Enterprise Audit Platform Migration: Appian to Microsoft Power Platform
A Tier 1 Bank's internal audit management platform — serving 400+ users across the UK and India — was migrated from Appian to Microsoft Power Platform, delivering ~£2 million in annual licence savings, 92 Dataverse tables, 88 Power Automate flows, and a fully unified Microsoft stack with AI-powered productivity gains.
Sector
Financial Services · Internal Audit
Technology
Microsoft Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, Dataverse, Azure
Scope
Full platform migration
Users
Tables migrated
Automate flows
Annual licence savings
The Challenge
A £2M Annual Cost and No Strategic Alignment
A Tier 1 Bank's enterprise internal audit management platform had been built on Appian, serving audit teams across the UK and India. While functional, the platform had become a strategic liability.
With annual licence costs running at approximately £2 million, tooling siloed from sister applications such as FLOD and CRG, and an architecture that prevented internal staff from extending or supporting the system, the case for migration was unambiguous.
The Solution
A Design-First Migration to Microsoft Power Platform
The migration was a comprehensive lift-and-transform — not a like-for-like replacement, but an opportunity to re-engineer for modern capabilities. Delivered as a partnership between Remarkable Dynamics (now part of Formulate) and the bank's internal project team, the approach began with architecture and design before any code was written.
01.
Platform Architecture & Data Model
Before any build began, a high-level Entity Relationship Diagram (ERD) was produced — mapping the full complexity of the Appian data structures to a new 92-table Dataverse schema. This design-first approach preserved relational integrity while correcting legacy structural debt and introducing new capabilities.
88 Power Automate flows replaced Appian process models, covering approvals, notifications, and data operations. SharePoint was integrated as the document management backbone, and five security roles with dynamic access teams provided record-level access control. Comprehensive entity versioning was introduced across all key records — a significant capability enhancement over the original platform.
02.
Data Migration Engine
Data migration spanned three generations: a legacy system pre-dating Appian, the Appian operational dataset, and the new Dataverse environment. Dedicated Power Automate migration flows extracted, transformed, validated, and loaded thousands of records — all within the same governance and security perimeter as the application itself.
Each migration run produced validation reports reviewed and signed off by the bank's testing team before records were committed, providing a complete audit trail of the migration process and giving the business confidence in data completeness ahead of go-live.
03.
MI Reporting: SQL & Tableau to Power BI
The reporting layer was migrated from SQL and Tableau to Power BI — 15 reports with up to 15 tabs each, serving 410 users across 2,300 auditable entities. Usage-specific semantic models were built for each reporting domain, keeping queries fast and row-level security aligned to the application's five security roles.
Where Tableau chart types had no direct Power BI equivalent, bespoke custom visuals were developed using the Power BI Visuals SDK. Reports are embedded directly within the Power Apps interface, eliminating the need for users to switch tools — an improvement on the previous Tableau setup.
The Outcome
£2M Saved, Unified Stack, AI-Powered Productivity
The migration delivered a platform that is not only less expensive to run, but more capable, more governable, and fully owned by the bank's own team. What began as a cost-reduction exercise concluded as a genuine capability advancement — with the internal audit platform now sharing a unified Microsoft foundation with related applications across the bank.
Licence Savings
~£2 million in annual Appian licence costs eliminated, with the platform now running on the bank's existing Microsoft stack.
AI Productivity
Multi-day audit tasks reduced to under an hour through AI-assisted features — a transformational productivity gain for audit teams across two countries.
Unified Stack
The internal audit platform now shares the Microsoft Power Platform foundation with FLOD and CRG, enabling consolidated governance, simpler support, and a system extensible by bank staff.
Formulate: enterprise migration with long-term ownership built in.
The Next Step
Planning a platform migration?
Whether you are evaluating a move away from a legacy or third-party platform, or need to align disparate systems onto a single stack, our team has delivered this at scale.
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