Case Study: Modernizing Sales Reporting and Data Flow for Alliance Metal Products
Client: Alliance Metal Products
Location: Birmingham, Alabama
Industry: Steel & Metal Supply
Engagement Focus: Data Management • Power BI Reporting • ERP Optimization • Sales Forecasting
Overview
Alliance Metal Products, a trusted steel supplier serving the Southeast, relied on a legacy ERP system to run its day-to-day operations. While the ERP was functional, the company faced growing challenges in surfacing actionable insights and maintaining a streamlined flow of data across internal systems. With limited reporting capabilities and fragmented data access, their sales team struggled to gain visibility into key performance indicators, customer trends, and forecasts.
Alliance Metal Products engaged The Osprey Group to provide data strategy, system integration guidance, and custom reporting solutions—focused on enabling smarter sales decisions and optimizing operational reporting through Power BI.
The Challenge
Despite connecting their ERP to Power BI, Alliance Metal Products lacked a cohesive architecture to manage data efficiently or visualize it meaningfully. Their reports were slow, disconnected, and difficult to maintain. Sales and leadership teams needed better insight into pipeline forecasts, inventory trends, customer behavior, and revenue performance.
Key challenges included:
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Legacy ERP limitations with poor data flexibility
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Slow, static, or inaccurate Power BI dashboards
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No centralized architecture for clean data movement between systems
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Lack of actionable forecasting data for the sales team
Osprey’s Solution
The Osprey Group conducted a series of Data Management Workshops to guide stakeholders through a proven playbook. These sessions focused on understanding the business’ data sources, mapping core data flows, and identifying bottlenecks in their reporting environment.
Key Deliverables:
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Data Architecture Design: Developed a scalable and maintainable data pipeline architecture to ensure clean, consistent movement between ERP, Power BI, and other systems.
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Report Optimization: Rebuilt and optimized existing Power BI dashboards for speed, usability, and executive-level clarity.
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Sales Forecasting Reports: Designed custom sales forecasting models, allowing sales leadership to track historical performance, pipeline health, and projections in real time.
Outcomes & Value Delivered
✅ Improved Report Speed and Accuracy
Clean, optimized data sets and Power BI models reduced load times and improved trust in reported numbers.
✅ Enabled Strategic Sales Planning
Custom forecasting reports gave sales leaders the tools to make proactive, data-driven decisions.
✅ Future-Ready Data Architecture
The system foundation now supports additional integrations and analytics as the business grows.
✅ Internal Team Empowerment
Workshops and documentation helped train internal staff to interpret reporting system.