Banaraswala Wire Mesh Private Limited a renowned manufacturer and exporter of wire mesh, has been at the forefront of ERP adoption since the 1980s. Under the leadership of Vishal Singh, their Director of Finance, HR, and Strategy, the company has navigated through multiple ERP implementations. After experiences with TCS iON and Salesforce, Banaraswala found its ideal solution in ERPNext in 2021 since it offered the unified platform and customization capabilities they sought. Navin Vanmali, their dedicated customer success manager from Frappe, has been instrumental in optimizing their processes.

Now, Vishal shares a new chapter in their digital transformation journey with Frappe Insights, which has helped them see data in a new light.

Discovering Frappe Insights

An avid reader of Frappe's newsletters, Vishal stumbled upon Frappe Insights – a new open-source business intelligence tool. Vishal wasn’t new to using an analytics tool as he had tried using PowerBI for Banaraswala in 2020, only to abandon it later. Navin helped him install Insights and encouraged him to explore it. Vishal experimented with basic queries but, assuming limited use, gave up initially.

Weeks later, the marketing team needed to analyze complex data. Extracting and analyzing data in Excel proved time-consuming and cumbersome, especially with frequent data updates. Remembering Insights, Vishal decided to give it another try. He tried some basic queries and successfully extracted the required data, but encountered issues that led him to pause again.

Seeing is believing

During a follow-up call, Navin inquired about Vishal's experience. Learning about the initial challenges, Navin helped them update to the newest version which resolved most of the issues, and helped Vishal set up joins for more intricate queries. Vishal eventually mastered the tool and trained his accounts and purchase teams – all with no prior development or SQL experience.

As more people within Banaraswala saw the dashboards and charts and recognized how valuable Insights was, everyone wanted to give it a try. Leveraging their existing ERPNext setup, they created custom doctypes to ensure no data was missed for visualization in Insights. Their Frappe Cloud-hosted environment further simplified the connection between ERPNext and Insights.

Insights in action

"How has Frappe Insights transformed your operations?" we asked Vishal. He shared a compelling story:

A marketing representative planned a trip to Kerala to meet a client. To maximize their visit, they wanted to identify potential clients in the region. The challenge? The data resided in separate Customer, Address, and Quotation documents, requiring multiple joins.

Using Insights, they combined quotation data from the last six months with the address master for the Kochi district and obtained a list of potential clients. Inspired by this success, they created a dashboard and replicated this for all regions, displaying district names and lists of recent customers. This readily available information is now a staple for the marketing team, optimizing their travel schedules and maximizing client outreach.

Real-time data visualization proved equally valuable for the accounting team. Previously, they spent their Friday afternoons preparing reports detailing payments that needed attention. This involved manual data extraction from ERPNext, VLOOKUP operations, and pivot tables in Excel – a time-consuming and error-prone process. Insights offered a solution: a real-time dashboard. This dashboard eliminated the need for these manual tasks, automating the report generation process and providing the added benefit of real-time data. This translates to significant time savings for the accounting team, allowing them to focus on more strategic tasks. Here are some dashboards created by the team.

A data-driven future

While Insights has significantly improved Banaraswala's operations in just two months, they see even greater potential. Currently, they're focusing on ad-hoc queries but eagerly await future releases to address permission controls and other features in development (soon to be released in July ‘24). One feature they're particularly excited about is the ability to schedule queries and email results to customers. Despite these limitations, Insights has already become the go-to tool for their chartered accountant (CA), dramatically increasing efficiency.

The visual query builder in version 2.2 has been an empowering tool, allowing non-developers to create complex queries. Of course, with any new tool, there's a learning curve. When facing challenges, the team often turns to ChatGPT for initial debugging. However, for more complex issues, they've found invaluable support from Saqib Ansari, creator and maintainer of Frappe Insights. Currently, Banaraswala utilizes Insights with a single ERPNext database, but they plan to leverage it across multiple databases after their upcoming data migration.

The most crucial takeaway? Access to real-time data that empowers data-driven decisions which has significantly impacted their business.

Ready to transform your data journey?

Vishal emphasizes that they're more than happy with Insights and are eagerly anticipating future releases to maximize its full potential, improve processes, and make better decisions for Banaraswala. He also appreciates that while Insights is still evolving, the Frappe team's responsiveness and support have made the adoption process smooth and worthwhile.

Frappe Insights has not only improved Banaraswala’s efficiency but has also encouraged a data-driven culture within the company. Join them and others in supercharging your business intelligence with Frappe Insights!