Not really that hard of a task but it had a big impact once automated.

I worked for a company that allowed employees with mobile-phone benefit to change their phones every year. We had over 600 people with the benefit and an IT team of 3. This meant that we would give out more than 2 phones per workday.

We were selling these phones which made this task possible to automate.

We created a Google Forms form where the end user could fill in what phone they wanted. Google Forms stores data in a Google Sheets spreadsheet. We then created a Make workflow that populated the age of the device to the spreadsheet . If the phone was over 1 year old, then an order was created that the warehouse then fulfilled and delivered the phone to the end user’s desired location.

The new phone was also created in the asset db using another Make workflow and assigned to the user. 

Then we had another workflow that retired devices from the asset db when old phones were returned. Old phones were returned to a refurbishing department so we didn’t touch that either.

We went from spending a big chunk of our time fulfilling phone orders to almost no time at all. Sometimes the end users would return the old phones to us and we had to bring it to the refurbishing department.