A global hand-tool manufacturer had accumulated three separate reporting platforms over a decade — each with its own licensing cost, filtering syntax, and skill requirement. Allari consolidated all three onto Power BI across Sales and Manufacturing domains, validated feature parity, and established a standing monthly cadence so the dashboards evolve with the business rather than freezing at cutover.
- Sector
- Industrial Manufacturing / Hand Tools
- Work type
- BI Modernization
What the consolidation produced
Platform consolidation
3 → 1
Three legacy reporting platforms consolidated onto Power BI for Sales and Manufacturing domains.
Feature Parity
Validated
Filtering behavior matched against the legacy reporting platforms so end users retained full capability.
Iteration
Monthly
Standing monthly Changes & Issues cadence so dashboards evolve with the business rather than freezing at cutover.
Delivery Model
Same team
BI modernization delivered by the same delivery team running JDE production support — no vendor silo.
Diagnosis
The Reporting Fragmentation Problem
A decade of platform accumulation
The manufacturer had accumulated three separate reporting platforms: a desktop BI tool for general analytics, a JDE-native report writer for ERP-specific output, and a mobile reporting platform for field access. Each added its own licensing cost and operator burden.
Fragmented view: Sales reports and manufacturing dashboards were split across the three platforms. There was no single source of truth — answering a cross-domain question required pulling from at least two systems.
Skill lock-in: Each tool had its own filtering syntax, refresh cadence, and required skill profile. Knowledge could not be consolidated — a change in one platform did not propagate to the others.
DIAGNOSIS: Redundant licensing, siloed knowledge, and a mobile platform approaching deprecation — with no consolidation path in place.
Why This Mattered for the Business
Sustainment risk was growing
Vendor sustainment for the three legacy platforms was becoming harder to manage in parallel. The mobile reporting platform's deprecation loomed, creating urgency — but a hasty migration without feature parity would erode user trust and force retraining.
Meanwhile, the manufacturer's relationship with Allari already covered JDE production support. The same team held institutional knowledge of the underlying JDE data model — which meant BI modernization could happen without a cold start.
Legacy Platform Types
- Desktop BI tool
- JDE-native report writer
- Mobile reporting platform
Intervention
Phase 01
Inventory & Consolidation Map
- Catalogued every existing report across all three legacy platforms
- Identified overlap, duplication, and gaps between Sales and Manufacturing views
- Documented filtering logic and refresh dependencies per platform
- Produced a consolidation map as the governing artifact for Phases 02 and 03
Phase 02
Sales domain — Power BI rebuild
- Rebuilt Sales reporting on Power BI with explicit feature-parity matching
- Filtering behavior matched against the legacy system — stated success criterion
- End users retained every filter combination from the prior platform
- Data validated against legacy source systems before cutover
Phase 03
Manufacturing domain + ongoing iteration
- Extended Power BI consolidation to Manufacturing domain
- Established standing monthly Changes & Issues cadence
- Dashboards evolve with the business — not frozen at cutover
- Cross-domain Sales and Manufacturing visibility unified on a single platform
Operating Model
Delivery coordination — same team, no silo
- Request Classification: BI requests routed alongside JDE tickets
- OpenBook® transparency — cost visibility across ERP and BI workstreams
- 15-Minute Work Measurement — every unit of BI work tracked
- Embedded teams — no separate BI vendor or inter-team handoff
What the engagement delivered
The manufacturer did not need more reporting tools. It needed fewer — unified under a single platform that its delivery team could maintain, extend, and validate without switching contexts. Power BI provided that platform.
The feature-parity requirement was the key structural constraint: migration is only credible if users do not regress. By cataloguing legacy filtering behavior before rebuilding, Allari ensured that the consolidation was a net gain, not a trade-off.
The monthly iteration cadence transformed the engagement from a one-time project into a continuous service. Dashboards that evolve with the business are fundamentally different from dashboards frozen at go-live — they remain decision-ready as the organization changes.
Client identity withheld at customer request. This engagement profile describes the operating scope and approach. Confirm current scope and reference availability with Allari.
Frequently asked
Why did the manufacturer consolidate three reporting platforms instead of maintaining them separately?
Each legacy platform — a desktop BI tool, a JDE-native report writer, and a mobile reporting platform — carried independent licensing costs, its own filtering syntax, a distinct refresh cadence, and a separate skill profile. Operators could not move knowledge between tools, sustainment was becoming harder, and one of the platforms was approaching deprecation. Consolidating onto a single Power BI layer eliminated the redundant cost structure and created a unified source of truth across Sales and Manufacturing.
How did Allari ensure end users did not lose capability during the migration?
Allari catalogued existing reports before rebuilding and made feature parity a stated success criterion. During the Sales-domain build, the team matched filtering behavior against the legacy system, preserving the users’ existing filter combinations alongside Power BI’s interactions.
What does the 'monthly iteration cadence' mean in practice?
After the initial consolidation, a standing monthly Changes & Issues cadence was established. Rather than freezing the dashboards at cutover and issuing tickets for every subsequent change, the engagement includes a structured monthly cycle to evolve the dashboards as the business changes — new sales regions, manufacturing line adjustments, updated KPI definitions. The dashboards stay current without requiring a new project each time.
How was this BI modernization connected to the manufacturer's existing JDE production support?
The Power BI work was delivered by the same delivery team that runs JDE production support for this manufacturer. BI requests are routed and classified alongside JDE tickets under the same Request Classification framework. There is no separate BI vendor, no inter-team handoff, and no communication gap between the ERP layer and the reporting layer — the team that understands the JDE data model is the same team building and maintaining the dashboards.
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