Chasing approvals, assembling the same report every month, copying data between systems — the work that quietly consumes days and produces nothing. Norcadia Advisory maps these processes and automates them with Power Automate, using Microsoft tooling your organisation already licenses.
The best candidates are boring, frequent and rule-based. If a person does it the same way every time, it probably should not be a person doing it.
Someone spends two or three days a month assembling the same management report pack.
Approvals sit in inboxes for days because nothing prompts the approver.
Status updates are collected by emailing individuals and pasting replies into a spreadsheet.
Data is re-keyed between SharePoint, Excel and a third system because nothing connects them.
Overdue actions are only noticed when someone manually reviews the tracker.
Onboarding, requests or sign-offs depend on someone remembering the next step.
Automating a bad process just makes it fail faster. We map what is actually happening first, simplify where the process itself is the problem, and automate what remains.
Map the real process as performed, not as documented, and identify where manual effort concentrates and where handoffs stall.
Design and build of flows for approvals, notifications, data movement and recurring report assembly — with error handling that fails visibly rather than silently.
Task tracking, notifications and request handling wired into the tools your teams already work in, rather than another system to check.
Reporting built on the automated data so management visibility is a by-product of the process rather than a separate exercise.
Documentation and hands-on training so your team can maintain and extend the flows without depending on us.
A before-and-after view of hours recovered, so the value of the work is demonstrable rather than assumed.
Deliberately sequenced so the team sees a real result early, before the harder work starts.
Sit with the people doing the work and map what actually happens. The documented process and the real one diverge more often than not, and automating the documented version is how automation projects fail.
Build the highest-frequency, lowest-complexity flow first and get it live within the first couple of weeks. Early visible time saved is what buys support for the rest of the work.
Work through the remaining processes, simplifying before automating where the process itself is the problem. Some steps turn out to be removable rather than automatable.
Documentation, training and a named internal owner for every flow. Automation nobody in the organisation understands is a risk waiting to surface the first time something breaks.
Introduced Power Automate workflows and dashboards to reduce manual workload, improve task tracking and free up key team members for higher-value work.
Anonymised to protect client confidentiality.
Power Automate is Microsoft's workflow automation tool. It is most useful for the repetitive administrative work that sits between systems: routing approvals, chasing overdue actions, collecting status updates, moving data between SharePoint lists and Excel, and generating recurring reports. It is included in most Microsoft 365 business plans, so for many organisations there is no additional licence cost to start.
The best first candidates are high-frequency, rule-based and low-judgement — the tasks a person does the same way every time. Approval routing, status collection, notification chasing and recurring report assembly usually pay back fastest. Processes involving negotiation, exception handling or judgement are poor first candidates, however tempting they look.
A typical engagement runs 2 to 8 weeks per workstream. We prioritise quick wins first so the team sees tangible benefit within the first couple of weeks, then move to more complex automation once there is confidence in the approach.
In most cases no. Power Automate, SharePoint and Teams are included in standard Microsoft 365 business licensing, which the large majority of organisations already hold. Premium connectors carry an additional cost, but the majority of practical PMO and operational automation can be built without them.
Every engagement includes handover documentation and training so your team can maintain and extend the flows themselves. Automation that only one external consultant understands is a liability rather than an improvement, so self-sufficiency is part of the deliverable rather than an optional extra.
The delivery structure that automated reporting feeds into.
Read more →Governance, dashboards and RAID processes that expose the truth early.
Read more →For projects already delayed, red-rated or lacking clear ownership.
Read more →Describe the process that takes the most manual effort and we will tell you whether it is a good automation candidate — and roughly what it would take.