Manufacturing and distribution: from the ERP to a number the board understands
The ERP holds almost everything and shows almost nothing. Why ERP reports do not answer management questions, what has to come out of it, and how to cross that with what happens outside the plant.
In manufacturing and distribution the problem is rarely missing data — the ERP records everything. The problem is that the ERP was designed to EXECUTE processes, not to answer questions. It knows every order and cannot tell you, on one screen, which customer has been slowing down for three months.
An ERP report answers "what happened in this document". Management asks "what is happening with this customer, over time, compared with before". Those are incompatible formats.
What has to come out of the ERP
Not the whole ERP. For commercial and margin management, four sets cover most of it:
| Set | Essential fields | Question it unlocks |
|---|---|---|
| Orders | Customer, date, item, quantity, value, terms | Who is buying less and since when |
| Items | Code, family, cost | Which family carries margin and which only turns |
| Customers | Identifier, region, rep, channel | Revenue concentration and portfolio risk |
| Finance | Invoice, due date, payment | Customers who buy and pay late |
Note what is not on the list: full invoices, item-by-item stock movements, production orders. Those are legitimate and heavy, and they almost never answer a board question. Bringing everything is the mistake that most delays this kind of project.
The questions the ERP alone cannot answer
- 01Which customers reduced purchases in the last 90 days relative to their own pattern. Not those who bought little: those who bought less than themselves.
- 02Margin by family after the discount actually applied, not the list price one.
- 03How much revenue depends on the top ten customers — and how that changed over the year.
- 04Which rep has a growing portfolio and which one only held flat because a big account carried it.
- 05How long between the first commercial contact and the first order.
The first four live inside the ERP and fail on format: they need comparison over time per entity, which is exactly what document reports do not do. The fifth needs an outside source — CRM or support — and is the one that surprises people most when it appears.
The practical path
- Extract by querying the ERP database or by scheduled export. Do not depend on someone clicking export.
- Bring 24 months of history. Comparing with the same month last year matters most in seasonal industries.
- Standardise the customer. The same buyer under three records is the classic error that breaks portfolio analysis.
- Only then connect outside sources: CRM, support, media.
Duplicate customer records are the defect that ruins distribution analysis the most — and it does not show up as an error, it shows up as a customer who "bought little".
What changes with a connected assistant
The sales manager stops depending on IT for a portfolio question. The board stops waiting for month close. And the question that today never gets asked — "which customers are slowing down?" — fits in one sentence, every week, instead of becoming a BI project.