How a ₹40 Cr manufacturer cut MIS reporting from 2 hours to 4 minutes.

This is a case study of a real client — a Noida-based auto-parts manufacturer with ₹40 Cr in revenue, 180 employees, and two production lines. Names have been changed.

The situation before

Every morning at 9 AM, the operations manager spent two hours compiling the previous day's numbers. Production output from one system. Attendance from a register. Inventory levels from Tally. Dispatch from a spreadsheet. He'd pull all of these into a Master MIS sheet and email it to the MD by 11 AM.

Two hours. Every working day. For a person who cost the business ₹12L per year. That's 40 hours per month — half a full-time employee — just to compile data that already existed somewhere.

What we found in the Diagnostic

• Five separate data sources: Tally (finance + inventory), a biometric attendance system, a production log in Google Sheets, a dispatch tracker in another spreadsheet, and quality defect logs in paper registers.
• No single source of truth — the MIS was the only place where all five came together, and it was manually compiled.
• Two days of data lag on quality defects (paper logs were entered weekly).
• The MD had no mobile visibility — he could only check the MIS on his laptop.

What we built

1. 1
   Connected Tally via API — live inventory and financial data flowing into the dashboard every hour.
2. 2
   Integrated the biometric system — attendance updating in real time, feeding into payroll calculation.
3. 3
   Replaced the production Google Sheet with a structured digital log — accessible from the shop floor on tablets.
4. 4
   Digitised quality defect logging — floor supervisors log on mobile, data flows in immediately.
5. 5
   Built the MD dashboard — cash position, production output vs target, attendance, inventory below reorder point, and overdue receivables. One screen. Mobile-optimised.
6. 6
   Automated the daily MIS email — generated at 8 AM automatically, sent to the MD and department heads.

What broke (and how we fixed it)

The Tally integration had a problem in week two: the Tally server was on-premises and the internet connection was unreliable. Data gaps appeared in the dashboard. We solved this by adding a local buffer that queued updates and synced when connectivity was restored — losing no data, but sometimes showing a 2-hour lag instead of real-time.

The shop-floor tablet adoption took three weeks longer than expected. Floor supervisors were used to paper and were initially resistant to the digital logs. We ran a half-day training session and, critically, showed them how the data they entered was visible to the MD in real time. Adoption improved immediately after that.

The numbers after 90 days

• Daily MIS compilation time: 2 hours → 4 minutes (the 4 minutes is the MD's time to read it, not compile it).
• Data freshness: yesterday's numbers at 11 AM → live numbers, checked at 7 AM before the MD enters the office.
• Two production line stoppages caught early: both flagged by the dashboard before they escalated into full stoppages.
• Operations manager's role: shifted from compiling to analysing. He now spends those 2 hours per day on operational improvement instead.
• Estimated annual saving from recovered ops time: ₹6L (conservative — based only on the operations manager's time).

The Build cost was ₹8.2L. The payback period was under 18 months on ops time alone — before accounting for faster decision-making and the two stoppages that were avoided.