Board-Level Power BI Reports on a Fruit Processor's Bespoke ERP

The client is one of Europe's leading fruit processors. This project covered its Bulgarian operations, a seasonal processing business built around exports. In Bulgaria the company runs a bespoke ERP developed locally. The operational data was all there, but the system offered too few reports and no visuals at all, so leadership had little to manage by.

No vendor reporting existed to fall back on. Nor was there any documentation of the ERP database that reports could be built from.

Where it hurt

• Stock decisions in the dark. In a seasonal business, how much raw and processed fruit is on hand shapes every sales and production call.
• Sales and production out of sight. Leadership could not see performance well enough to steer the season.
• Finance stitched together. Financial numbers were put together manually instead of coming from the system of record.
• An undocumented database. Building reports was hard when nobody had ever described the database behind them.
• A board with no market picture. The directors had no clear sense of where the company stood in its market.

One model now serves the CEO, the executives and the board. It runs on live ERP data, and each person sees the view their role permits.

• Essential reporting behind the CEO's decisions, used internally throughout the organisation.
• Executives and the board now see clearly where the company stands in its market.
• Finance, production, sales and stock in a single model, running on live ERP data.
• Reporting built on an undocumented ERP that had no native reports to start from.

This engagement did not record time savings or usage numbers. The figures above describe its scope.

Where bespoke ERP reporting goes wrong

Reports on an undocumented custom ERP break more easily than reports on a standard one. Column names may mean something other than what they say. Cancelled records may never be deleted. The schema can shift with the ERP developer's next update. A report that looks fine but counts cancelled stock, or counts transfers twice, loses the board's trust quickly. The real work is checking the model against numbers the business already trusts, writing down what we learned about the database, and keeping the reporting model isolated, so an ERP update breaks a single mapping rather than every report.