End-to-end transformation for a regional seafood business

An established regional seafood business needed real-time visibility over its performance - and less manual effort spent producing it.

The brief

At the business’s scale, performance and margin visibility had come to depend on manual, after-the-fact reporting - numbers pulled together well after the trading week they described. By the time a manager could see margin slipping on a particular customer or product line, the week that caused it was usually already over. Deliver real-time reporting and automation the business could run on day to day, not a one-off report, so the business could see what was happening while there was still time to act on it.

Our approach

Through a Torque advisory subscription, we started by understanding where the business’s manual reporting effort was actually going day to day, so the automation that followed targeted real time cost rather than an assumed one. From there we built a read-only dashboard pulling live data from the business’s accounting system via API - covering business performance (revenue, margin, customer engagement, operating costs), stock (landed cost, conversion, drippage) and operations (staff, scheduling, productivity) as three connected views rather than three separate reports. We automated the business’s highest-frequency manual tasks alongside it, targeting the specific work that discovery had shown was consuming the most time for the least insight.

The outcome

A live dashboard surfacing exactly where margin was slipping across customers, plus automation freeing up the time previously spent producing that picture by hand. The business can now see a margin problem while there’s still a trading week left to respond to it, rather than reconstructing what happened after the fact - and the hours once spent compiling that picture manually are back in the business, not in the spreadsheet.