The Atelier · Sapiency, the practice of Ahmad Alawami
Inside one build.
Most advisory work is presented from the outside: the deck, the summary, the after. This is the inside — the actual system that ran the twelfth Saudi Film Festival's guest operation, drawn as the machine it was. Scroll to move through it.
Seven weeks · one person · built while the festival was in motion
Stage 01
One conditional form
Six separate sign-up forms and their manual routines were folded into one bilingual form carrying fourteen conditional rules. Every guest enters the system through this single door — which is why everything after it can be trusted.
- 6 → 1 forms consolidated
- 14 conditional rules
- 2 languages, one record
Stage 02
The governed master
An eighteen-sheet system with one master at its centre: 771 records, 619 of them guests, across ten accreditation classes and more than forty fields. Contact coverage was rebuilt from almost nothing to roughly 90% phone and 66% email.
- 771 records, one source of truth
- 18 sheets feeding and fed
- ~90% phone coverage, rebuilt
Stage 03
The quality layer
Eleven automated checks across three severity levels orbit the master continuously. In a single pass they surfaced 712 issues across roughly 700 people and forty-plus fields. A standing guardrails document governed every hand and every script that touched the live data.
- 11 checks, 3 severities
- 712 issues surfaced in one pass
- 0 values invented — doubtful cases went to a human
Stage 04
The messages
A logged mail-merge carried roughly 714 personalized bilingual messages by email and WhatsApp — 141 invitations across four waves, 158 hosting messages, 415 ceremony passes — with anyone who had declined removed from the send list automatically.
- ≈714 messages, every send logged
- 4 invitation waves
- 415 ceremony passes issued
Stage 05
The manifest pipeline
A daily bilingual arrivals-and-departures manifest, rebuilt around twenty to thirty times across the festival week. Own-car and no-reception guests excluded from pickups automatically; the airline derived from the flight number. The operations manager preferred these printed sheets to a live arrivals board I had built — so the board was shelved, and the sheets shipped.
- 20–30 rebuilds across the week
- 2 languages, daily
- 1 good tool shelved, on purpose
Stage 06
The dashboard
A small live web application on top of the master: hosting periods, nationality and home city, the opening-ceremony funnel — and every figure traceable in one click back to the row it came from. That gold thread, from the chart to the record, is the whole philosophy of the build.
- 1 click from figure to source row
- 330/335 clean reconciliation — 99%
- 1–2 wks full-time work saved on countable tasks · estimate
One person did the diagnosis, the build, and the handover. That is the practice.