Quick Summary

• Problem: Daily MIS took 8 people, 4–6 hours, across messy Excel exports and emails.

• Fix: ERP → Databricks Lakehouse → Power BI semantic model → auto refresh.

• Impact: 90% manual reduction; same-day decisions; a single, trusted version of truth.

• Why it matters: Automation returns time to your experts and stops spreadsheet drift.

Story Narrative

The operations war-room started early. Coffee, folders, and a familiar refrain—“Who has the latest file?” By noon, the MIS report was “final.” By 2 pm, someone spotted a mismatch. Again.

We began by mapping not the data, but the rituals—who touched what and why. That revealed four choke points: ad-hoc exports, manual lookups, fragile formulas, and no refresh standard. We built a Databricks ingestion layer that pulled ERP tables on a schedule, validated schema drift, and applied business rules once—not 20 times across sheets. From there, a Power BI semantic model standardized KPIs (gross margin, lane profitability, dwell time) and enforced definitions, so every team spoke the same language.

Dashboards refreshed automatically. Drill-downs replaced email chains. Managers stopped debating numbers and started discussing outcomes: “Which corridor can absorb 12% more volume?” What changed? Not just speed. Trust. When the baseline is reliable, teams move from firefighting to foresight. The best compliment came a month later: “We don’t do MIS anymore—we do decisions.”