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Microsoft Fabric for Manufacturing: How to Give Leadership Faster, More Reliable Insights
Picture this: you’re an operations or IT leader at a manufacturing company, which has been steadily growing through acquisitions. To guide key business decisions in the months ahead, leadership has asked for an enterprise-wide production report that includes a snapshot of how all their subsidiaries are performing.
The task sounds simple enough, but you know it’ll probably eat up at least a couple of weeks. Each daughter company uses a different enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, so getting a complete picture means bouncing between platforms to get the necessary insights.
It’s a common challenge for acquisition-driven manufacturers. As the enterprise inherits a mix of ERPs and data management strategies, information gets increasingly fragmented, and reporting becomes much harder. Salesforce research points to the same challenge: unharmonized data is a major priority for manufacturing decision-makers, and over half say their customer and supplier data is siloed or hard to access.
Solving this problem, though, doesn’t have to (and actually shouldn’t) mean forcing every business unit into a single tool. At Convverge, we’ve seen firsthand the impact a unified data platform like Microsoft Fabric can have on reporting, making it easy to consolidate data from multiple ERPs and get the bird’s-eye view executives are after.
Let’s break down what that means and how it looks in practice.
When Growth Outpaces Reporting
Growth through acquisitions is a sign of success, but it also makes for messier reporting. Most manufacturers I’ve worked with rely on ERPs—like SAP, Epicor, or QuickBooks—to manage operational information. Some may also use solutions like SharePoint, or even traditional spreadsheets.
As the organization expands, different business units independently develop systems to best fit their everyday needs. Newly acquired companies also bring their own established ways of managing and reporting on data, many of which have been refined over years. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. However, problems come up when leadership needs a holistic analysis that reliably answers questions around overall enterprise performance, return on investment, and costs.
If you have dozens of business entities, it’s easy to see how translating everything into an accurate report can get very complex and time-consuming. Every reporting cycle is a manual exercise of exporting and validating data. Usually, that data comes in various formats or follows different naming conventions, and could even use multiple languages.
Bringing it all together into a more consistent, analysis-ready dataset takes time. Errors are common, and leadership can quickly lose trust in reports. Important business decisions also end up taking longer than they should.
Why a Single ERP Isn’t the Answer
Migrating different arms of the business to one ERP might seem like the logical fix here. However, there are several reasons why this usually isn’t feasible, or even desirable:
- Business continuity: Forcing subsidiaries into a single system disrupts established operations and decentralized business models. It removes the autonomy and flexibility each company needs to serve different customers or production processes.
- Specialized operations: Business units use their own ERPs for a valid reason: they’re optimized for tasks within finance, supply chain management, and other specific functions. Standardizing on one platform can remove capabilities that support each workflow.
- Cost and implementation risk: ERP migrations that span an entire enterprise are often expensive, years-long projects. When poorly executed, they can also cause downtime and data loss, compromising user buy-in and trust.
The Middle Ground: Multi-ERP Consolidation With Microsoft Fabric
Rather than limping along with manual reporting or migrating to one system, a better approach is to connect the data while allowing every ERP to remain in place. In a nutshell, manufacturers need a solution that:
- Collects data from each ERP automatically
- Standardizes it so information from every system can be compared on equal footing
- Stores it in one trusted, governed location
- Makes it easy to translate it into reports and dashboards
This is the idea behind Microsoft Fabric, which unifies enterprise data in an integrated environment. You can think of it as a layer that sits above ERPs and other data sources, pulling from each one without changing how they actually work within each business unit.
Data no longer needs to be exported manually. Instead, automated pipelines extract it regularly so analytics and reports are always based on current information. Because data is centralized, it’s also easier to enforce consistent governance and security. Organizations ultimately save time, avoid mistakes, and make it simpler for leadership to answer big-picture questions on demand.
What to Expect When Implementing Microsoft Fabric for Manufacturing
If this sounds like the right approach for your organization, you might be wondering what implementing a solution involves. Every manufacturer will have slightly different reporting needs, systems, and goals, but in my experience, most Microsoft Fabric projects follow a similar general path:
Auditing the Current State
One of the first things I look at when working with these types of clients is where the organization stands as-is. That means auditing existing tools, data, and reporting workflows to get a shared understanding of the current environment. Usually, we’re aiming to map things like:
- Which ERPs exist across the enterprise and its subsidiaries
- What other data sources, such as spreadsheets, are capturing relevant information
- How data definitions or rules vary between each entity—think naming conventions, formats, or common performance metrics
- The types of questions leadership needs answered, along with the reports or dashboards they already reference most often
- What current reporting workflows look like
- How existing data and systems are integrated
Roadmapping High-Value Opportunities
While bringing in Fabric might seem like a massive IT project, your entire reporting infrastructure doesn’t have to be tackled all at once. In fact, identifying a specific problem to solve is the best approach because it’s easier to ensure success and build momentum from there.
By the time an audit is complete, the biggest reporting pain points and high-value opportunities have usually started to reveal themselves. Focusing on one and getting input from the people closest to that process allows the team to develop clear goals and a roadmap. Ideally, this roadmap lays a foundation to scale Fabric to other use cases and business units over time.
With TerraVest, for example, we started with the goal of making monthly reports easier and faster for executives to access. Their roadmap focused on seeing measurable wins there first, but subsidiaries quickly saw value in the solution and adopted it themselves to support reporting within other teams.
Building Data Pipelines and Governance
The next phase is largely about replacing spreadsheet exports and manual consolidation with automated pipelines that pull from ERPs and other relevant sources. A key part of that work is ensuring data from different systems “speaks” the same language. Aligning naming conventions, definitions, formats, and other inconsistencies allows everything to be easily interpreted and compared, apples to apples.
This is also where setting up proper governance happens. Governance is a broad topic, but in practical terms, it means having clear rules around data ownership, access, and quality. In Microsoft’s words: “When adopting Fabric, the goal of governance is to empower the internal user community… while adhering to industry, governmental, and contractual requirements and regulations.”
While we’ve talked about the value of starting with a narrow use case, it’s worth noting that data pipelines and governance are usually built with scalability in mind. That means the platform has enough flexibility to adapt to new subsidiaries or reporting needs without starting from scratch.
Preparing Teams for Success
Fabric will only be as effective as the people using it. The organizations I see with the best outcomes and adoption typically:
- Involve stakeholders from day one. When technical teams (the people managing Fabric) and everyday users collaborate, they’re more likely to trust the solution and build something that solves actual reporting problems.
- Invest in training. A solid training program gives administrators the skills to maintain Fabric and gives users the confidence to find the insights they need.
- Assign internal champions. Giving teams a trusted point of contact makes it easier to support users and gather feedback over time.
Give Manufacturing Leaders Insights They Can Trust
If you’re used to reports taking weeks to hand off to executives, it might be time to rethink the organization’s approach. With the right Microsoft Fabric implementation, it’s entirely possible to take reporting from a multi-day endeavor to something that can be easily handled in a morning.
If you’d like to discover what that could look like for your organization, talk to the Convverge team about Microsoft Fabric consulting.
