Our client designs, manufactures and installs external building products, including shading systems, louvres and ventilation solutions, for major commercial projects across Australia: schools, hospitals, data centres and large-scale developments. Like many project-based manufacturers, their business runs on a backlog, a portfolio of large, long-running jobs whose value and composition shift constantly as projects are won, progressed and completed.
The challenge
For a business built on a handful of very large projects, understanding the shape of that backlog isn’t optional. It’s core to running the business. Yet our client’s leadership team reviewed performance through a board pack that was assembled by hand, once a month, in PowerPoint. Every version was a manual snapshot: time-consuming to put together, and out of date almost as soon as it was finished.
Underneath that board pack sat a deeper problem. The numbers it drew on lived in three separate systems, one for job and production management, one for task tracking, and one for accounting, with no shared source of truth between them. Reconciling them by hand was slow and left plenty of room for error.
But the sharpest problem was easy to miss. Revenue and job actuals already had a history, because every transaction carries its own date, so trending them over time was straightforward. Backlog concentration didn’t. Which jobs currently made up the top 20, and how dominant they were, was never a dated record. It was just the current arrangement of things, constantly overwritten as jobs moved. Ask “what does our backlog concentration look like today?” and you’d get an answer. Ask “how has it changed over the last six months?” and there was no way to know.
Without a running record, leadership couldn’t say whether their reliance on a small number of big jobs was easing, holding steady, or quietly building into a real risk. The only fallback was someone manually pulling old spreadsheet exports and comparing them side by side, month over month, hoping the right version had been kept.
Our approach
We started by unifying the three source systems into a single, governed data platform, so every downstream report, board pack included, could draw on one consistent version of the numbers instead of three competing ones.
On top of that foundation, we replaced the static PowerPoint with a live, interactive Power BI board pack: a report that reflects the current state of the business at all times, with the same executive-friendly structure the board was already used to, but without the manual assembly or the built-in lag.
The centrepiece was a daily snapshot process. Every single day, it takes a frozen, point-in-time picture of the top 20 jobs and a set of portfolio-wide concentration metrics, and files it away permanently rather than letting it be overwritten. For the first time, leadership could look back and see exactly how their most valuable jobs, and the concentration risk they represented, had actually moved over time, not just where things stood on any given day.
Alongside the backlog view, the same platform now surfaces pipeline health, win rates and sales cycle trends, giving leadership a forward-looking picture to sit alongside the historical one.
The result
The board pack is no longer something someone builds once a month and hopes is still accurate by the time it’s presented. It’s always current, and always one click away from a deeper view. Reconciling three separate systems by hand has been replaced by a single, trustworthy source of truth.
Most importantly, leadership can now see how concentration risk is building or easing over time, rather than discovering it only in hindsight, with nothing left to reconstruct by hand from old exports. What used to be a single, ever-shifting figure is now a running record, one that flags where the business is heading, not just where it stands today.
