Executive Information System at Alpro

Challenge

Alpro's Leadership Team needed a single, trusted view of company performance — across financial results, logistics operations, and commercial activity. The underlying data lived in disconnected systems with inconsistent definitions: cloud databases, on-premise databases, manually-maintained Excel files with rich formatting, and CSV exports. Pulling a coherent monthly view for executive decisions meant manual reconciliation across departments — slow, error-prone, and expensive to repeat each cycle.

Approach

We designed a tailored EIS dashboard that aggregates and visualizes the essential KPIs in a single, intuitive interface. The platform ingests data from cloud and on-premise databases, processes formatted Excel and CSV files through Python, and harmonizes everything through a structured pipeline — staging, aggregation, master-data enrichment, and DWH loading — before serving the data to Power BI.

The pipeline is end-to-end automated. Data flows from sources through a Python pre-processing step (handling Excel files with non-trivial formatting, converting to CSV) into a Linux-based filtering pipeline, then into a staging schema for shape normalization. From staging it is aggregated to the month level, populates intermediate fact tables, and lands in MD datamarts.

A Master Data Service (MDS) layer lets business users enrich the dataset with the inputs only they own — currency rates, units, conversion factors. After user enrichment, the dataflow continues automatically: data marts are calculated and loaded from fact tables and the MDS user data, with a load log capturing every refresh and any errors with their reasons. Power BI datasets refresh on top of this trusted layer.

Outcomes

• One trusted view of financial, logistical, and commercial performance for the Leadership Team
• Real-time visibility into business performance — replacing spreadsheet reconciliation with a governed pipeline
• Trend identification and proactive decision-making, not retrospective reporting
• Data consistency across departments thanks to a single harmonization layer
• Business-owned master data via MDS — currency rates, units, conversion factors maintained where the knowledge lives
• Auditable refresh log with explicit error reasons, supporting reliable monthly close

Technology