Workflow automation and custom apps
Power Apps and Power Automate solutions that replace the manual processes draining your team: approval routing, grant and compliance tracking, field reporting, and the monthly report somebody assembles by hand. Built inside the Microsoft 365 your agency already pays for, so there is usually nothing new to procure.
Blue Peak Data Consulting builds these for counties, cities, police departments, public health departments, state programs and grant funded organizations. The flows and apps live in your own tenant, they are documented, and your staff can change them without calling us.
What automation actually replaces
Four kinds of work. A first project is usually one of them, chosen because it repeats often enough that the saving repeats too.
Multi step approval routing
Conditional routing with dynamic approver lookup, delegation when somebody is out, rejection handling that sends the request back with a reason, and a record of who approved what and when. The audit trail is the point as much as the speed.
Custom Power Apps
Field reporting, inspections, intake and verification. Lightweight apps that validate at the point of entry and feed your reporting layer directly, instead of creating one more spreadsheet nobody else can see.
Automated report assembly and delivery
Collection, cleanup, formatting and distribution on a schedule. Leadership gets the same document on the same day of the month without anyone rebuilding it, and the version everyone quotes is the version the system produced.
Deadline and obligation tracking
Award terms, reporting deadlines, renewal dates and review cycles tracked with an owner, a due date and an escalation, so a missed deadline takes a deliberate failure rather than an ordinary busy week.
The manual work we typically remove
Approvals living in email threads
Routed, tracked and auditable flows replace the forwarding chains nobody can reconstruct six months later, which matters most when the person asking is an auditor or a records request.
Rekeying the same data between systems
An integration moves the data and your staff stop being the integration. The typing errors go with the typing.
The monthly report assembly line
Download, paste, pivot, format, email. Five steps, one person, every month. All five can run on a schedule and land in the same place.
Paper and spreadsheet field reporting
Mobile friendly apps that validate at entry and write straight into SharePoint, Dataverse or your database, so the trip back to the office to type it up disappears.
Workflow automation for public agencies
Public agencies run on approvals, deadlines and forms, and most of them run on Microsoft 365 already. That combination is why the Power Platform tends to pay off here faster than anywhere else. Here is what we build with it.
Grant compliance calendars
Award terms, report due dates, drawdown windows and closeout tasks in one tracker with an owner and an alert on each. Federal and state performance and financial reports stop depending on one person’s memory. There is a working model of this on the site: the interactive grant command center.
Purchase and personnel approvals
Requisitions, travel requests, timesheet exceptions and policy waivers routed by amount, department and delegation rules, with the approval history attached to the record. Your finance office gets a defensible trail instead of a forwarded thread.
Field and inspection reporting
Code enforcement, facility and playground inspections, park and fleet maintenance, and public works condition surveys captured on a phone with photos and location, validated at entry, and available in the same report the department already reads.
Program intake and eligibility screening
An intake form that checks eligibility as it is completed, routes the applicant to the right caseworker, and produces the counts your funder asks for. This replaces the PDF that gets emailed, printed, and typed in a second time.
Records and open records request tracking
Intake, assignment, the statutory clock, extensions, redaction sign off and closure, with a dashboard showing what is due this week. The clock is the part that is hardest to run out of an inbox.
Recurring report assembly
The monthly council packet, the quarterly state submission, the weekly command staff numbers. Collected, formatted and delivered on a schedule, with the same definitions every cycle.
The right first project is a process that runs at least monthly, touches more than one person, and has a deadline attached. Those three conditions together are what makes the saving repeat and makes the automation worth documenting.
Systems we work with
Microsoft 365 and the Power Platform
- Power Automate for scheduled and event driven flows
- Power Apps for canvas and model driven apps
- SharePoint lists, libraries and permissions
- Dataverse where a real relational store is needed
- Power BI and DAX for the reporting layer on top
- Power Query for shaping what the flow collects
Data behind the process
- Microsoft SQL Server
- Azure and Azure Data Factory
- Amazon Redshift
- Oracle SQL
- Salesforce and other CRM extracts
What the process runs on today
- Excel workbooks and shared drives
- CSV exports on a schedule
- Email approval threads and calendar reminders
- Paper forms and PDF intake
- Reporting views your software vendor already publishes
We will not claim familiarity with a records system, ERP or permitting platform we have not worked in. Where a flow has to reach a system like that, we build against the export or the published reporting view rather than asking your vendor for something new, which is usually both faster and easier for your IT staff to approve.
How the work runs
Four phases, the same on every Blue Peak project (how we work). Each phase is its own written scope, its own acceptance and its own invoice, which is what makes it easy to fit inside a small purchase.
Discovery
We sit with the people who run the process today and write down every step, including the ones that are not in the procedure. Then we agree which steps automate, which stay human on purpose, and what the finished flow has to prove. You get a written scope and a written quote before anything is signed.
Solution design
The routing rules, the approval levels, the data the app captures, where it is stored and who can see it get written down and reviewed with you. Exceptions get designed here rather than discovered later: what happens when an approver is out, when a request is rejected, when the source file is late.
Implementation
Flows and apps get built in your tenant and tested with your own staff on real cases, running alongside the manual process until it is clear the automation handles the awkward ones too. Failure alerting is part of the build, so a broken flow announces itself.
Optimization and handoff
Tuning after the first live cycles, then you get the flows, the apps, a written description of every rule, and a working session with whoever will maintain them. Everything sits in your tenant under your ownership. There is no hosted product to keep paying for and no code held back.
Who does the work
Our senior consultants lead every build, and the consultant who scopes your automation is the one who builds it. Our lead consultant brings twelve years in production analytics and Microsoft 365 delivery, across Power BI, the Power Platform and SQL Server.
That consultant led reporting on a $30M multi jurisdictional federal initiative from 2019 to 2022, building Tableau reporting on SQL Server, integrating grantee data across jurisdictions, and producing grant compliance reporting that passed federal funder review. At a national telecom the same consultant unified a sales pipeline spanning six source systems into one Power BI environment on Azure Data Factory and SQL Server, and built an analytics product line used by more than 100 people.
That record was earned before Blue Peak was formed, so we describe it as our people’s experience rather than as the firm’s past performance, on purpose. What you get is the people who did that work, with no junior handoff.
Questions agencies ask
Do we need extra licenses for Power Apps and Power Automate?
Check before you buy anything. Most Microsoft 365 plans include standard Power Automate and the ability to run canvas apps against SharePoint and Office data. Premium connectors, Dataverse and model driven apps need a paid plan. Which side of that line your project falls on is usually decided in design, and we will tell you which choice you are making before you make it. If you do need licenses, you buy them from Microsoft directly. We do not resell them and take no margin on them.
Will our IT department have to give you administrator rights?
No. We work in the environment your IT staff designate, with the least access that lets the work happen, usually a guest account in a single workspace or environment. Nothing is copied to a Blue Peak server and nothing goes to an outside service for processing. If agency policy rules out an outside account entirely, we can design and document the build and have your own staff apply it.
What happens to the automation if you disappear?
It keeps running, because it lives in your tenant under your ownership, not in a product we host. Handover includes the flows, the apps, a written description of every routing rule and validation, and a working session with whoever will maintain them. Your staff can change an approver, a threshold or a form field without us.
Is an automated approval defensible under our records and open records rules?
That is your records officer’s call and your retention schedule governs it, but the automated version is usually easier to defend than the email version. Every step is timestamped, attributed and stored in one place your agency controls, rather than scattered across individual mailboxes. We design retention and export into the build so a request can be answered from the system, and we will document exactly what is captured so your records officer can review it before go live.
What should we automate first?
The process that runs at least monthly, touches more than one person, and has a deadline attached. Those three together are what makes the saving repeat. A yearly process with one owner is rarely worth automating even when it is painful, and we will say so rather than sell you a project.
Do you work with agencies outside Kansas?
Yes. Blue Peak is based in Olathe, Kansas, works across the Kansas City metro and Missouri, and delivers remotely beyond both. The build happens inside your tenant, so distance changes nothing about the work. Blue Peak is a SAM.gov active small business, UEI PRPBEM9HEND3, CAGE 15CS5, registered under NAICS 541611, 541512 and 541690, and will complete whatever vendor registration your state or agency requires before an award.
More from Blue Peak
Analytics and reporting built for government work covers how Blue Peak contracts with public agencies, including UEI, CAGE and registered NAICS. Power BI dashboards for police departments shows the same approach at a small agency, and the public safety demo is a working dashboard built on published city data you can check against the source. The other two service pages are Power BI consulting, for the reporting the automation feeds, and SQL and data engineering, for the pipelines underneath both.
Send us the report you hate producing
Name the recurring report or the manual process that costs your team the most time. The approval chain nobody can reconstruct, the monthly packet somebody assembles by hand, the inspection forms that get typed in twice. One line is enough, plus a rough figure for how long it takes today.
You get an honest read back within one business day: what it would take, roughly what it would cost, and whether it is worth automating at all. If it runs once a year and touches one person, we will tell you to leave it alone.