🎯 Situation

Une équipe des opérations retail avait un rituel quotidien : exporter les ventes de la veille depuis leur système POS en CSV, l'ouvrir dans Excel, reformater quatre colonnes pour correspondre au modèle, le coller dans un fichier de suivi SharePoint, et envoyer un email au responsable des opérations avec un résumé.

👉 C'est l'opportunité d'automatisation la plus fréquente dans toute équipe des opérations — une tâche répétitive, structurée, prévisible qui se produit selon le même planning, avec les mêmes fichiers, dans le même format. Power Automate gère ça sans code.

⚠️ Challenge

📷 The daily manual process (2 hours × 5 people)

  • Export CSV from POS system — manually
  • Open Excel, reformat columns — manually
  • Paste into SharePoint tracking file — manually
  • Write summary email to manager — manually
  • If file format changes or someone is sick — process breaks

⚡ The automated flow (0 minutes × 0 people)

  • Trigger: new CSV file dropped in SharePoint folder (by the POS export)
  • Read CSV rows with Power Automate
  • Map columns to SharePoint list columns — once, at setup
  • Append rows to SharePoint list automatically
  • Send summary email with row count and totals — automatically

🔍 Analyse

The flow has four steps:

1. Trigger — "When a file is created in SharePoint folder" (the POS export drops a CSV here each morning at 5 AM) 2. Get file content and parse CSV — Power Automate's Parse CSV action reads the file and creates an array of rows 3. Apply to each row — loop through rows, append each to a SharePoint list with column mapping defined once 4. Send summary email — after the loop, send an email with the total row count and summed sales figure

Build time: 3.5 hours including testing. The formatting normalization that took 45 minutes manually was handled by two Apply to each steps with string manipulation functions (trim, toLowerCase, replace).

The SharePoint list became the central data store — the same list that Power BI connects to for the daily operations dashboard. No more email attachments. No more version confusion. One authoritative source, updated automatically every morning.

✓️ Bonne pratique

The three keys to making this kind of flow robust:

1. Add error handling — if the CSV file has unexpected columns or missing rows, the flow should alert someone rather than silently fail or partially complete 2. Log every run — write a log entry (timestamp, file name, row count processed) to a separate SharePoint list so you can audit what ran and when 3. Build column mapping as variables — when the source format changes (and it will), you update one variable, not 50 parallel branches in the loop

💡 Synthèse

Copy-paste data work is one of the clearest automation signals in any team. If someone is doing the same structured task every day with the same files, Power Automate can replace it — usually in an afternoon. The payback starts the next morning and compounds every single day afterward.

👉 If it's the same task, the same files, the same format — every single day — it should be automated.

One afternoon of setup. Years of time saved.