A 50-year-old manufacturer with 300 employees had all their data locked in ERP and Excel silos. No visibility into production efficiency, supply chain performance, or real-time inventory. We built the data platform they'd needed for a decade.
The company had been manufacturing successfully for half a century, but their data infrastructure hadn't evolved with them. The ERP system — originally installed in the early 2000s — held most of the transactional data, but production staff had built an entire shadow reporting system in Excel to fill the gaps.
Plant managers ran weekly meetings off spreadsheets that took two people a full day to compile. Supply chain visibility ended at the ERP's purchase order screen. And inventory counts? Those happened quarterly, manually, because nobody trusted the system numbers.
The key constraint: this is a manufacturer that runs 24/7. We couldn't disrupt production, couldn't replace the ERP, and couldn't ask people to change how they worked overnight. Instead, we built a data layer that sat on top of everything — pulling from every system, unifying the data, and delivering it through dashboards people could actually use.
Cataloged every data source across the operation — ERP, MES, supply chain tools, Excel files, even the Access databases that a few departments still relied on. Mapped entity relationships and identified the canonical source for each metric.
Designed and built a modern data warehouse in Azure Synapse with dimensional models for production, inventory, supply chain, and financial analytics. Structured for both historical trend analysis and real-time operational views.
Built Azure Data Factory pipelines connecting every source system — including custom connectors for the legacy ERP and MES APIs. Data flows on automated schedules with monitoring, alerting, and retry logic built in.
Created Power BI dashboards for plant managers, supply chain leads, and the executive team — production efficiency, inventory positions, supplier performance, and financial KPIs, all from a single source of truth.
Built on Azure for scalability and reliability, with SQL Server bridging legacy systems to the modern warehouse. Every component was chosen for long-term maintainability — this platform needs to run reliably for years, not just pass a demo.
Twelve weeks after kickoff, the manufacturer had a fully operational data warehouse with automated pipelines from every major system and real-time dashboards on screens across the plant floor and in every leadership office. For the first time in the company's 50-year history, everyone was looking at the same numbers.
Reduction in reporting overhead — the two full person-days spent compiling weekly reports dropped to automated dashboard refreshes that take minutes
Inventory optimization identified — unified visibility across ERP, MES, and supply chain revealed overstock patterns and slow-moving inventory worth hundreds of thousands
Production efficiency dashboards on the plant floor — operators and managers see OEE, throughput, and downtime metrics updated continuously throughout the shift
Single source of truth across operations, supply chain, and finance — ending the "my spreadsheet says different" conversations that plagued every leadership meeting