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Case Study
Mid-size Manufacturing Company
Industrial manufacturing · 220 employees
Monday sales reports cut from 9 hours to 20 minutes.
Problem
Every Monday, two analysts spent nine hours stitching together sales reports from SQL Server exports, three regional spreadsheets, and a legacy ERP extract. By the time leadership saw the numbers, the week was already half gone.
Solution
We connected Power BI directly to SQL Server, modelled the fact and dimension tables in a semantic layer, and rebuilt the weekly deck as a live dashboard. Refreshes were scheduled overnight so Monday started with clean numbers.
Result
Reporting time dropped from nine hours to twenty minutes. The two analysts got their Mondays back and the sales team started reading the dashboard on their phones before the standup.
What we actually did
- Audited 14 existing reports and killed 9 that nobody opened.
- Modelled a single sales fact table with clear grain — one row per invoice line.
- Wrote 22 documented DAX measures replacing spreadsheet formulas nobody understood.
- Trained two internal analysts to own the model after handover.