From Spreadsheet Chaos to Real-Time Operational Intelligence
The Challenge
A mid-market UK manufacturing group with three production sites came to us with a familiar symptom: month-end close took 11 working days and the board never fully trusted the numbers. Inventory accuracy sat at 67%, and the operations director was spending 60% of his time gathering data rather than making decisions. Every previous attempt had treated the late close as a finance problem — and none of them had worked.
Our Approach
Rather than accept the slow close as the problem, Altiora embedded with the operations, planning and finance teams to find its real cause. We shadowed how work actually happened across all three sites, mapped 47 business processes and traced the symptom upstream — the true issue wasn't finance at all. Production planning, inventory and reporting each ran on disconnected spreadsheets, so finance spent every month reconciling unreliable data. We diagnosed 23 critical integration gaps and set the order in which to fix them.
The Solution
Once the cause was clear, our own team designed, built and deployed the fix in-house — no handoff to a third-party developer: a custom production planning module replacing 14 separate spreadsheets; automated inventory management with real-time stock visibility across all sites; an integrated reporting system that cut month-end close from 11 days to 2; and an executive dashboard giving the board live operational KPIs. We then stayed on to run and optimise it.
Results & Impact
Within six months the business had transformed how it operated, describing the change as going from running in the dark to running from a cockpit. Because one partner had diagnosed, built and now ran the system, the group went on to acquire two further businesses and integrate them in 8 weeks each — a process that previously would have taken 12-18 months.
Related reading
Explore the services, solutions and perspectives connected to this topic.