How to Get Your Microsoft Power Automate Flows Under Control: A Story from Community Summit

It usually starts with a simple request: "Can you send this team an email when this field changes?" Before Jennifer Dar builds anything, she has to answer a harder question first: does something already do this? In a Dynamics 365 environment with years of cloud flows and legacy workflows behind it, that answer used to take real digging.

Community Summit 2026 brought the Microsoft community together in Nashville for the largest independent Microsoft AI and Business Applications user conference, packed with practitioners swapping ideas, solving real problems and building what's next on Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. In the middle of all that energy, Herb Johnson, Senior Dynamics 365 Consultant at Blue Summit Technologies, and Jennifer Dar, Solutions Architect at Innovative Employee Solutions (IES), a leading full-service Employer of Record (EOR) and global workforce solutions provider, shared how they made that question easy to answer, and why it matters for any organization running on Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform.

Their session, From Legacy to Modern: Keeping Your Power Automate Flows Under Control, showed how to monitor, track and report on modern cloud flows and legacy Dynamics 365 workflows in one place. Here's the story behind it.

Why this matters at IES

IES runs its business on Microsoft Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. Serving clients and contingent workers in the United States and around the world, IES relies on automations behind the scenes to keep onboarding, payroll and compliance moving, from internal notifications to background processes that run every day. With that comes real complexity, and every automation has to be secure and reliable.

Jennifer has watched that environment grow from the inside. She joined IES as an onboarding specialist, volunteered to help with the company's move from on-premises CRM to the cloud, and grew into the Solutions Architect behind many of its automations today. That 2018 cloud move is also where Blue Summit's story with IES began, and where Jennifer first met Herb. Today, Blue Summit is IES's primary partner for additional IT support, from day-to-day help to custom solutions like the flow tracker at the center of this session.

So when the out-of-the-box tools fell short, she knew exactly what was missing.

“The out-of-the-box Power Automate solution was helpful, but it didn't give us the granular details we were looking for around accountability and reporting.”

Jennifer Dar, Solutions Architect, IES

Hitting the wall: automation sprawl

IES isn't alone. As organizations lean further into Dynamics 365, cloud flows multiply and classic workflows linger. Out-of-the-box tools make you pick a side. As Herb put it, "You have to choose one or the other. You can't look at both at the same time." Without a system, teams lose track of what exists, who owns it, what's failing and what's critical.

The result is reactive support. Errors go unnoticed until a business process stalls or a user reports something broken. And there's a trap Jennifer knows well: when the person who built a flow leaves the company, disabling their account can quietly break automations nobody knew depended on them.

That's automation sprawl: cloud flows and legacy workflows piling up faster than anyone can document, monitor or own them. It rarely happens all at once. It builds one quick fix, one copied flow and one departed employee at a time, and most teams don't notice until something breaks.

One hub, both worlds, three pillars

Herb has worked with Dynamics 365 since its CRM 4.0 days, and he describes his goal simply:

“My passion is to help people automate the chaos in their jobs and make their jobs easier.”

Herb Johnson, Senior Dynamics 365 Consultant, Blue Summit Technologies

At IES, that meant giving the team one place to see everything.

Together with IES, we built one central hub in Dataverse that brings cloud flows and legacy workflows together, so technical and non-technical teams share the same view. It rests on three pillars of control:

• Daily error monitoring. Scheduled checks surface every failed cloud flow run and legacy workflow error, logged in a single place so trends and repeat offenders stand out. No more waiting for a user to report a broken process.
• Process tracking. Every flow and workflow becomes a Process Tracking record with its trigger details, the tables and columns it fires on, and a direct link to the process itself.
• Process owner reporting. When something fails, the report says who to call, not only what broke. As Jennifer put it, even if the person who built a process is no longer with the company, the tracker still brings it to light, so whoever owns it now can step in.

Where AI actually helps

An AI model reads each flow's definition and turns it into plain-language keywords and summaries, closing the gap between what an automation does and what a business stakeholder needs to know. It also helps with troubleshooting, separating data problems from logic problems, and gives leaders a clearer view of automation health.

AI can speed up the build itself, too. Claude helped create the custom web resources inside the app, including a flow run viewer with filtering and drill-down, and the code can go back to Claude to extend or debug it.

Three everyday wins

Here's what that looks like on a normal day for Jennifer. Each one sounds simple, but without a full view of what's already running, a quick change can create duplicates or break something another team relies on.

In the Process Tracking app, legacy workflows and modern flows sit side by side with trigger details, conditions and direct links.

Herb built the solution to stay lean: one new table, the cloud flows that populate it, the AI model, the app, security roles and web resources. His first tip for anyone building their own: turn on cloud flow run history in Dataverse. Keeping that history in its own tracking table also means it lasts beyond Dataverse's default 28 days.

Your turn: bring it to your team

You don't need a big project to get here. Whether you manage a handful of flows or thousands, aim for three things: visibility into every flow and workflow you have, reliability from catching failures before your users do, and accountability through a named owner for every automation. One heads-up: flows need to live in a solution to be tracked, so personal flows won't show up.

Start small, share what you find with your team and build from there. Every flow you can see is one less surprise.

Want to learn more?

This session came out of a real partnership. IES brought the day-to-day reality of running a growing Dynamics 365 environment, and we brought the build. Thank you to everyone who joined us, to Jennifer and the IES team for sharing their story, and to Community Summit for selecting our session.

May your flows run green and your error reports stay empty.