Case Study: Food Manufacturer – Monthly Reports
Objective
A food manufacturing company was spending significant time each week manually preparing reports for their board meetings. This process involved gathering data from multiple sources, compiling it into Excel, and then manually creating a PDF to present key insights. The company needed a more efficient solution to automate this process, reduce manual effort, improve data accuracy, and ensure reports were ready before a crucial Monday morning deadline.
Solution
We developed a custom Excel template designed to automatically pull data from various sources and populate key metrics into pre-built tables and charts. This streamlined the data gathering process, ensuring accuracy and consistency across all reports. To further simplify the presentation of insights, we automated the generation of a PDF document that summarised key data and insights.
This PDF report, designed for easy reading, was generated without the need for manual intervention, ensuring that the leadership team received a professional, ready-to-use summary of key data every week.
Additionally, the entire process was automated to run each Monday morning, ensuring that the PDF report was auto generated and distributed by email to the relevant team members well ahead of their deadline.
Results/Impact
The automation of the monthly reporting process led to a 50% reduction in the time spent preparing reports. The improved data accuracy and consistency also helped the company make more confident decisions during meetings, as all key metrics were up to date and reliable.
With the automated report generation and distribution every Monday morning, the team was able to consistently meet their deadlines without stress.
The new system allowed the company to focus more on analysing the data rather than preparing it, and the automated PDF ensured a professional, polished delivery of insights at each board meeting.