Bolton has a strong base of manufacturing, distribution, engineering and professional services businesses, and most of them have grown up running on a mixture of ERP screens, exports to Excel and the odd report someone built years ago and never quite handed over. That is where we tend to come in. Not to rip anything out, just to put a clean Power BI layer over the top so the team can see what is actually happening without having to ring the person who built the spreadsheet five years ago.
Because we are local, we can pop in for the first conversation if that suits you, which makes a real difference when the people who know the data are on the warehouse floor or in production rather than at a desk. There is a lot you learn in half an hour walking through an operation that you would never pick up over Teams. From there most of the build happens remotely so we are not adding travel costs to the bill. We get the first piece of reporting in front of you within a week or two, then build out into dashboards the wider team can actually use.
A lot of Bolton manufacturers have similar pain points. Production data sits in one system, stock in another, sales in a third, and the only way anyone gets a full picture today is to copy three exports into a spreadsheet. We can blend that properly in Power BI so the directors see one consistent view, the production manager sees their bit on a screen on the shop floor, and the finance team are not chasing the same numbers from different angles. The same approach works for distribution and engineering clients. Different data, same shape of problem.
We also run friendly Power BI training for in house teams who would rather own the reports themselves. Sessions are kept small, the examples are from your own business, and we leave you with notes you can actually come back to. Most groups want a couple of half day sessions to start with, then a standing block of monthly support so somebody is always on hand when they hit a wall. That is usually a lot cheaper than hiring an analyst, and it grows the knowledge inside your business rather than parking it with a consultancy.
For professional services firms in town the work tends to look slightly different. Utilisation, pipeline, write offs, work in progress, debtor days. We build a tight set of weekly reports the partners actually read on the train home, and back them up with dashboards for the team leads who want to drill into a particular client or matter. Nothing too clever, just numbers that match across everyone's screens and that update without anybody having to do anything.
Plenty of our Bolton clients have sites or sister businesses in nearby towns like Bury and Wigan. If yours sits across Manchester, Blackburn or Preston as well, we can handle the lot. Read a bit more about us, or drop a quick message in and we will come back the same day with an honest view of where to start. If Power BI is not the right answer we will say so, and tell you what we think you should look at instead.