The Challenge

A mid-size manufacturing company was making critical business decisions based on spreadsheets. Every Monday, three analysts spent the first half of their day compiling data from 6 different systems — ERP, production floor sensors, CRM, supply chain management, accounting, and HR — into 14 separate Excel reports for leadership.

The reports were always at least 3 days old by the time they reached decision-makers. Production issues that should have been caught on Tuesday weren’t visible until the following Monday. Supply chain disruptions were identified after they’d already caused delays.

What We Did

We placed a team of 3 — a data engineer, a backend developer, and a frontend developer with dashboard experience. The first phase was data pipeline construction: building ETL processes that pulled data from all 6 source systems into a cloud data warehouse on a near real-time basis (15-minute intervals for most sources, hourly for the ERP).

The second phase was dashboard development: an interactive web application with role-based views for production managers, supply chain leads, finance, and executive leadership. Each view showed the metrics that mattered for that role, with drill-down capability to the underlying data.

The Approach

We prioritised the highest-impact reports first. The production efficiency dashboard went live in week 3, giving floor managers real-time visibility into output rates, defect rates, and machine utilisation. By week 5, supply chain tracking was live. By week 8, all 14 reports had been replaced.

The key design decision was making the dashboards self-service. Leadership could filter by date range, product line, facility, or supplier without asking an analyst to run a custom report. The three analysts who previously compiled spreadsheets were reassigned to actual data analysis — identifying trends and opportunities instead of copying numbers between systems.

The Result

All 14 manual reports eliminated. Leadership now has real-time access to every metric they previously waited a week to see. Production issues are identified and addressed the same day. The three analysts redeployed to strategic analysis identified two supply chain optimisations in their first month that saved the company more than the entire dashboard project cost. The platform processes over 2 million data points daily and hasn’t required manual intervention since launch.