A mid-sized manufacturer replaces four disconnected systems with one ERP and closes the month in three days
Precision components manufacturer
A manufacturer with two plants and a distribution warehouse ran finance, inventory, production, and procurement on four systems that agreed with each other only after a fortnight of reconciliation. We implemented ERP as a single system of record around their actual shop-floor process, and put BI on top so the numbers leadership saw were the same ones the plant worked from.
14 → 3
working days to close the month
measured from the third month after go-live
4 → 1
systems of record
accounting, warehouse, planning spreadsheet, and procurement email retired
Daily
margin by product line
previously estimated once a quarter
−23%
inventory holding
with no increase in stockouts, from planning against real demand
The situation
Finance ran on an accounting package. Inventory lived in a warehouse system that did not talk to it. Production scheduling was a spreadsheet maintained by one planner, and procurement was email. Month-end took fourteen working days, most of it spent finding out why inventory valuation in the warehouse system disagreed with the ledger — and it always did.
Margin per product line was a quarterly estimate. Nobody could say, on a given Tuesday, whether a large order was profitable to accept. The finance director's stated goal was a five-day close; the operations director's was that the planner could take a holiday without production stopping.
What we did
- 01
Process first, software second
Six weeks walking the flow from customer order to shipped pallet with the people who did each step, recording every hand-off and every workaround. The resulting process map, not a vendor template, became the configuration specification.
- 02
Finance and inventory on one ledger
General ledger, payables, receivables, and multi-location inventory implemented first, with inventory valued in the same system that books it. The warehouse system was retired the day stock was counted into the new one.
- 03
Production planning from the same data
Bills of materials, routings, and material requirements planning replaced the spreadsheet. Work orders consumed inventory and booked labour to the job as it happened, so actual cost per order was known when the order shipped.
- 04
Procurement with commitment control
Requisition-to-pay with approval workflows and three-way matching. Budget holders saw committed spend at requisition, and supplier invoices matched automatically against receipts.
- 05
BI on the governed data
A semantic layer defining margin, on-time delivery, inventory turns, and cost variance once, with dashboards for the board, the plant, and the sales team reading the same definitions. The quarterly margin estimate became a daily figure.
“For the first time, when I quote a job I know whether we make money on it. That alone paid for the project.”
— Managing Director, Precision components manufacturer
Solutions used
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