peacock

Thank you Baker Tilly US #PowerPlatform #PowerAutomate #PowerApps #PowerBI