A regional distributor was logging equipment and process downtime on paper at the point of occurrence, then re-entering it into a spreadsheet once a week, a process that ate several hours of administrative time and meant downtime causes weren’t reviewed until whatever caused them had already happened multiple times. Details here are illustrative of the type of engagement and outcome typical for TekNation’s manufacturing and logistics clients, generalized to protect client confidentiality.
The starting point
Floor supervisors were filling out a paper downtime log whenever a line or process stopped, noting the time and a rough reason. Once a week, someone in the office retyped every entry into a shared spreadsheet, a task that consistently took most of an afternoon and was often delayed when that person was out or busy with something else. By the time the data was compiled, it was a week old, and any pattern in the reason codes was easy to miss.
What the assessment found
The paper log itself wasn’t the core problem. The gap was the week-long delay between an event happening and anyone reviewing it in aggregate. Reason codes were also inconsistent between supervisors, since there was no standard list to choose from, which meant “downtime” got logged in a dozen slightly different ways for what were often the same three or four recurring causes.
What TekNation built
TekNation replaced the paper log with a Microsoft Forms entry accessible from a shop floor tablet, using a standardized dropdown of downtime reason codes instead of free text. Power Automate picked up each submission immediately, logged it to a SharePoint list, and updated a running summary automatically, no weekly re-entry required. A Power Automate flow also flagged the shift supervisor’s phone when the same reason code recurred more than twice in a single day, surfacing a pattern the same day it started rather than a week later. This kind of automation is covered more generally in Power Automate 101.
The result
The weekly re-entry task disappeared entirely, freeing up roughly a half day of administrative time every week. More significantly, a recurring material-shortage issue that had been showing up inconsistently in the old paper logs became visible within the first two weeks of the new system, since the standardized reason codes made the pattern obvious instead of buried across a dozen different phrasings.
Why the reason code standardization mattered as much as the automation
Automating a broken process just makes the broken process faster. The real shift here was pairing automation with a standardized, limited set of reason codes, which turned scattered notes into data that could actually be aggregated and trended. That combination, not the automation alone, is what made the recurring issue visible. It’s the same principle behind good reporting generally, covered in why most production dashboards fail.
If your team is still manually re-entering data from paper logs or disconnected spreadsheets, TekNation can assess what that process would take to automate.
This kind of result comes from the same operational intelligence approach covered in our full managed IT overview.
Frequently asked questions
Does a project like this require replacing existing systems?
No. This project layered Microsoft Forms and Power Automate, tools already included in most Microsoft 365 business plans, on top of the existing process without touching the distributor’s core WMS or ERP.
How long did the shift from paper to automated logging take?
The Forms setup and Power Automate flows were built and piloted with one shift within about a week, with full rollout across all shifts completed shortly after.