A Fortune 500 manufacturer with 8,000 employees across 12 plants operated in reporting silos, each location managing its own Excel-based dashboards. We unified operations, finance, and supply chain reporting on a single Tableau Server platform, automating data flows from SAP and enabling self-service analytics for 400+ users.
The client operated 12 manufacturing plants across North America, each generating its own operational, financial, and supply chain reports in Excel. While each plant's reporting was accurate, leadership had no consolidated view of inventory turns, production efficiency, or margin performance across the enterprise. Month-end consolidation took weeks and required manual reconciliation by the finance team.
The company had already invested in SAP ERP and wanted to leverage the data asset they were generating. They needed a modern BI platform that could scale to 400+ users, provide self-service analytics, and reduce the operational burden on their finance and operations teams.
We implemented a three-layer architecture, starting with a rigorous data inventory to map all reporting sources, building automated ETL pipelines from SAP, then deploying Tableau Server with governance, role-based access, and a structured training program.
The problem wasn't technology — 12 plants were already running SAP. The problem was that no one had done the data modeling work to make the SAP asset usable for enterprise reporting. Aizen's Diagnose stage surfaced that before a single dashboard was built.
Audited every plant's Excel reporting suite. Catalogued KPIs, identified inconsistencies in how the same metric was calculated across locations, and mapped each KPI back to a SAP table or module. Wrote a brief before any Tableau work was scoped.
Three-domain data model designed (operations, finance, supply chain). Architecture decision record documented which SAP tables owned which KPIs. Tableau governance model — content collections, row-level security by plant, publishing rights — written before any server was provisioned.
Python ETL pipelines from SAP built and validated domain by domain. Tableau Server deployed with governance controls. Six months from first stakeholder interview to 400+ active users trained across all 12 plants, with train-the-trainer resources in place.
Nightly refresh cadence operational with automated error handling. Local IT teams running the environment with documented runbooks. Finance team time previously spent on Excel consolidation redirected to strategic analysis. Operations teams making decisions on current data for the first time.
Manual Excel work eliminated through automated data pipelines and self-service dashboards. Finance team reallocated from consolidation to strategic analysis.
Real-time and near-real-time dashboards replaced weekly Excel refreshes. Operations teams now make decisions on current data, not one-week-old snapshots.
Democratized analytics across all 12 plants. Operations, finance, and supply chain teams all self-service, reducing BI team bottlenecks.