Reporting automation: from 2.5 days to 2 hours
Manufacturing company
Industry and type of organization
A manufacturing company. The monthly management report was produced by hand, assembled from many data sources.
Business problem
The monthly report for the board was produced by hand and took 2.5 days: gathering numbers from many sources, assembling them into a whole and checking them. The board learned the result of the past month with a delay of a few days, and every manual transfer of numbers risked a mistake.
Behind this stood a deeper, non-technical problem: the report delivered many indicators, but only some of them actually influenced the board's decisions.
Approach and scope of work
We started with the question of which decisions this report is meant to support, and with defining the KPIs. Then we ordered and unified the data into a single source of truth, so that everyone computes the same indicators the same way. The recurring gathering, cleaning and combining of data from many sources, that is the ETL process, we automated in Power Query. We also designed changes in the ERP system so that the data leaves it in a form ready for the report, without manual rework.
At the end came the visualization: the state of the company and the key metrics on a single screen, so that they answer the question about business health before anyone has time to ask it.
Business effect
2.5 days → 2 hours
preparing the monthly report
the same report, a fraction of the time
The time recovered went back to the team for analytical work, instead of assembling numbers by hand. The report is now ready almost immediately after the month closes and shows the current picture of the company, so decisions have something to rest on.
Scale of the implementation
A monthly reporting cycle, data from many sources. The process standardized once and repeatable in every subsequent period, without building it from scratch.
If you suspect your data would answer questions you decide today by gut feel, describe your reporting process to us. We will see what can be read out of it.
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Service area: Data analysis, reporting and decision support.