← All insights

Collection

Business intelligence for manufacturing — strategy, deployment, open source

Business intelligence for manufacturing is rarely a tooling problem. It is a model problem — who has access, who is accountable for which number, and whether dashboards are placed in the path of decisions or to the side of them.

The two pieces below cover both ends: an Apache Superset deployment that removed a Power BI licensing ceiling for a SE Asia garment manufacturer, and a candid look at the four reasons BI implementations still fail in 60–85% of organisations.

Open-source BI is no longer a compromise. Apache Superset embedded into a custom ERP with ClickHouse underneath delivers role-based dashboards at a cost structure that scales with users, not seats.
But deployment is only half the work. The other half — process clarity, action ownership, training that survives the first quarter — is what determines whether a BI implementation strategy actually changes how the business runs.

Case Study
Manufacturing · Open Source · Apache Superset
Apache Superset BI deployment for a garment manufacturer
Power BI licensing was limiting data access across departments. Apache Superset — embedded in the custom ERP, connected to PostgreSQL and ClickHouse — removed the ceiling without changing the budget. Here's what we deployed and what changed.
April 2026 · 6 min readRead →
Article
Strategy · BI Implementation
Why BI implementations fail — 4 pitfalls we've seen firsthand
60–85% of BI implementations fail to meet objectives. Unclear processes, no accountability, disconnected decisions, inadequate training. Four pitfalls we encounter most consistently — and what actually fixes each.
March 2026 · 6 min readRead →

What separates BI that gets used from BI that gets built

Most BI implementations are scoped around tooling. A platform is selected, dashboards are built, and then the questions of who looks at them, when, and what they're supposed to do with what they see — get answered after the fact, if at all. That is why 60–85% of BI projects still fail to meet their objectives.

The work we do starts from the opposite end. We map the decisions first — what does a production manager need to know by 8am Monday, and who owns the action when a number is wrong. Then we build the data pipelines and dashboards around those decision points, not around what the tool makes easy to display.

For manufacturers running on custom ERPs or ageing Dynamics installations, Apache Superset connected to ClickHouse delivers role-based, real-time dashboards without Power BI per-seat licensing constraints. For organisations that already have Power BI but aren't getting value from it, the issue is almost always the model, not the tool. Dashboards placed in the path of real operational decisions get used. Dashboards built to prove a project was completed do not.