Perth Management Consulting Firm
Achieves 85% Efficiency Gain in Project Delivery

A leading Perth-based management consultancy was struggling with inefficient project delivery workflows. Their consultants spent over 60% of their time on administrative tasks — project setup, document management, status reporting, and resource allocation — leaving less than four hours in every working day for the actual advisory work clients were paying for.

Document approval bottlenecks in SharePoint were a recurring source of project delivery delays. Consultants would submit deliverables for sign-off, then wait days for approvals to move through an informal chain of emails and calendar invitations. There was no structured workflow to track where a document sat in the review process, which meant project managers were chasing approvals manually rather than progressing engagements. On some projects, critical deliverables were delayed by a week or more simply because the approval routing had no automated trigger.

Client reporting compounded the problem. Status updates and project summaries were compiled manually by each consultant, resulting in inconsistent formats, varying levels of detail, and no standard structure that clients could rely on across different engagements or project managers. The firm needed to modernise its operations to remain competitive in the Australian consulting market — and that meant rebuilding the administrative layer from the ground up.

Lakestone.ai implemented a comprehensive automation solution using Microsoft Power Automate as the orchestration platform, integrated with Azure AI for intelligent document processing and SharePoint for centralised project management.

The decision to build entirely within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem was deliberate. The firm was already paying for M365 licensing across the organisation — adding a separate automation platform would have introduced new vendor contracts, additional training overhead, and integration complexity. By building on Power Automate, every flow we designed worked natively with the SharePoint libraries, Teams channels, and Outlook inboxes the consultants already used daily. Adoption was faster and the ongoing maintenance footprint was smaller.

We mapped the firm’s consulting project lifecycle into distinct stages — scoping, delivery, review, and close-out — and designed Power Automate flows specific to each stage. Document approval routing was rebuilt as a structured workflow: when a consultant submits a deliverable in SharePoint, the appropriate approver is notified automatically via Teams, given a clear deadline, and the status is tracked in real time. Azure AI Document Intelligence handles data extraction from contracts and briefing documents, removing the manual re-keying that had been eating into billable hours at project initiation.

Technology Stack

• Microsoft Power Automate: Central workflow orchestration platform — chosen for native M365 integration, eliminating third-party vendor overhead
• Azure AI Document Intelligence: Intelligent extraction of data from project documents, contracts, and client briefings
• SharePoint Online: Centralised document management with structured approval workflows replacing ad hoc email chains
• Microsoft Teams: Automated notifications, approval prompts, and project stage transitions
• Power BI: Real-time project analytics and standardised client reporting dashboards generated automatically at each project milestone

Consultants who previously spent the majority of their week on administrative overhead now direct that time toward billable advisory work. The shift has been measurable in utilisation rates: consultants are logging more chargeable hours per month without working longer days, because the non-billable administrative layer has been automated away. For the firm, this translates directly to increased revenue capacity from the same headcount.

Client satisfaction has improved alongside delivery consistency. Because every engagement now follows the same automated reporting cadence — with standardised status updates generated automatically at each project stage — clients receive predictable, comparable updates regardless of which consultant is leading the engagement. Several clients have noted the improvement in reporting quality without prompting. The approval bottleneck that had been delaying deliverables by days has been replaced by a tracked, time-bounded workflow that surfaces blockers before they become delays.

Project delivery efficiency improved by 85%, allowing consultants to focus on high-value strategic work rather than administrative tasks. The firm can now handle significantly more concurrent projects with the same team size while maintaining quality standards.