Entering the same information into two different systems. Manually sending a follow-up email after each request. Copying data from one Excel file to another. Chasing up pending approvals. If these situations sound familiar, your team is wasting hours each week on tasks that technology could handle.

Good news: if you already use Microsoft 365, you likely have access to automation tools at no extra cost. Here's how to take advantage of them.

1. How much time does your team waste on repetitive tasks?

A significant portion of working time in an SME is absorbed by manual and repetitive tasks: transferring information from one tool to another, sending the same reminders every week, managing simple approvals by email, classifying files according to fixed rules.

These tasks don't require thought. They require time. And that time could be spent on activities that truly move your business forward.

• Manually resubmit leave or expense approvals
• Copy form responses into an Excel spreadsheet
• Send a confirmation email after each new customer request
• Transferring files received by email to a SharePoint folder
• Notify a team each time a task changes status

What automation changes: these tasks are done automatically, in the background, without errors or delays. Your team can focus on what creates value.

2. Power Automate: the automation tool included in Microsoft 365

In practice for your team

Microsoft Power Automate is a workflow automation platform integrated with Microsoft 365. It allows you to create automations between your applications without writing a single line of code.

With a Microsoft 365 Business Standard or higher subscription, your employees already have access to standard Power Automate connectors, which is often enough to get started and achieve quick wins, according to Microsoft.

Power Automate works on a simple principle: if this happens, then do that. For example:

• If a Microsoft Forms form is completed, then create a row in Excel and send a confirmation email.
• If a file is uploaded to a OneDrive folder, then notify the team on Teams.
• If an approval request is submitted, then send a notification to the manager and wait for their response before proceeding.

It offers more than 1,000 connectors to popular applications: Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Excel, Forms, but also external tools like DocuSign, Salesforce, and hundreds of others.

3. Five concrete automations for an SME

In practice for your team

Here are real-world examples that SMEs are implementing with Power Automate, based on use cases documented by Microsoft.

• Automated leave approval: an employee submits a request via a form, the manager receives a notification via Teams or email, approves or rejects with a single click, and the employee is automatically notified. No more email chains.
• Collecting and centralizing customer requests: each form submission on your website automatically creates an entry in a SharePoint list and sends an acknowledgment to the customer
• Expense report management: employees photograph their receipts, Power Automate sorts them into the correct folder and sends an approval request to the finance manager.
• Automatic follow-up alerts: if a task in Planner or To Do has not been completed after X days, an automatic reminder is sent to the responsible person.
• Automatic weekly report: Every Monday morning, a summary of the previous week's activities is compiled from your Microsoft 365 data and sent to managers.

What this represents in real time: each of these automations can save 30 minutes to several hours per week depending on the volume of your business.

4. AI in Power Automate: Going even further

In 2026, Power Automate integrates artificial intelligence capabilities that make automation even more powerful for SMEs.

• Document processing with AI Builder: Power Automate can automatically read and extract information from an invoice or purchase order received by email, without human intervention.
• Sentiment detection in customer emails: automatically identify urgent or dissatisfied emails and prioritize them in your processing queue.
• Copilot Agents: With Microsoft Copilot Studio, you can create autonomous agents that manage complete workflows, from event detection to action, without any human intervention.

These features were reserved for large companies a few years ago. They are now accessible to SMEs in Trois-Rivières and throughout Quebec via Microsoft 365.

5. Where to begin without getting lost?

The classic pitfall is wanting to automate everything at once. The right approach is to start by identifying the three most repetitive tasks in your business and automate the simplest one first.

Useful questions to identify your opportunities:

• What task does your team do exactly the same way every week?
• Which process generates the most human errors?
• What approval process takes time simply because we're waiting for an email?
• What information is entered manually in more than one place?

Once the first automation is in place and functional, subsequent ones become easier to identify and implement. The return on investment is quickly apparent.

At OKTO Solutions, we support SMEs in Trois-Rivières in implementing their first Power Automate automations. We work with you to identify the quickest gains and configure the workflows so that everything works from the start.

Discover our Microsoft 365 and automation services or contact us to identify your automation opportunities.