30 broken flows nobody owned — now documented and monitored.
Years of ad-hoc Power Automate flows — built by departed staff and long-gone vendors — quietly ran this 200-person logistics company. Then approvals started failing silently, and nobody could say which flows still mattered or whose license they ran on.
Automation everyone relied on — and nobody owned.
The flows had accumulated the way they always do: one urgent problem at a time. An approval here, a notification there, a scheduled report built by a vendor whose contract ended years ago. Each one made sense to the person who built it, and almost none were written down. As staff moved on, their flows stayed behind — still running, still wired into the company's daily approvals, with no owner, no documentation and no one left who could explain what they did.
The failure mode was the dangerous kind: silence. A Power Automate flow that errors doesn't stop the business with a bang — the approval simply never arrives. Requests sat unanswered while everyone assumed someone else was being slow. And because flows run on the connections of whoever built them, an account disabled during offboarding could quietly take a working process down with it — the first anyone heard of it was a request going nowhere.
Cleaning up looked as risky as leaving it alone. Nobody knew which flows still mattered, so nothing could safely be switched off; nobody knew whose license each flow ran on, so every account change was a gamble. The company didn't need another automation project — it needed someone to take ownership of the estate it already had.
Inventory, triage, repair — then watch it weekly.
This was a rescue, not a rebuild. On a Growth retainer, we worked through the estate in strict order: know everything that runs, keep only what earns its place, and make sure nothing can fail silently again.
Every flow in the tenant went into one inventory: what it does, what it touches, who built it, and which account and license it actually runs on.
Flows whose process no longer existed — 40% of the estate — were retired. Fewer moving parts, fewer mystery licenses, less noise around what remains.
The survivors moved off personal accounts and onto service accounts, so the next resignation can't take an approval chain down with it.
The 30 flows that were failing were fixed one by one — connections restored, broken steps re-pointed, each run until its run history came back clean.
Each surviving flow now has plain-language documentation: its purpose, its owner, its connections, and what to check when something looks wrong.
Every survivor sits on a weekly run-history review, so a failed run is a line in a report we act on — not a silence the business discovers later.
What changed.
No new platform and no rebuild — the same automation the company already had, now owned, documented and watched. Three numbers tell the story.
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Book a free 30-minute audit — we'll look at what's actually running in your tenant, who owns it, and show you exactly where silent failures could be costing your team time.