Dataflow Solutions, Workflow & Automation Consultancy

Sydney, working Australia-wide

Manual work is a choice.

We find what shouldn’t be done by hand, and we build what replaces it. Sometimes that is a few hours of automation. Sometimes it is an application. We start by working out which.

Selected outcomes
Recovered labour cost discrepancy identified and resolved $3M
Compliance management-reported labour costing completion, full financial year 96%
Tools delivered in production use 9
Business units across one organisation 4

Figures from delivered work. Client organisations and individuals are not identified.

The pattern

Nobody sets out to do work by hand. It accumulates.

A report gets built once as a favour. A spreadsheet grows a second tab, then a fourth. Two systems that were never meant to be compared start getting compared, by a person, every month. None of it was a decision, and that is exactly why nobody revisits it.

The cost is rarely the hours, though the hours are real. It is that your most capable people spend their attention on assembly instead of judgement, and that decisions get made on numbers nobody fully trusts.

We are not attached to any particular technology. We are attached to the manual step disappearing.

What we do

Whatever ends the manual work, and nothing more than that.

Automation

Process automation

Work that repeats, needs no judgement, and still costs someone their week. Systems that hold different versions of the truth. Compliance tracked as a team total when the problem is always an individual. We take the manual step out entirely rather than making it faster to perform.

Applications

Custom applications

When the process does not fit any tool you can buy, we build the tool. Web, desktop and mobile. Real software, designed around how the work is actually done, and built to keep running without its author standing next to it.

AI

AI solutions

Reading documents, classifying, drafting, pulling structure out of material that has none. We use AI where the difficulty is genuinely judgement, and conventional code everywhere else. We keep a person in the loop wherever being wrong would matter.

Platform

Microsoft 365, Dynamics & Power Platform

SharePoint, Power Query, Power BI, Power Automate, Dynamics. Most organisations are already paying for far more capability than they use. Often the fastest result comes from turning on what you own rather than buying something new.

How it goes

Four steps, in this order.

  1. 1

    A conversation

    You describe what is taking too long. We ask what happens either side of it. Usually 30 minutes is enough to tell whether there is something worth building.

  2. 2

    Follow the work

    We map the process as it is actually performed, not as the procedure describes it. The gap between those two is where most of the wasted effort lives.

  3. 3

    Build the right thing

    Sometimes a few hours of automation, sometimes a full application. Whichever it is, you see it early enough to tell us it is wrong. Not a platform, not a migration, not a licence you did not need.

  4. 4

    Hand it over

    Documented, owned by your team, and yours to change. If you would rather we kept hosting it, ran the AI side of it, or stayed on to extend it, that suits us. The point is that you choose.

Richard Ferretti, Founder and Lead Consultant at Dataflow Solutions

Who you’d be working with

A project engineer who builds software.

Dataflow Solutions is led by Richard Ferretti. The work above comes from a decade inside heavy asset maintenance (planning, scoping, compliance, budgets) and from building the tools that made those jobs survivable. That order matters: the process is understood first, and the software follows.

More about Richard

Start here

Tell us what’s taking too long.

A short conversation is usually enough to tell whether there’s something worth building. If there isn’t, we’ll say so.