Benchling’s cloud platform is used by pharmaceutical and biotech companies to analyze complex datasets, streamline research workflows, design DNA using CRISPR gene-editing technology and more.
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Microsoft Power Automate
Score 8.3 out of 10
N/A
Microsoft Power Automate is an advanced automation platform offering a range of features, including AI-powered automation, robotic process automation (RPA), business process automation (BPA), digital process automation (DPA), and process/task mining. The platform aims to empower organizations to securely automate their operations at scale by leveraging low-code and AI technologies.
Benchling is especially well suited to groups or contexts where there are many users who do not have a coding background but need a seamless and structured approach to data. Benchling is particularly useful in cases where there are data flows from instruments and other devices where the data can be deposited in an automated fashion. It is likely less appropriate or useful to users who are just looking for a general data warehouse solution.
We replaced all the classic SharePoint and Nintex-based workflows with Power Automate. This saved extra licensing costs and getaways from managing legacy workflows. Power Automate Designer is very user-friendly and requires no additional learning curve. We also use it to replace RPA solutions created with other platforms using the Power Automate Desktop application.
Some of the integrations can be a bit spotty so it depends on what kind of data source you are integrating
Sometimes new users are not always aware of all the various functionality that Benchling has - can do better to provide more user awareness of more complex features
Power Automate is a great product that has a vast array of options on how to use it. Your imagination is the only hurdle with using Power Automate as there is no limit to what can be done with the system. It has brought a lot of value to our business through the use of custom systems, connectors, and streamlining processes.
For most tasks WinAutomation is great and easy to use. You just set up tasks on a step by step basis and you can even tell the program what to do when there is an error (such as continue with job). Sometimes with complicated web extraction jobs it would be good to be able to easily extract data from the web page source.
both Community support and Microsoft official support typically respond to (and resolve) reported issues in a VERY expedient manner, usually going above and beyond for education and bugfixing. I have been thoroughly impressed with the level of support I had been provided in the past.
after reviewing the main features of Power Automate, the Microsoft trainer focused on some of our real life use cases implementation, from simple to more advanced.
although it was productive, it is more difficult to stay focused and in a 7 hours a day online training (including screen share issues and the fact that the trainer just can't precisely show the exact location of your mistake)
I had to migrate from Robocorp to Power Automate. The automation was using API and sharepoint. So it was better to use Power Automate instead of Robocorp so we did the migration. in some areas the migration was easy but creating flows and making it smaller codes was difficult. Debugging the code was tough so we took lots of time.
Benchling was much more of a full stack solution and provide much more features that were relevant to the group. Airtable was more of a generic way to manage large amounts of data, but the complexity was still high for the types of data that would be need to be managed and there would need to be some workarounds. Overall Benchling was selected since it also had an electronic lab notebook feature which was very useful to associates in addition to its data workflows.
Power Automate can do many things that most platforms can't do as a 'citizen-developer' with no access to coding tools and deployment. It allows you to develop and deploy low/no-cost automation flows quickly. The blocks in Powert Automate do the API work for you, where you only need to connect the key data points and actions taken.
It had a positive ROI in terms of reducing the amount of time spent on data movement and curation by associates
It had a positive ROI in terms of increasing the number of insights from structured data
It reduced the number of data entry and analysis errors by associates which led to a positive ROI in terms of efficiency and reducing time wasted by tracking down errors in data
