Twelve weekly Excel reports became one sales dashboard.
Every Monday, a sales coordinator assembled twelve regional Excel reports from ERP exports — and by the time they landed, the week's decisions had already been made on gut feel. This is how a 60-person distributor turned that ritual into one Power BI dashboard that arrives every Monday morning without anyone touching it.
Twelve spreadsheets, one exhausted Monday.
The reporting week started before the selling week did. Every Monday, the sales coordinator pulled fresh exports from the ERP, opened the previous week's twelve regional workbooks, and worked through the same routine: paste in the new data, repair the formulas the paste had broken, check the totals against the ERP screen, and save out a fresh copy for each region.
Then came distribution — emailing each region its own file, fielding the inevitable "this number looks wrong" replies, and untangling versions whenever a manager edited a copy and sent it back. Pricing lived separately in SharePoint price lists, so any margin question meant cross-checking yet another file. Nothing about the numbers was dishonest; there were simply too many hands and too many copies between the ERP and the people reading them.
The deeper cost was timing. Sales managers held their Monday conversations before the reports arrived, so the week's calls, priorities and stock decisions were made on gut feel — and the workbooks, when they finally landed, mostly confirmed or quietly contradicted choices that had already been made. The numbers weren't wrong. They were late, and late made them irrelevant.
One model, one dashboard, refreshed while the office sleeps.
Instead of automating twelve spreadsheets, we removed the reason they existed — replacing the whole assembly line with a single Power BI build over the data the coordinator was already juggling.
A star-schema model built over the nightly ERP exports and the SharePoint price lists — the same two sources the coordinator merged by hand, now joined once, centrally, the same way every week.
A single dashboard replaced the twelve regional workbooks. Every region reads from the same page and the same definitions, so "whose number is right" stopped being a Monday conversation.
From the top line down to any region, any rep or any SKU — the questions managers used to email the coordinator about are now answered by clicking into the visual itself.
Power BI subscriptions deliver the dashboard to every manager on Monday morning. Nobody compiles, formats or forwards anything — the numbers are simply waiting when the week starts.
The Monday scramble, retired.
Three numbers tell the before-and-after: how many reports exist, what the coordinator got back, and when the sales team sees its data.
The service behind this build — and two more Power BI stories.
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