Reporting your production, sales and finance teams all agree on
Your ERP knows what you made. Finance knows what you invoiced. Nothing knows both at once. We join them up, then build the reporting on top so margin, delivery and scrap stop being a matter of opinion.
No pitch, no obligation.
This is for manufacturers who have outgrown spreadsheets
You are probably not short of data. You have an ERP, a finance package, something running the shop floor, and a folder of spreadsheets holding the whole lot together. The problem is that none of it agrees, and getting an answer means asking someone to build a report first.
That is fine at ten people. At fifty or two hundred it starts costing real money, because decisions get delayed until the numbers are argued out, and by then the month has moved on.
We are not an ERP reseller and we are not going to tell you to replace anything. We connect what you already run, agree once what each figure means, and put the answers somewhere everyone can reach them.
You will recognise this if
- Month end depends on one person and their spreadsheet
- Production and finance quote different output figures
- Nobody can say which products actually make money
- Delivery performance is measured by memory
- Reports were built by someone who has since left
The numbers manufacturers ask us for
Six that come up in almost every conversation. Yours will differ at the edges, and the point of the first call is to find out how.
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True margin by product and customer
Not list price minus standard cost. Actual margin once materials, labour, scrap and rework are counted against the job.
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On time, in full delivery
Measured against the date you promised rather than the date you rescheduled to, and broken down by customer and line.
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Scrap, waste and rework
What it costs by product, shift and machine, so you can tell whether a problem is a process or a particular Tuesday.
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Order book and forward load
What is committed, what is at risk, and whether the next eight weeks fit through the capacity you actually have.
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Stock and consumable usage
What is moving, what has been sat there for a year, and where usage has quietly drifted away from forecast.
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Revenue against last year
Like for like comparisons that survive a customer being renamed, a product being recoded or a site being reorganised.
Why manufacturing data is harder than it looks
Most analytics work assumes a clean sale of a single item. Manufacturing does not work like that, and generic reporting tools quietly get it wrong.
Units change as things move. You buy by the tonne, make by the batch and sell by the pallet. Any figure that ignores the conversion is wrong by a factor nobody notices until year end.
A job is not an order. One customer order can span several works orders, part deliveries and credit notes. Tying revenue back to what was actually produced takes deliberate modelling, not a join on order number.
Time is not tidy. Shifts cross midnight, weeks cross months, and a batch started on Friday finishes on Monday. Getting daily and monthly figures to agree means deciding once which side of the line things fall on.
Names change and history matters. Customers get renamed, products get recoded, sites merge. Comparing this year to last year properly means handling all of that rather than losing the history.
What we do about it
- Unit conversions handled once, centrally
- Orders, works orders and despatches modelled properly
- A calendar that agrees with your shift patterns
- Renames and recodes tracked, so history survives
- Every definition written down and owned by someone
How we build it
Four stages, each producing something you keep whether or not you carry on to the next.
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Data audit
We map which system holds what, where your figures diverge and why. Usually this alone settles an argument that has been running for years.
You keep the findings in writing. -
Warehouse
One modelled source built from your ERP, production, stock and finance data, loading automatically overnight without anyone pressing a button.
Reconciled against your current reports. -
Reporting
The figures that drive decisions, on desktop and on a phone, with the definition behind each one agreed before it is published.
Built in stages, useful from the first. -
Governance and handover
Access by role, sensitive figures restricted, definitions documented and a named owner for each number that matters.
Yours to run without us.
What we build it on
Mainstream Microsoft tooling rather than anything exotic, so another supplier could pick it up tomorrow if you ever wanted them to.
SQL Server and Microsoft Fabric
Where your data lands and gets modelled. Both are widely supported, so you are never dependent on one person knowing a niche tool.
Power BI
Where the reporting lives. If you already have Microsoft 365 licences, you are most of the way there already.
Your existing systems
Read from, never replaced. Nothing is installed on production equipment and nothing changes in the systems your people already use.
Manufacturing analytics questions
The practical ones we get asked before anyone commits to anything.
What is manufacturing analytics?
Bringing production, order, stock and finance data together so you can answer questions about margin, delivery performance and waste from one agreed set of figures, rather than from separate exports that disagree with each other.
Which systems can you pull data from?
Most ERP and MES systems, finance packages, CRMs, weighbridge and shop floor systems, and spreadsheets. If it has a database, an export or an API, it can usually be read. Where a system is genuinely closed, we work from its scheduled exports instead.
Do you need to install anything on our shop floor systems?
No. We read from your systems rather than changing them. Nothing is installed on machines or on the production line, and your existing systems keep running exactly as they do now.
Can reporting be limited so people only see their own site or department?
Yes. Access is set by role, so a site manager sees their own site, a sales manager sees their own accounts, and finance sees everything. Sensitive columns such as cost or pay can be hidden from people who do not need them.
Will the reports work on a phone or a tablet on the shop floor?
Yes, and they are designed for it rather than shrunk down from a desktop report. A phone layout is built deliberately, with fewer figures per screen and touch sized controls.
How do you make sure the new numbers are right?
Everything is reconciled against the reports you already trust before it goes live. Where a new figure differs from an old one, we show you exactly which records cause the difference and let you decide which is correct.
Start with the numbers that annoy you most
Thirty minutes on a video call. Tell us which figure you do not trust, and we will tell you whether it is fixable and roughly what it would take.
- Completely free, no obligation
- No sales pitch, no slide deck
- Nothing to prepare beforehand
- An honest answer if we are not the right fit
Or tell us what is not adding up
Describe it in your own words. We reply within one working day.
Send us a message
The more specific you are about which systems disagree, the more useful our first reply will be.