Case study · Industrial operations · Client confidential
From a 9-day reporting cycle to 36 hours.
A multi-site industrial operation with five units was rebuilding management reporting manually every month from a legacy ERP environment.
The starting point
The visible request was reporting. The underlying friction was upstream.
Each unit exported operational data, worked it in spreadsheets and contributed to a manual monthly consolidation. The reporting cycle took nine days and management visibility depended on repeated reconciliation work.
A new dashboard alone would have put a better interface on top of the same fragile process.
What changed
Simplify the reporting flow, then automate it.
- Standardise the source data and reporting definitions.
- Centralise the consolidation logic instead of reproducing it in spreadsheets.
- Automate variance detection across the five units.
- Expose the resulting management view through executive reporting.
Result
36 hours instead of nine days.
The rebuilt process reduced the reporting cycle from nine days to 36 hours, added automated variance alerts across five units and gave management a more current operational view.
Technology used after the process redesign: SQL Server, Power BI, Python and Azure Data Factory.
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