Case Notes
Believable reporting work, with the factory names kept quiet when needed.
Production data is sensitive. It can show margins, bottlenecks, customer pressure, scrap and the places where a system is being propped up by a careful person with a spreadsheet. These notes keep the useful shape of the work without pretending every client wants a glossy case study.
Case Note One
Coventry Precision Machining Firm
A late-order view was being built from three separate spreadsheets, each owned by a different part of the office. The Monday number changed depending on who had refreshed what.
Ruth mapped the three sources, agreed the definition of a late order and rebuilt the view into one daily WIP report. The new workbook kept the current order line, operation status and promised date visible without asking the production manager to reconcile three tabs before 8:30am.
- Location
- Coventry
- Work
- Daily WIP report
- Length
- 4 weeks
- Result
- One Monday late-order number
Case Note Two
Warwickshire Food Manufacturer
A batch yield workbook had grown slowly over several audit cycles. The formulas worked until someone inserted a line, typed in the wrong input area or copied a tab from an old month.
The rescue job stabilised the calculations, protected the input sheets and added handover notes for the production administrator. Nothing theatrical was added. The win was a workbook that could be used by the person covering holiday without ringing the original builder.
- Location
- Warwickshire
- Work
- Batch yield workbook
- Length
- 6 working days
- Result
- Protected inputs and notes
Case Note Three
Black Country Fabricator
The owner wanted a Power BI board pack, but the useful part was agreeing what belonged in it and what did not. Weekly Sage exports and shop-floor spreadsheets were already available, although nobody quite trusted the joined-up story.
Dashboardster built a pack showing order intake, despatch, WIP, overdue value and a handful of production measures. Ruth wrote the calculation notes plainly enough for the office manager to challenge a number before the review meeting rather than during it.
- Location
- Black Country
- Work
- Power BI board pack
- Length
- 7 weeks
- Result
- Weekly Sage and shop-floor feeds
Before And After
The Improvements Are Usually Small Enough To Be Believed
- Fewer manual copy-pastes before the production meeting.
- A named owner for each metric, so definitions stop drifting between departments.
- One version of the Monday number, with source files named and dated.
- Calculation notes written in normal factory English rather than hidden in a formula nobody wants to touch.
Text Fragments
Things Clients Have Said After The Fuss Went Down
“We stopped checking the checker.”
“It looks less clever now, which is exactly why people use it.”
“The first Monday after handover was the first one without a spreadsheet argument.”