The job is rarely to replace what is already there. It is to put a clean Power BI view over the top so the production manager, the office team and the directors are all looking at the same numbers. We will spend the first session with whoever owns the data day to day, then come back with a working draft inside a fortnight. Showing something that works is almost always more useful than another scoping document, so we get to a real report quickly.
Food producers and manufacturers in Blackburn tend to want dashboards around yield, waste, downtime and customer service levels. The office side wants a tidier monthly pack and the ability to slice the numbers by site, line or customer without rebuilding a pivot every time. Power BI handles both happily off the same data model, which means you are not maintaining two parallel sets of reports that drift apart over time.
A lot of East Lancashire manufacturers run on a mixture of an ERP plus a long list of spreadsheets that have grown up around it. Those spreadsheets often contain the genuinely useful logic, but they are fragile and they tie knowledge to one or two people. Part of what we do is take that hidden logic and rebuild it properly inside a Power BI model so it is documented, testable and no longer dependent on one person not being on holiday at month end. That is rarely glamorous work but it removes a lot of quiet risk.
For teams that want to keep things in house we run friendly Power BI training on your own data, pitched at managers and ops people rather than analysts. Small groups, plain English, and you leave with something working rather than a folder of slides. We are also happy to support an in house analyst behind the scenes, picking up the harder modelling work and reviewing things as they grow, so the person you have in place is not stuck without anyone to ask.
Distribution and service businesses across the patch tend to want a slightly different picture. Customer service levels, complaint volumes, route performance, recurring revenue, retention. We can pull those from the systems you already use and turn them into dashboards that managers can open on a phone between visits. The point is always the same. The people running the business should be able to see what is happening without ringing somebody else and waiting for an export.
We work with plenty of nearby businesses in Preston, Bolton and across the rest of Lancashire, so if your group has sites in more than one town we can handle that. When you are ready, please get in touch and we will come back the same day with a sensible first step and a clear price.