Power BI Inventory & Sales Analytics for Retail

Inventory reporting has a familiar failure mode. Someone exports data from the ERP, opens it in a spreadsheet, merges it with two other spreadsheets, and circulates the result. It works, it takes half a day, and every step is a chance to introduce a number nobody can trace later. This retailer, running physical warehouses alongside an online store for construction and furnishing products, was doing exactly that, and the catalogue was growing faster than the process could carry.

The obvious fix is to pull the data through the ERP's API, which is where the project would have stalled. That API returns a thousand rows per request, so a full inventory refresh became an exercise in pagination that took hours and needed its own database server and cloud services to sit behind it. The interesting decision was to stop using it. The ERP can already produce saved searches as files, so the pipeline consumes those instead, which removed both the bottleneck and the infrastructure that existed only to work around it.

What the business got is dashboards covering inventory, sales, and stock status across warehouses and the online store, refreshing every fifteen minutes without anyone pressing a button. Refresh time dropped by more than ninety percent, from hours to minutes. The servers behind the old approach were switched off, taking a recurring annual cost with them. And the manual export step disappeared, which mattered as much as the speed did, because the errors it introduced were the reason people argued about whose number was correct instead of deciding what to order.