Manufacturing Partner
(Client name withheld by request to protect proprietary infrastructure details)
Impact: 11 Systems Consolidated to 2, 70% Fewer Errors, & Six-Figure Cost Savings
The Challenge
This manufacturing business had major, well-known clients across the Americas — but internally, their data was old and scattered across an aging infrastructure. The result was business processes that couldn’t keep pace with the scale they were operating at.
The Discovery
We started the way we always do: by diving into the business as granularly as possible. That meant a full review of their IT infrastructure and a complete mapping of their processes — five departments and more than 100 individual processes in total — from warehouse and inventory management to sales and customer support, across every system in their tech stack, including their ERP, CRM, and internal proprietary software. What we documented became the cornerstone of a proper digital transformation plan, not just a list of upgrades.
Execution & The Human Side of Change
We consolidated 11 disconnected systems down to just 2, migrating the full infrastructure to a modern platform with zero downtime over the course of about a year and a half — opening the door to new technologies and better integrations going forward.
Migrations like this — new ERP, new CRM, new ways of doing daily work — live or die on one thing: whether the people using the systems actually accept them. That’s the part most technology partners underweight, and it’s the part we treat as seriously as the infrastructure itself.
Rather than a blanket rollout, training was focused on the roughly 5% of the team who work directly with these systems day to day, backed by a two-week, all-hands-on-deck support window immediately after go-live for anything that came up. Staff were fully confident on the new platform within about two weeks — a smooth enough transition that it felt more like an upgrade the team had already bought into than a disruption.
The Impact on Business Processes
The efficiency gains were immediate and measurable. By centralizing their data and eliminating legacy bottlenecks, we fundamentally changed how their teams operate:
- Accelerated Reporting: Reporting cycles that previously consumed an entire workday were reduced to two hours maximum, reclaiming hundreds of hours of administrative time annually.
- 70% Reduction in Manual Errors: By automating data flows between the newly consolidated systems, manual data entry—and the costly errors associated with it—dropped by roughly 70% across all five departments.
- Unlocking Strategic KPIs: With fast, reliable data finally available, we built entirely new dashboards that gave leadership unprecedented visibility into real-time metrics, from granular product category trends to true departmental sales performance.
Adapting in Real Time
Partway through the engagement, the business — a Canadian company serving U.S. customers — was hit with the tariff volatility affecting cross-border trade. We leveraged our Power BI expertise to build dynamic dashboards that could be adjusted on demand as requirements shifted: a calculation that used to take a couple of hours by hand now runs in seconds, and updating the dashboards for new rules has never disrupted day-to-day operations. It became one of the highest-impact pieces of the engagement.
The Bottom Line & Ongoing Partnership
Between the infrastructure consolidation, the process efficiencies, and the tariff dashboards, the combined value delivered has been in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Beyond the project itself, we’ve continued as their vCIO for the past three years — helping plan and map their technology roadmap for the mid and long term.