An engineering firm managing assets on behalf of external clients and internal stakeholders was running incident and action tracking across more than 23 spreadsheets. We consolidated it into a single Canvas App, SharePoint list and Power BI dashboard — saving around 40 hours a month and improving data accuracy along the way.
This client is an engineering firm that manages physical assets on behalf of both external clients and internal stakeholders. To track incidents and the actions arising from them, the business was — and we mean this literally — running the entire process across more than 23 spreadsheets.
Actions were split into separate tabs per client. Formulas were duplicated across sheets with no single source of truth. There were dedicated spreadsheets for open incidents, closed incidents, monthly hours, and more besides. Producing the monthly graphs for stakeholder reporting meant manually updating at least 10 of these spreadsheets, five times each month — once per client. It was calculated that a full week, every month, was spent purely on reporting.
Before building anything, we started by aligning what stakeholder reports actually required against what was being tracked — and cut the metrics nobody was using. Automating a bloated process just makes a bloated process faster; the goal was a right-sized one.
We reviewed every stakeholder report against what was actually being tracked, and removed metrics that weren't being used — reducing the surface area before any automation was built.
A new Canvas App replaced the previous Word-document-based incident reporting process, giving the team a single, consistent way to capture every incident from the start.
Eight of the original Excel sheets were combined into a single, filterable SharePoint list — removing duplication and giving the team one place to find any record, for any client.
Rather than duplicating detail across sheets, relationships were built directly into the Power BI data model — pulling in the specific detail each report needed without copying data anywhere.
A Power BI dashboard was built to specific layouts that transfer directly into a PowerPoint slide each month. Slicers gave every client a standardised report template, and meant reporting stayed consistent even when the usual person was away.
An action tracker was built directly into the Canvas App, so actions arising from incidents could be tracked, displayed and communicated to stakeholders in a clear, professional format — not chased separately after the fact.
The business went from a patchwork of 23+ spreadsheets to a single connected system — and the impact on reporting time was immediate.
The spreadsheets weren't the real problem — they were a symptom of a process that had grown client by client, year by year, with nobody stepping back to ask what the reporting actually needed to show. Aligning requirements first meant the new system automated the right process, not just a faster version of the old one. That's also why the result wasn't just time saved, but genuinely better data.
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