KPI Dashboards Across the Systems You Already Run
You already hold the numbers. They just sit in three different systems, so the answer to a simple question arrives as a spreadsheet someone rebuilt by hand. We read those systems together and build the view each level of management actually needs.
The few figures that say whether the business is working.
Switch between Director, Operations and Finance above — same underlying data, three different jobs. Figures are invented for illustration and are not drawn from any client engagement.
The useful questions span more than one system
“What is our margin this month, by product line?” is a reasonable thing for a manager to ask. Answering it usually means the ERP for the sales, a separate operational database for the costs, and somebody's judgement to line the two up. So it gets answered once a month, by hand, by whoever is best at Excel — and by the time it is ready, the month it describes is over. The data was never the problem. The joining of it was.
The same data, scoped to the person looking at it
For the board and directors
The small number of figures that describe whether the business is working: revenue against plan, margin by line, stock tied up, the exposure nobody wants to be surprised by. Few numbers, current, on a phone.
For operations and department heads
The working view — what moved today, what is stuck, which counterparty or product line is behind. Enough detail to act on before the month closes, not a summary that arrives after it does.
For finance and back office
Registers, approvals and reconciliations scoped to the financial year, drawn from the same source the ledger uses rather than a parallel spreadsheet that has quietly diverged.
Three kinds of source, one set of numbers
Your ERP
SAP Business One on Microsoft SQL Server or SAP HANA, read through a read-only user against the tables you nominate. Nothing is installed on the ERP and no add-on is registered.
The databases beside it
MySQL and PostgreSQL — the operational systems holding the part of the business the ERP never captured. Read on the same cycle, so one figure can draw on both.
REST APIs
Any HTTP endpoint we can issue a GET against, with no authentication, a Bearer token, an API-key header, or Basic auth. That covers most third-party tools your team already uses.
Delivered, not described
Our SAP Business One reporting service builds exactly this on top of an existing ERP, read-only. For a precious metals trading desk we built a management information system with stock-in-hand dashboards, financial-year trade registers and role-based views for concurrent operators. And for a technology services firm we built monitoring and reporting across their client estate.
Building dashboards on your existing systems
How is this different from Power BI, Tableau or Zoho Analytics?
Those are tools. They are good tools, and if you have someone in-house who owns them, they may be all you need. The difference is who does the work: a licence gives you a canvas and leaves the connecting, modelling and maintaining to you, which is where most internal dashboard projects stall. We build the thing, connect it to your systems, and hand you something that already answers your questions. If you would rather buy a tool and staff it, we will say so rather than sell you a project.
What does "a view per level of management" actually mean?
That the same underlying data is presented differently depending on who is looking. A director does not want the screen a warehouse supervisor needs, and giving both of them the same dashboard means neither uses it. We scope views by role — what each person can see and what they see first — so the dashboard matches the decision that person actually makes.
Do you need to change or replace our existing systems?
No. We add a reporting layer beside what you already run rather than migrating or replacing anything. Your ERP stays exactly as it is. This is deliberately not a platform you have to move onto — if you stopped working with us, the systems you own would be entirely unaffected.
Is our data safe? Does it leave our network?
For ERP reporting the layer runs inside your network, so database credentials and data never leave your premises. We do not require you to expose systems to the internet or copy your database to infrastructure we control. Where a REST API is involved the call goes to that vendor as it normally would, and we only ever read.
We already have reports out of our ERP. Why would we need this?
Built-in reporting answers the questions the ERP anticipated. It struggles with the ones that need data the ERP does not hold — which, in practice, is most of the interesting ones. If the answer to a routine management question currently involves someone exporting two systems to Excel and reconciling them by hand, that is the gap this fills.
How long does this take?
A first working dashboard against a live connection is usually a matter of weeks rather than months, because we are reading systems that already exist rather than building new ones. The honest answer depends on how many sources are involved and how clean they are, which is what the first conversation is for.