Surrey Search & Rescue, a voluntary specialist search team operating in the charity sector, play a crucial role in assisting emergency services in locating missing vulnerable adults and children. With a dedicated team of over 80 individuals and search dogs, they are on call 24/7, covering Surrey and its surrounding areas. This case study explores how they use Encodian’s Power Automate Connector, Flowr, and, more specifically, its Populate Word Document action to save their volunteers numerous hours.
One of the critical challenges faced by Surrey Search & Rescue was the need to maintain accurate and accessible records for their search dog team’s training and assessments. This was essential for operational readiness and a requirement of Lowland Search & Rescue standards. The manual recording and storing of this information were time-consuming and posed the risk of inaccuracies.
Surrey Search & Rescue found a solution in Encodian Flowr, a powerful automation tool. The team implemented 1 Power Automate flow that involved capturing outputs from a Microsoft Form and using Encodian’s Flowr Populate Word Document Action to dynamically create a document. This is then automatically added to a shared folder for those who need access to have it at the click of a button. This streamlined their record-keeping process and ensured accuracy and compliance with industry standards.
By adopting Flowr, Surrey Search & Rescue estimates saving 60 hours of invaluable voluntary time annually. This newfound efficiency allows the team to focus more on their core mission – responding to emergencies and helping locate missing individuals.
Power Automate flow
Hours estimated build
Hours saved
Surrey Search & Rescue’s adoption of Flowr has addressed their need for accurate and up-to-date records and has resulted in significant time savings, ensuring their dedicated team remains agile and ready to respond to emergencies. Saving over 60 hours a year with one Power Automate Flow that took a couple of hours to set up is precisely why Flowr exists. The successful integration of Encodian Flowr demonstrates how innovative automation tools can make a substantial impact, especially in voluntary emergency organisations where every second counts.
Find out why Flowr gives you more for your action compared to Power Automate
100MB data size
Rich text/HTML support
Repeating sections (nested arrays, headers, footers, etc)
Dynamic table creation
Conditional expressions (eg. if/else)
Dynamic bookmarks
Hyperlink insertion
Images (arrays, resizing, URLS & Base64)
Document insertion (merging document content)
Control characters (eg. line break & page break)
Template configuration: JSON data/n data fields
10MB data size
No rich text/HTML support
Limited repeating sections
No dynamic table creation
No conditional expressions
No dynamic bookmarks
No hyperlink insertion
Limited image configuration
No document insertion
No control characters
Hardcoded Word template configuration
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