L&D automation: retiring the spreadsheet that ran training for 2,000 people

The Learning & Development team at Stanbic IBTC was drowning in spreadsheets. Training data for over 2,000 employees was collected manually through Excel files on SharePoint, generating a 90% error rate, approval cycles that stretched beyond five days, and no real-time visibility for anyone. I was brought in to fix it, owning the solution from requirements through go-live.

The existing process was entirely manual. Employees filled in Excel templates, emailed them to HR, who then chased managers for approvals via email before manually consolidating everything into a report. At peak periods the pressure was acute: hundreds of submissions, no validation, no audit trail, and a team stretched thin trying to reconcile it all.

• ›90% error rate from manual data entry: wrong formats, missing fields, duplicate submissions
• ›Approval cycles averaging 5+ days with no automated reminders or escalations
• ›No real-time visibility into submission status for employees or HR
• ›Manual report consolidation consuming significant HR bandwidth every cycle

• Existing licences onlyThe solution had to be built on tools the organisation already licensed. No procurement cycle, no new vendor, no additional per-seat cost across 2,000 users.
• Adoption decides everythingA system 2,000 employees route around is worse than the spreadsheet it replaced. Simplicity and low change-management friction were requirements, not preferences.
• Peak-period volumeThe design had to hold at the moments the manual process collapsed: hundreds of submissions arriving in a short window.

Four groups touched the process daily: employees submitting training requests, line managers approving them, the HR and L&D team consolidating and reporting, and leadership needing visibility into training compliance. The design gave each a distinct surface: a validated submission form for employees, a Teams-and-email approval flow for managers, exception-only alerts for HR, and live dashboards for leadership.

The first two weeks were stakeholder interviews and requirements finalisation: walking the manual process with the people who ran it, cataloguing where the errors actually entered (formats, missing fields, duplicates), and where the days actually went (email-based approval chasing and manual consolidation). The findings pointed the design at two levers: validate at the point of entry, and automate the hand-offs.

Replace every manual step with an automated, validated, auditable workflow, using the Microsoft stack the bank already owned. Make bad data impossible to submit rather than expensive to clean: predefined categories, mandatory fields, budget-limit checks in the flow. And invert HR's role from processing everything to handling exceptions; the system alerts them only when intervention is needed.

• option 01Harden the spreadsheet processLocked templates, macros, and stricter procedures. Cheapest option, but it leaves the structural problems intact: email as the workflow engine, no live status, and consolidation still manual.
• option 02Procure a dedicated training management systemPurpose-built features, but a procurement cycle, licence cost across 2,000 seats, and an integration project, all to solve a process problem the existing tenant could already handle.
• option 03Build on Power Platform inside the existing tenantThe chosen path. Power Apps, Power Automate, SharePoint, and Power BI were already licensed, deployable immediately, and familiar enough to keep training and change management light.

• Strict validation over submission flexibilityDropdown categories and mandatory fields mean an employee occasionally cannot express an unusual request the free-text spreadsheet allowed. That rigidity is precisely what removed the 90% error rate; the edge cases route through HR as exceptions.
• Platform fit over feature depthA dedicated LMS would offer richer training-management features than a Power App. The bank needed clean data, fast approvals, and visibility, and it needed them in twelve weeks, not a platform program.
• Exception-based oversight over full HR reviewLetting the workflow auto-route approvals means HR no longer sees every request pass through their hands. The Power BI dashboard replaced that manual touch with better visibility than reviewing ever provided.

1. Weeks 1-2Stakeholder interviews and requirements finalisation
2. Weeks 3-4Power App prototype build and SharePoint list setup
3. Weeks 5-6Power Automate approval workflow development
4. Weeks 7-8Power BI dashboard build and integration testing
5. Weeks 9-10User acceptance testing and training delivery
6. Weeks 11-12Go-live deployment and post-launch support

Employees submit through a mobile-friendly Power App with dropdown menus for predefined training categories, mandatory field validation, and instant confirmation. Each submission triggers a Power Automate workflow: validation against budget limits, an approval request to the line manager via Teams and email, automatic status updates to SharePoint, and outcome notifications back to the employee. SharePoint Online holds the data under role-based access control, and a Power BI dashboard gives HR live submission counts, approval rates, and breakdowns by department, training type, and time period.

Click to expand

Dashboard

Click to expand

Submit Request

Click to expand

My Requests

Click to expand

Manager Approvals

Click to expand

Submission Confirmed

Within three months of going live, 95% of the 2,000+ employee base had adopted the platform. Error rates in training data dropped by 90%. What had been a five-day approval cycle collapsed to under 24 hours. HR reclaimed significant bandwidth previously lost to manual consolidation and chasing approvals, and leadership gained real-time visibility into training compliance for the first time.

Beyond the numbers, the project demonstrated something more important: the right digital solution, built around how people actually work, does not need to be complex to be transformative.

• ›Validate at the point of entry, not the point of reconciliation. Every error prevented in the form is an error nobody has to find, chase, and fix downstream.
• ›Adoption is designed, not hoped for. Building on familiar tools, keeping the app simple, and delivering training before go-live is why 95% of employees actually switched.
• ›Exception-based workflows scale where review-everything workflows drown. HR's bandwidth returned the moment the system only asked for their attention when something needed it.