The Challenge
A Cork-based manufacturing company producing specialist components for the construction sector employed 45 people and had recently won several large contracts. But their management reporting was struggling to keep up with the business.
Every month, the finance manager and her assistant spent three full working days consolidating data from four separate systems: a production planning tool, a sales CRM, an inventory management database, and their accounting package. None of these systems spoke to each other — so everything had to be exported to CSV, cleaned manually in Excel, matched with lookups, and assembled into a master report by hand.
The process was error-prone. A misaligned paste or an incorrect VLOOKUP could silently corrupt the figures. The management team had begun to distrust the numbers, which was creating friction at board level and slowing down decision-making.
The breaking point: A reporting error that understated production costs by 12% for an entire quarter — discovered only when auditors flagged a discrepancy — prompted the finance manager to look for a better solution.
The Audit Findings
The Data Sensum free productivity audit mapped the entire reporting workflow and found the following pain points:
- Four data sources with incompatible export formats, requiring manual normalisation each month
- No version control on the master report — overwritten each cycle with no audit trail
- VLOOKUP-heavy Excel model with hidden dependencies that broke when source data changed format
- No automated data validation — errors only caught if someone noticed something looked wrong
- Report delivery always late, meaning management decisions were being made on last month's data
The Solution
We designed and built a scheduled ETL pipeline that runs automatically on the first working day of each month. The pipeline:
- Connects directly to all four source systems via API and secure database connection
- Extracts, cleans, and standardises the data into a unified schema
- Applies business logic to calculate margins, production efficiency ratios, and inventory turnover
- Loads the results into a Power BI dashboard and a locked Excel summary report
- Runs a suite of data quality checks and sends an alert if anything looks anomalous
The management team now receives a link to the completed dashboard on the morning of the first working day — rather than waiting until mid-month for a manually assembled report.
Added benefit: Because the pipeline runs on live data, the team can now generate an up-to-date snapshot at any point during the month — something that was previously impossible.
The Results
What previously took 3 full working days now takes 15 minutes of automated processing. The finance manager and her assistant reclaimed 6 full working days per month between them — time now spent on financial analysis and forecasting rather than data wrangling.
Error rate dropped to zero in the first six months of operation. Management confidence in the numbers improved immediately, and board reporting became significantly more efficient.
"We went from dreading month-end to barely noticing it. The data is just there, it's correct, and we can actually use it to run the business rather than spending three days producing it."
— Finance Manager, Cork Manufacturing Company