How Vizora helped W.E. Rawson save thousands of hours a year – and uncover profit hiding in plain sight.

The challenge: A business running on spreadsheets

W.E. Rawson is a sophisticated manufacturer – but for years, the data that should have powered its decisions was trapped.

Finance, sales, planning, transport and production each ran on their own systems, a mix of bespoke and off-the-shelf tools that didn’t talk to each other. Information sat in silos. There was no single source of truth.

Reporting depended on manual processes and Excel. Reconciliation was slow and error-prone. Critical reporting knowledge lived in individuals, not systems – a fragile arrangement that limited transparency, consistency, and confidence in the numbers.

Even a basic question like “What’s our revenue by customer this month?” required exporting every transaction into Excel and rebuilding the report from scratch. The ERP could produce data – but rarely the decision-ready information the leadership team needed.

That ongoing friction became the final trigger for change.

What W.E. Rawson needed

The brief started simple: stop spending hours each week running and rerunning Excel reports.

Core requirements included visibility into:

• Revenue by customer and product
• Stock levels and stock usage
• Procurement activity
• Financial performance

But as the engagement progressed, the ambition grew. What began as a project to access data became a project to transform how the business made decisions.

The Solution: One Source of Truth, Tailored to Every Role

Vizora delivered a centralised reporting platform that pulls data from across finance, sales, production, transport and planning into a single, trusted source.

Just as importantly, the platform was built around role-based dashboards – meaning the right people get the right view, automatically, without exposing sensitive data.

• Sales staff see pricing, revenues, orders and stock – without ever logging into the ERP.
• Operational teams rely on daily reports to drive production and planning.
• Directors and shareholders access high-level strategic dashboards.
• Security roles restrict every user’s view to only what’s relevant to them.

Today, Vizora is the primary source of information across the entire business.

The time dividend

Automation has delivered real, measurable hours back to the business.

Across the organisation, W.E. Rawson estimates several thousand hours saved per year on like-for-like reporting — alongside far deeper insight than was previously possible.

The Breakthrough: Profitability Visible at the SKU Level

With over 10,000 unique products, W.E. Rawson had never been able to see contribution at a granular level. Profit was visible in aggregate — but not where it was actually being made, or lost.

Vizora built a contribution reporting solution that draws data from every business system to reveal contribution per product, per invoice.

The impact was immediate. The business could now:

• Monitor profitability product-by-product
• Analyse contribution customer-by-customer
• Price with confidence
• Manage product ranges strategically
• Target marketing with sharper data

It also surfaced loss-making product ranges — directly informing decisions to discontinue underperforming lines.

A Real World Win: Fixing Prices in Textiles

One of the most valuable insights came from the Textiles division.

Pricing in this area is typically calculated per kilogram – but density and product dimensions significantly affect throughput and production efficiency. The contribution report exposed gaps in the underlying pricing assumptions, showing exactly where profitability was being eroded.

Armed with the data, the team:

• Implemented informed, evidence-backed price increases
• Worked collaboratively with customers to redesign more cost-efficient product specifications
• Improved profitability without damaging customer relationships

This kind of proactive, data-driven decision-making simply wasn’t possible before.

Adopted Across the Business

Vizora’s dashboards are now in daily use by stakeholders at every level – from the shop floor through to the boardroom. Reporting has shifted from a reactive, manual chore to a proactive strategic tool.

The Outcome

By centralising data, automating reporting, and unlocking SKU-level profitability, Vizora has helped W.E. Rawson:

• Save thousands of hours every year
• Automate critical financial and operational processes
• Gain product- and customer-level contribution visibility
• Improve pricing accuracy
• Discontinue loss-making ranges
• Empower teams with secure, role-based data access

Most importantly, it has transformed how the organisation uses data – moving from manual reporting to real-time, insight-driven performance management.