How I Saved $45K for My Employer With Power Automate

My no-code story started in October 2020 when I first joined REEF, a tech company that had raised a billion dollars and was in high growth mode. The company was in its early days of launching delivery-only food trucks in parking lots with close proximity to customers, and I was part of the Launch team responsible for accelerating that goal.

I found a way to leverage no-code, to make it easier for these Launchers to initiate a new project and save 1,500 hours of Launcher time and thus $45,000.

Understanding the problem

As I was talking to Launchers nationwide, I realized they were spending a lot of time setting up projects on Asana when their strengths were in operations.

When I spoke to the Launch team at headquarters, I learned there was no easy way to track all these projects on a dashboard for executives to monitor.

Creating an automated workflow would shorten and simplify the project initiation process and standardize the data produced for each project. Then, it would be possible to aggregate the projects on a dashboard.

The solution

On a high level, here’s what I did:

1. Created a Microsoft Form prompting a Launcher for each project’s most important data points.

2. Created a workflow in Microsoft Power Automate that would:

• Create a project in Asana based on a standard template and customize each project with a series of API calls based on the submission data.
• Notify the central Launch team and cross-functional stakeholders of the new project.
• Connect this new Asana project with its sister record in Salesforce.

The results

From then until today, this new workflow has been used 1,500 times. The new workflow converted a process that took 1 hour or more to 1 minute.

The workflow saves Launchers 1 hour of work each time the project form is submitted. That hour is valued at $30, which is the Launcher’s average hourly wage.

Thus, to find the solution’s tangible savings, you multiply $30 by 1,500 to get $45,000. The intangible value far exceeds the $45,000.

The automated emails and messages helped the team collaborate better. As a result, this helped accelerate the launch timeline for each of these projects.

Standardizing the project data in a query-friendly format made it possible to build a dashboard for executives. The dashboard data was leveraged to raise more venture capital and create partnerships with other companies.

When you account for these factors, it is easy to conclude the solution is invaluable.

Whenever you see your teammates doing repetitive tasks, see if you can automate them. The solution can be more valuable than you think.