DACH industrial · post-ERP reporting
Strategic reporting for an industrial manufacturer
Austrian metal surface-finishing company · two plants · hundreds of B2B customers
Before
Strategic questions answered by multi-day manual Excel work—or not at all.
After
A complete strategic report per plant, monthly, automatically—reconciled against accounting totals.
What was stuck
The ERP captured data—but management still couldn't answer basic strategic questions without days of manual Excel work.
Customer ranking, product-group margin, contribution per account: the answers existed across hundreds of exports and spreadsheets.
Decisions about pricing, capacity, and customers were made on feel.
- 01Understand
- 02Design
- 03Build
- 04Measure
01Understand
We started with the data the ERP actually produces—not with a reporting tool. We analyzed a full year of order exports across both plants and mapped how an order flows from entry to invoice.
That surfaced the real obstacles: revenue dates that didn't reflect invoicing reality, orders that existed only on invoices, classifications that had to be derived from process steps.
Success was defined in business terms: reliable customer ranking, revenue by product group, and margin per customer—automatically, every month, reconciled against accounting totals.
02Design
The design was a data pipeline with one source of truth: validated master data, business rules in one place per plant, and one monthly run producing a management report as PDF and Excel.
Technology followed the design: a plain, maintainable pipeline on the company's own infrastructure. No new platform to license.
03Build
The pipeline was built report by report, each verified against known figures. Where ERP data was wrong or incomplete, the pipeline says so explicitly—accounting totals always reconcile.
Deployed on the client's environment for both plants. The company can operate it without us.
Measure
Metrics agreed upfront
- Customer ranking by revenue and margin
- Revenue by product group
- Margin per customer account
Before
Management decisions made on feel—profitability by customer did not exist in any report.
After
Leadership sees customer profitability and product-group performance monthly, without manual assembly.
Management now sees strategic numbers that previously did not exist in any report.
Definition of done: Figures are confirmed with the client before publication. The pipeline reconciles against accounting totals on every run.
In one line
A company that had just bought an ERP was still blind at the strategic level. Now leadership gets the numbers that matter, every month, without anyone assembling them by hand.