From scattered Excel to a system that runs itself

The context

The client is an industrial services company with a team that mixes office and field work. The business was running well, but the way they managed it had outgrown its tools: each department had its own spreadsheet, and which version was the good one depended on who you asked.

The challenge

Orders were logged in one Excel file, technicians' work reports in another and stock in a third that almost never added up. When someone updated a sheet, everyone else fell out of date. The team lost hours rewriting the same data in different places, and transcription errors ended up in faulty delivery notes and in phone calls to fix them. There was no way to see, at a glance, how the month was going.

What we did

We started with the consultation: a couple of sessions to understand how information really moved, not in theory. From there we designed a custom web application that became the single source of truth for the whole team.

• We centralised orders, work reports and stock in a single database.
• We automated the calculations and alerts that used to be done by hand.
• We added a dashboard with the key business metrics in real time.
• We set up role-based permissions, so each person sees what they need.
• We trained the team and left documentation so they can work on their own.

Results

Day-to-day operations stopped depending on duplicated spreadsheets. Data is entered once, reports come out on their own, and management knows how the month is going without asking anyone for the file.

I don't know how we put up with Excel for everything for so many years. Marc built us a custom application and the difference is huge: what used to be chaos now runs itself.