Insurance: How to Avoid the Cost Trap with PowerApps

Microsoft PowerApps provides a powerful low-code platform that delivers significant benefits to the commercial and industrial insurance industry. The technology’s deep integration with Microsoft Office, Outlook, and SharePoint makes it particularly attractive. However, without professional implementation, hidden costs and long-term maintenance challenges can arise. This article explores how to avoid these problems and realize the full potential of PowerApps.

Our team has analyzed several PowerApps solutions in both development and production environments. This article highlights four key success factors: business-critical relevance, long-term maintainability, seamless integration, and efficient scalability. Technology decision makers and enterprise technology teams will benefit from the following five best practices.

1. Business-Centric Development Requires a Stable Domain Model

Supporting business processes requires a comprehensive representation of domain-specific data. A robust data and business model ensures software longevity and maintainability, especially in business-driven development.

Data input must include validation rules to prevent incorrect input. This is especially important when migrating systems from legacy environments, as errors can drive up costs significantly.

2. Avoid Data Silos as User Interfaces: Focus on Processes and User Experience

The ease of creating input forms and lists in PowerApps can lead to a loss of focus on the user. This risk increases when business teams do not have time to provide input or when requirements analysis is not aligned with real-world use cases. Joint business and technical project leadership should prioritize user needs:

• What data needs to be captured and in what order?
• Which data fields are optional?
• How can data views optimize daily workflows?

3. Professional Source Code Management Ensures Long-Term Stability

In one production system analyzed, developers had implemented more than 250 JavaScript methods within PowerApps that were created on demand and distributed across multiple locations. In an enterprise environment, this number could multiply over time.

Debugging becomes difficult without centralized debugging tools. Interactions between scripts remain difficult to track.

A best practice is to store all scripts in a central repository from the start, make dependencies explicit, and leverage version control across distributed teams.

4. Avoid Overly Complex and Nested Processes

PowerApps workflows should not exceed a certain complexity threshold, as scalability and performance issues can slow process execution. In one project, a workflow with more than 70 subprocesses experienced a 62% slowdown when more than 20 processes were running in parallel.

Breaking large processes into smaller ones and simplifying or automating steps such as calculations or validations can significantly improve efficiency.

5. Integrate Automated Testing and Security Checks

Enterprise applications require regular unit, integration, and end-to-end testing to ensure stable deployments. Each stage of development must verify that the software works as expected. New features and bug fixes must not compromise system stability.

Enterprise software development should incorporate automated testing throughout the build and deployment pipeline. These tests run in the background with every change, providing real-time feedback on system stability.

Security testing is equally important. Automated tools should continuously monitor developed code and external libraries for vulnerabilities or known security issues. In low-code environments, professional security tools are a must.

Conclusion: Combining Low-Code with Professional Software Development

PowerApps offers simplicity, but success depends on integrating industrial software development best practices.