Vehicle manufacturer implements data warehouse to streamline financials

Client background

Marion Body Works is an independent, family owned and operated manufacturer of cost competitive, specialized equipment located in Marion, Wisconsin. Marion Body Works manufacturers rescue and fire apparatus, commercial van bodies, truck cabs, military platforms and custom engineered vehicles.

The business challenge

Marion Body Works critical business information was fragmented around the company, stored on separate computers using inconsistent software and file types, making it time intensive to compile comprehensive reports. If one data point changed while the report was being compiled, the whole process had to restart. The process cost too much time in labor and external contractors, which resulted in reports that were often riddled with errors. They were also spending a significant amount of time and money pulling together data from different departments to measure monthly progress towards their annual goals.

Strategy and solution

Baker Tilly designed an ideal data warehouse modeled around the client’s business processes, regardless of what software those processes ran on. The new system focused on streamlining the financial information, including sales, costs and transactions, which would provide useful information for other departments. We then identified what financial data would be required for monthly report automation and several metrics from the monthly report that could easily be checked to ensure there was no loss of information during the extract, transform and load (ETL) process from the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system to the initial automated report. Baker Tilly implemented solutions to:

• Extract data that was already electronically recorded in software or applications within the company
• Reverse-engineer excel formulas and calculations to be more efficient and calculate on-demand
• Recreate or extract any manually entered information needed for the new, real-time executive report

The new system allowed managers to compile automated, accurate reports from multiple data sources daily, saving staff time and additional work. The executive team had access to updated reports to view progress toward its financial goals daily, without tying up extra manpower. For the monthly reports, once the numbers from the executive report were confirmed with past Marion reports, Baker Tilly made those data points available in a self-service business intelligence (BI) tool which enabled the IT staff at Marion to drive sets of data into their Business Management Platform. These departments were also able to drill down in the data to see the underlying drivers, empowering them to improve the metrics tracked by the Executive team.