Labor Union Swag Request Automation

A regional labor union replaced recurring manual data entry with an automated intake, notification, and inventory workflow.

Client overview

Our client is a regional labor union representing thousands of workers across the grocery, retail, and cannabis industries. Their Special Projects team coordinates branded merchandise for members, staff, and high-visibility events spanning multiple divisions. As programs expanded, the volume and complexity of requests quickly outgrew the process built to handle them. Client name withheld at client's request.

The challenge

Every swag request arrived through a public web form, landed in a shared email inbox, and had to be hand-transcribed into a tracking spreadsheet, line by line, size by size. For the labor union's staff, this meant hours of recurring work each week:

Copying form submissions into logs manually
Chasing missing or unclear details from submitters
Reconciling errors introduced by manual entry
Producing reports with no real-time visibility

Requests spanned three distinct categories, general member giveaways, cannabis division promotions, and internal staff gear, each with complex size matrices that had to be carefully tracked against inventory. The process had no realistic path to scale.

The solution

Technology Navigators designed and deployed a fully automated intake and tracking system that replaced the manual workflow end-to-end. Submissions now flow from a redesigned intake form, through an orchestration layer, and into a live inventory log and formatted team notification, all without a human touching a spreadsheet.

What we built

Smart intake form. A Jotform front end uses conditional logic, collapsible sections by swag category, and separate size matrices for cannabis and regular staff gear.
Real-time orchestration. A Microsoft Power Automate flow triggers on each submission, parses the form data, and sends it to both team email and structured spreadsheet logging.
Formatted email summaries. Conditional rendering shows staff only the items that were requested, without blank fields or noise.
Live inventory log. Every request is written to a SharePoint-hosted Excel workbook across more than 20 fields, including requester details, event context, item quantities, and size breakdowns.
Division-aware data model. Cannabis and regular staff swag flow into separate reporting segments for downstream analysis.
Full documentation. A technical manual stored on SharePoint allows the team to maintain and extend the system independently.

Stack: Jotform · Microsoft Power Automate · SharePoint Online · Excel Online

Results and impact

The labor union's Special Projects team has reclaimed hours of recurring work every week, gained real-time visibility they never had, and built a foundation for scaling member and staff engagement programs without scaling headcount. What was a week-by-week scramble is now a background process.

100%

Elimination of manual data entry for all swag requests

20+

Data fields captured automatically per submission

Instant

Team notification the moment a request lands

Single source of truth for inventory demand 24/7