How Romeo Engineering saved 115+ hours a year with automation.
A one-person civil and structural engineering consultancy replaced repetitive OneDrive and Excel administration with a structured Microsoft 365 onboarding system.
93%
Reduction in manual admin effort
15 minutes → under 1 minute
115+
Hours saved per year
Returned to engineering work
< 60 sec
Full onboarding setup
Previously 15 min of manual steps
~5 mo
Simple payback
$12k investment at $250/hour
The challenge
Every new job started with 15 minutes of manual admin.
Romeo Engineering Consultants is a one-person civil and structural engineering consultancy in South Australia. Every new job required around 15 minutes of manual setup, including:
- Creating folders
- Preparing documents
- Copying data between Excel tabs
- Manually entering job information
Across the year, that added up to more than 150 hours spent on administration instead of billable engineering work.
The existing setup was also difficult to scale. Files were stored in OneDrive, data lived in Excel, and future team members would not have a clean central system to work from.
The solution
One form submission. Everything done in under a minute.
Elevion AI built a Microsoft 365 automation system that now handles Romeo Engineering's client onboarding process and moved the business from OneDrive and Excel into a cleaner SharePoint structure.
The system now automatically:
Total time from form submission to completion: under 60 seconds.
The result is a more reliable system that supports Romeo Engineering's daily workflow today and provides a scalable foundation for future team growth.
The automated workflow
A standardised process for every new job.
Custom job forms
Job details are captured once in a structured format, removing the need to repeatedly enter the same client and project information.
Folders and documents
The system creates job folders, generates key documents, and populates them with the relevant client and project data.
Tasks and notifications
Tasks and email notifications are created automatically, while structured project data is stored in SharePoint Lists.
“I am a sole operator within my business. I am an Engineer, Drafter, Administrator, Accounts Manager and everything in between. I reached out to Elevion Consulting to see if I could buy some time back and focus on what was truly important to the business. Ethan made the whole process seamless. What used to take 15 minutes per job now happens automatically in under a minute and has eliminated errors from manual data entry. I no longer need to create folders and documents that were time consuming and low value. I can focus on engineering and growing the business.”
REDirector
Romeo Engineering · South Australia
Key takeaways
What made this work.
More engineering capacity
More than 115 hours are recovered each year for engineering and client work instead of repetitive job administration.
Fewer data-entry errors
Client and project details are captured once and reused across the onboarding workflow, reducing manual copying and re-entry.
A scalable operating foundation
Structured data in SharePoint Lists replaces disconnected OneDrive files and Excel tabs with a cleaner system for future team growth.
Approximately five-month payback
At $250 per engineering hour, 115 hours represents at least $28,750 in annual capacity value against an approximately $12,000 project investment.