The challenge
The Infrastructure Sustainability Council (IS Council) is one of Australia's leading certification bodies for sustainable infrastructure and buildings. When a major project wants to prove its sustainability credentials, IS Council's rating process is how it does it. That work matters. Certification shapes how billions of dollars of infrastructure is designed, built and operated.
Behind the scenes, the certification process ran on spreadsheets. Project teams compiled evidence, IS Council staff checked it, and the back-and-forth happened through files passed around by email. Every submission meant hours of manual handling: chasing missing information, reconciling versions, re-keying data and assembling reports by hand.
That approach had a hard ceiling. Because staff time scaled with every submission, the only way to certify more projects was to hire more people. Demand for sustainability certification was growing, and the process was becoming the bottleneck on IS Council's own mission. Manual handling also made the experience slower and more frustrating for the project teams IS Council serves, many of whom are large contractors and asset owners used to digital workflows.
IS Council needed to take a process that lived in spreadsheets and turn it into a platform project teams could use themselves, without losing the rigour that gives the certification its value.
Our approach
Design the end-to-end workflow
We mapped the certification process from first enquiry to final rating and designed a platform around it. Every step that had relied on someone opening a spreadsheet was redesigned as a structured task in the product.
Make it self-serve
The core idea was simple: let project teams do their own submissions. We built a portal where teams submit and track their evidence, see what's outstanding and move through the process without waiting on IS Council staff for every step.
Build on a stack that fits the organisation
We built the front end on Bubble and the data backend on Microsoft Power Platform. That combination let us move quickly while keeping the data in an environment IS Council could govern and extend.
The results
The platform replaced spreadsheets with a structured, self-serve certification workflow. Project teams now handle their own submissions, and IS Council staff focus on assessment instead of administration.
The saving is concrete. The platform saves more than $10,000 in staff time on every certification submission. Multiply that across a year of certifications and the impact on IS Council's capacity is significant. Most importantly, the organisation can now grow the number of projects it certifies without adding headcount at the same rate, which means more infrastructure assessed against sustainability standards.
The experience improved for project teams too. A structured portal is easier to work with than a chain of emailed spreadsheets. Teams can see where they are, what's missing and what happens next, which reduces delays on both sides.
The project also gave IS Council a digital foundation to build on. With its data in a structured platform, the organisation can look at reporting, analytics and new services that were impractical when everything lived in files. We are continuing that work today on IS Council's data platform.
“Working with Lightning Products has been very good. We weren't replacing a legacy system but creating something entirely new, which meant there wasn't a detailed requirement sheet to follow. Lightning Products excelled in adapting to a brief that was intentionally open-ended, allowing us to figure things out collaboratively. Their ability to adjust as we learned and their shared sense of vision made them a fantastic partner.”
What this means for your business
If a core process in your organisation still runs on spreadsheets and email, your growth is capped by how many people you can hire to push files around. That's true for certifiers and peak bodies, and just as true for any business running approvals, applications or compliance by hand.
We turn those processes into platforms your customers can use themselves, while keeping the rigour that makes your service valuable. The result is lower cost per transaction, a better experience for the people you serve, and room to grow. If you can point to the spreadsheet that runs your business, we can show you what it looks like as a product.
