Supply chain and manufacturing
80% less time to a forecast, 90% less manual reporting
Not every data problem needs a warehouse. Sometimes it needs the manual work removed from a process that already works.
5 million rows · ERP and planning systems
Context
A manufacturer’s supply chain team was producing sales forecasts, vendor performance reports and MRP inputs largely by hand. The source data lived in the ERP and financial planning systems; getting it into a usable state was a recurring manual exercise measured in days, repeated every cycle.
The problem
Five million rows of extracted data being handled manually is slow, but the real cost is error. Manual MRP input files introduce layout mistakes that propagate into planning. Manual vendor reporting is skipped when people are busy, which is exactly when it matters. And a forecast that takes days to produce is out of date by the time anyone reads it.
What we did
- 01Consolidated five million rows out of the ERP and financial planning systems into a live sales forecast dashboard.
- 02Automated vendor performance reporting end to end, including distribution, so it ran whether or not anyone remembered.
- 03Automated the production of MRP input files, enforcing the required layout programmatically so malformed inputs could not reach the planning system.
- 04Supported the wider analysis the team needed around it: supply chain mapping, value at risk, total cost of ownership, demand analysis and KPIs.
Outcome
- Data extraction time reduced by more than 80%, turning a multi-day forecast into a live dashboard.
- 90% of the manual vendor reporting process eliminated, along with the risk of it being skipped.
- 50% of the MRP process automated, removing a whole class of layout and transcription error.