The Challenge of Fragmented Financial Tracking

For the global life sciences manufacturer operating across multiple sites, managing working capital had become a complex puzzle of disconnected pieces. Each location maintained its own spreadsheets and pulled reports independently from SAP ECC and various financial systems. This fragmented approach created significant operational friction. Finance teams spent countless hours manually consolidating data from different sites, only to discover that the numbers weren’t directly comparable. One site might calculate Days Sales Outstanding using a different formula than another, making it nearly impossible to get a true enterprise-wide view of performance.

The quarterly and annual review process had become particularly painful. Teams would spend days gathering data, reconciling differences, and trying to standardize metrics after the fact. This delayed critical insights into Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable, and inventory performance—all essential elements for effective cash flow management in a heavily regulated industry. Beyond the time drain, the inconsistencies eroded confidence in the data itself. Leadership needed a solution that could bring order to this chaos without disrupting the existing systems that operations teams relied on daily.

Building a Centralized Analytics Foundation

Data Science Dojo approached the challenge by designing the Corporate Working Capital Metrics Dashboard Suite, a unified analytics platform that would bring clarity to complexity. Rather than replacing existing systems, the solution layered on top of them, pulling data from SAP ECC and other financial sources into Azure Synapse Analytics. The real innovation came in how the data was transformed. Using serverless SQL pools, the team created harmonized views that applied consistent formulas across all sites. Metrics like Weighted Average Days to Collect (WADTC) and Days Payable Outstanding (DPO) were now calculated uniformly, eliminating the variations that had plagued cross-site comparisons.

The architecture flowed naturally from data extraction through transformation to visualization. Power BI became the window into this newly organized world, with interactive dashboards that offered both the 30,000-foot view and the granular detail that finance teams needed. The entire suite was packaged as a Power BI App, making it easily accessible across the organization with automatic real-time updates.

The implementation unfolded in phases, each building on the last. Azure Synapse established secure connections to SAP sources and built the SQL views that would ensure metric consistency. For inventory management, the team standardized calculations for Inventory Weeks on Hand and Annual Turns. Each manufacturing site received its own dedicated dashboard suite, with specialized pages for AR Quarterly KPIs, AR Aging Detail, AP Spend Detail, and Payment Terms analysis. These tracked everything from Weighted Average Term (WAT) to Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) with precision.

At the enterprise level, the Power BI App aggregated data for meaningful cross-site comparisons. Finance leadership could now view three-month rolling averages of DSO, DPO, and Inventory Turns across the entire organization. Drill-through features let users move seamlessly from high-level trends to individual transactions, while flexible filters supported both quarterly snapshots and annual trend analysis. The design philosophy prioritized low disruption and quick adoption, building a framework that could evolve as the organization’s needs grew.

Empowering Financial Optimization and Decision-Making

The impact was immediate and far-reaching. What had once taken finance teams hours of manual work each quarter now happened automatically through Synapse pipelines. Those saved hours were redirected toward strategic analysis and proactive cash flow management. The 60-plus dashboards delivered real-time visibility into every aspect of working capital—from WADTC trends in Accounts Receivable to WADTP performance in Accounts Payable to Weeks on Hand for inventory optimization.

Perhaps more valuable than the time savings was the newfound confidence in the data. With standardized metrics across all sites, finance teams could finally make apples-to-apples comparisons and trust the numbers driving corporate decisions. The solution didn’t just solve the immediate reporting problem—it positioned the organization for scalable growth in financial operations and regulatory compliance, creating a foundation that could expand to accommodate new sites, new metrics, and new requirements as the business evolved.