# One operations dashboard in place of five spreadsheets

URL: https://mechaneforge.tech/case-studies/operations-dashboard-replacing-spreadsheets/
Sector: Services company, 40 to 80 staff (representative example engagement, anonymised)

> Operations ran on a tangle of shared spreadsheets that nobody fully trusted. We built a purpose-made dashboard with roles, approvals and live reporting, connected to the systems they already used.

## Challenge
- Five spreadsheets tracked the same work in slightly different ways, so numbers rarely agreed.
- Approvals happened over email and were hard to audit.
- Leadership had no live view of workload, only a monthly summary assembled by hand.

## Approach
- **Find the single source of truth**: We mapped which data lived where and agreed one owner for each field.
- **Build around the process**: Roles, approvals and views shaped to how the team actually works, not a generic template.
- **Integrate**: APIs and scheduled syncs into the systems they already used, so nothing had to be retyped.
- **Weekly demos and handover**: A working release every week, then documentation, training and full code ownership.

## What we measure
- Spreadsheets in daily use: From five to none
- Time to assemble the monthly report: Hours to minutes
- Approvals with a clear audit trail: All of them

Built with: React dashboard, REST APIs, PostgreSQL, Role-based access