A Tier-2 Supplier Cuts Carrying Cost Overhead 17% with Automated Forecasting and Weekly KPI Reporting

The Problem

A 38-person manufacturing-adjacent supplier in Auburn Hills was making inventory and purchasing decisions based on data that was, on average, three weeks old. Their reporting process required a dedicated half-day every month: one operations manager manually pulling figures from four different systems — their ERP, their supplier portal, their logistics platform, and a spreadsheet that only she fully understood — and assembling them into a summary for leadership. Decisions that needed to be made on Tuesday were being made with last month's numbers. The carrying cost of over-ordered inventory had become a consistent drag on margin.

The Solution

We mapped the four data sources, identified the 12 metrics that actually drove purchasing decisions, and built two connected automations. The first is a weekly KPI digest that pulls from all four systems every Monday at 6 a.m. and delivers a plain-English summary — current inventory levels, open POs, supplier lead time changes, and a three-week demand signal — to the leadership team's inbox before the week starts. The second is an exception alert that fires whenever inventory for a tracked SKU falls below a defined threshold, triggering a suggested reorder with quantities pre-calculated from their historical usage patterns.

• Automated weekly KPI digest from 4 connected data sources
• Plain-English narrative summary with leadership-ready format
• Exception alerts with pre-calculated reorder suggestions
• Real-time inventory threshold monitoring for critical SKUs