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From Inbox Approvals to Tracked Workflows: Power Automate for a Utility
They asked for a better approval email template. We found requests getting lost in inboxes with no audit trail at all - and replaced the whole process with a tracked workflow instead of a prettier email.
THE CHALLENGE
They asked for a template. A template wouldn't have fixed anything.
Approvals at the utility lived in email threads and spreadsheets - requests forwarded, re-forwarded, sometimes lost entirely. The ask was straightforward: build us a better approval email.
The Real Problem Underneath
A nicer template doesn't create an audit trail, doesn't track where a request actually sits, and doesn't tell anyone why turnaround was slow. The problem was structural - no tracking, no accountability, no visibility into where requests stalled, and nothing chasing approvers who let a request sit.
Prettier email would have looked better and changed nothing underneath it.
OUR APPROACH
The fastest path to accountable approvals - in three phases
We didn't redesign an email. We mapped how approvals actually moved, rebuilt that path as a tracked workflow with its own reminders, and put it where staff already worked. Step through each phase.
01
Map
Before automating anything, we needed to see exactly how a request moved today - every handoff, every delay, every place it could get lost.
- Documented the existing manual approval process end to end, across every request type that ran through email.
- Identified where requests commonly stalled or went missing, rather than assuming the bottleneck was obvious.
- Scoped a structured Power Apps form to replace the free-form email as the starting point for every request.
Outcomes
Process mapping surfaced that roughly a third of delays traced back to requests sitting unopened in an inbox, not to the approval decision itself.
THE SOLUTION
One Microsoft stack, each part with a job
Select a product to see the role it played in fixing approvals.
Workflow orchestrationPower Automate
The reason for the whole engagement: routed every request automatically based on type and approver, replacing manual forwarding with rules that ran the same way every time, plus the reminder logic that chased stalled approvals on its own.
THE OUTCOME
Approvals that are tracked, not just tidied up
100%
of approvals now logged with a full audit trail
1 day
average turnaround, down from 6
90%
less manual chasing of stuck requests
Automated reminders
stalled approvals get nudged without anyone having to notice first
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