Capital Expenditure Management

Synopsis

• Business Challenge: Replace a fragmented, spreadsheet-driven capital expenditure process that was difficult to navigate, inconsistently followed, and lacked a clear end-to-end workflow.
• Solution: Centralized Power Platform application managing capital projects from initial request and conditional approval through expenditure tracking, invoice accounting, and final project closeout.
• Business Impact: Established a single operational platform for managing an approximately $85 million annual capital improvement budget, improving visibility, accountability, consistency, and financial oversight across seven manufacturing sites.
• My Contribution: Led discovery, process analysis, architecture, development, workflow and approval logic, financial ledger functionality, deployment, training, and ongoing support.

Business Challenge

The legacy Capital Expenditure process was used primarily by engineers across the organization and had evolved into a collection of interconnected Excel workbooks with no clear workflow and a poor user experience.

Engineers were expected to navigate confusing instructions, manually copy information between spreadsheets, and work within outdated entry formats. The process was cumbersome and difficult to follow, often resulting in incomplete submissions, additional work after approvals had already been granted, or, in some cases, the process being bypassed altogether.

Following the successful implementation of the organization's Document Control system, engineering leadership recognized the opportunity to modernize another critical business process and partnered with me to develop an internal solution.

Solution

Working closely with finance stakeholders, I designed and developed a centralized application that transformed the legacy spreadsheet process into a structured digital workflow.

The application guided engineers through every stage of the capital expenditure lifecycle, standardizing data collection while automating a sophisticated approval process. Approval routing was driven by business rules that adapted automatically based on project type, expenditure category, project timeline, and other business criteria.

Unlike the legacy process, the application continued to serve as the primary system after project approval. Engineers used the solution to manage project progress, record expenditures and invoices through an integrated ledger, and ultimately close projects with complete financial accountability. Finance used the application to facilitate approval meetings, review project information, monitor expenditures, and track capital projects throughout their lifecycle.

Business Impact

The application replaced a cumbersome spreadsheet-based process with a centralized platform that was easier to understand, easier to use, and significantly more consistent.

Engineers benefited from a guided workflow that improved the quality and completeness of capital requests while reducing administrative effort. Engineering leadership and finance gained a single source of truth for project approvals, expenditures, and project status throughout the life of each capital investment.

Rather than serving as a simple approval system, the application became the operational platform used to manage capital projects through completion, improving visibility, accountability, and consistency across the organization.

My Contribution

I led the project through the complete solution lifecycle, including business discovery, process analysis, solution architecture, application development, testing, deployment, user training, and post-deployment support.

Working directly with finance stakeholders, I translated a mature, spreadsheet-driven business process into a centralized enterprise application. I designed the application architecture, developed the workflow engine and conditional approval logic, implemented expenditure and invoice ledger functionality, and delivered a solution that supported the complete lifecycle of capital projects from initial request through final financial closeout.