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The process that lives in one person's head
When that person leaves, the process doesn't slow down. It disappears. Documentation is not a compliance exercise — it is continuity infrastructure.
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Project Dragonstone
The scale of the problem.
A two-stream Microsoft 365 automation initiative built for the EMEA Parts Operations division of a major automotive OEM. Delivered within the existing licence stack. Zero additional tooling cost.
0+
Service sites
0
Area managers
0 month
Design to deployment
£0
Additional tooling cost
01 — DRAGONSTONE
The problem
Manual at every step. At scale.
Every month, supervisors completed site audits in Microsoft Forms. When submitted, nothing happened automatically. Someone manually extracted responses, compiled a report, formatted it, and emailed it — for every site, across every region. Historical data lived across 2–5 Excel workbooks per region, stored on individual laptops. No cross-region view. No submission accountability. No audit trail.
The manual process — before automation
0+
Hours lost per cycle
0
Disconnected workbooks
0%
Submission visibility
02 — THE PROBLEM
Stream 1 — Automate
Zero-touch from submission to report.
A Power Automate flow triggers on every new Microsoft Forms submission. It calculates scores across four categories, checks for duplicates using a composite Submission_Key, writes data to SharePoint, and delivers a formatted HTML audit report to the correct manager — automatically, every time, across all 250+ sites.
Stream 1 — zero-touch audit pipeline
0
Locations mapped
0
Manual steps remaining
0
Scoring categories
03 — STREAM 1
Stream 2 — Architect
One source of truth. Everything reads from it.
A unified SharePoint List replaced all regional workbooks as the single operational database. Power Query connects Excel for local analysis. A live Power BI dashboard surfaces performance data across three management tiers. A mid-month reminder flow flags outstanding submissions automatically on the 15th of every month.
Stream 2 — SharePoint as operational hub
04 — STREAM 2
The impact
1,060 hours. Back.
~0/yr
Hours reclaimed
£0
Additional tooling
0%
Manual aggregation eliminated
£0k max
Annual labour cost replaced
Conservative displacement analysis across both streams. Stream 1 alone accounts for ~1,000 hours per year — based on 17 minutes average report generation time across 250+ sites, 12 reporting cycles annually. Every error pathway from the manual process is structurally eliminated.
Before automation
After automation
Report generation
70 hrs
0 hrs
Data aggregation
4 hrs
0 hrs
Submission chasing
2 hrs
~0 hrs
Compliance reporting
2 hrs
0 hrs
Monthly hours — before and after.
After values represent automated processing time.
5 structural risks0 remaining
Every error pathway from the manual process
structurally eliminated
05 — THE IMPACT
Full case study
Every decision. Every number. Every technical choice explained.
The complete Project Dragonstone case study — architecture decisions, Power Automate build notes, Power BI technical choices, efficiency analysis, and lessons learned. Six pages.
Download case studyPDF · 6 pages · Free
06 — DRAGONSTONE
The journal
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From the journal
Thinking out loud.
SharePoint5 min read
SharePoint is not a file dump
Most teams use SharePoint the way they used shared drives. That is like using a database to store Post-it notes.
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Automation4 min read
Automating a broken process makes it faster at being broken
Before any automation work begins, map what is actually happening — not what is supposed to be happening. Those two things are rarely the same.
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Made Ex Nihilo · madexnihilo.com