When the ERP Exists, but Management Information Remains in Excel (Case Study)

A meat production and packaging business, employing approximately 110 people, had had an ERP system installed for four years. It worked normally for invoicing, raw material inventory, and payroll. The problem lay elsewhere. Every month, the finance manager manually prepared in Excel a cost analysis by production batch, pulling data from five different system reports and stitching them together alone. This work took more than two weeks, and by the time it was ready the numbers were already 'stale', which was especially problematic in a sector where the price of raw material changes from week to week.

Management had paid for a modern system and continued to make its decisions by looking at a manually prepared Excel file.

The review of the system showed that the problem was not the ERP itself. It was its initial configuration. Cost centres had been set up roughly, without any logical connection to the actual production stages: cutting, packaging, freezing. The critical issue of yield, meaning how many kilograms of finished product are produced from each kilogram of raw material, was not recorded systematically anywhere. Each shift recorded its own yield on paper, and each did it in a different way.

The system, therefore, contained part of the information, but no one could extract it in a useful form, and the most critical part, yield by batch, was not even recorded in the system.

The work began in reverse: not from the system screens, but from the question 'what does management want to see every week?' We arrived at four core reports: cost by type of production and by batch, yield of kilograms of raw material into finished product by type, profit margin by customer and by item, and operating result by business unit.

On this basis, the cost centres were restructured so that they corresponded to the real production stages, and a mechanism was created for recording yield by batch directly in the system, so that the quantity of raw material entering production would automatically be linked with the quantity of finished product produced.

At the same time, the entire route was mapped, from receipt of raw material to shipment of finished product, and a double weighing control stage that added nothing and only delayed the line was removed. Finally, one person inside the business was specifically trained so that they could maintain the logic of the system themselves, without needing external help for every small change.

Reports that used to require almost two weeks of manual work are now produced automatically, in a few minutes, using data from the previous day. Within the first month of operation of the new system, management identified that one specific packaging line had a noticeably lower yield compared with the others, something the old, 'blurred' costing system had never shown, because no one had ever systematically compared yields between lines.

The value of an ERP is not judged by how modern or expensive it is. It is judged by whether someone, before configuring it, sat down and decided exactly what the business needs to see every week, especially in a sector where raw material yield directly determines the margin. Without this work at the beginning, even the best system ends up as an expensive recording file, not a decision-making tool, and the business continues to live in Excel next to a system it never truly uses.