💡 Automation Wins: How David Saved 15 Hours a Month

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"What’s the best task you’ve automated that saved you hours of work?"

We asked our community this question, and the responses were amazing.

From small Python scripts to enterprise-wide PowerAutomate flows.

But one stood out the most, so much that we reached out to find out more.

⭐ David Cullinan’s Inventory Management Fix

David shared a masterpiece of automation that transformed inventory management for multiple Home Hardware branches in Australia.

The Challenge
Every week, multiple branches received invoices through Danks (a wholesale supplier portal). Each invoice had to be checked against their internal Enterprise Resource Management (ERM) system .

That meant:

• Downloading invoices from Danks’ SFTP server

• Manually matching each line item with ERM codes

• Correcting discrepancies caused by volume discounts or different product naming conventions (e.g., “shovel” vs. “spade”)

• Repeating this process across multiple branches and invoices

⏱️ The result? 10–15 hours of tedious manual work every month.

The Automation Solution

David used Microsoft Power Automate and SharePoint to build a workflow:

1. Check the SFTP server hourly for new invoices (per warehouse).

2. Retrieve invoices and store them in SharePoint.

3. Map and compare codes — ERM item codes vs. Danks codes.

4. Highlight discrepancies for the inventory team to review.

5. Format corrected data for bulk upload into the ERM system.

The Result
What used to take 10–15 hours per month now takes about 1 hour.

And that’s just the start.

By using data comparison sieves (serials, GTINs, fuzzy string matching on descriptions), his system can quickly spot matches between different suppliers’ product lists.

Inventory teams can focus on higher-value work instead of data wrangling!

Even a complex multi-system workflow can often be automated if you map out the repetitive steps and leverage tools like Power Automate or Python scripts. Start small, iterate, and watch hours of tedious work disappear.

🎓 Want to Try This Yourself?

Here are some great starting points:

• Learn Power Automate Basics

• Beginner’s Guide to Fuzzy Matching in Python

• SharePoint Integration with Power Automate

These stories show that no automation is too small or too complex - every efficiency counts.

👏 More Automation Wins

• Andrew Nelson – Automated moving mailbox files to SSDs, renaming and organizing via Python.

• Brian Busse – Overnight automation of Windows file server migrations to NetApp, complete with error handling.

• Ryan Bates – Migrated 100+ AD users solo in a single day using Robocopy and automated folder permissions.

• Miguel Machado Tomaz – Automated image-to-text-to-Word-to-PDF workflow, plus spam moderation on Facebook groups.

🔧 Automation Top Tips

Ask yourself: “Can I map this out step by step and hand it to a tool?”

• Look at tasks you do weekly or monthly that require repetitive checks or data reconciliation.

• Explore Power Automate, Python, or Bash scripts depending on your environment.

• Start with one branch or dataset, then scale once the flow works reliably.

Whether you use Power Automate, Python, or Bash, one successful automation can reclaim hours every single month.

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