High Speed Gear Saves 6 Hours a Day and Eliminates 211 Inefficient SKUs with Business Central Insight

Company Background

High Speed Gear Products Group (HSG) is a leading manufacturer serving military, law enforcement, competitive shooting, and commercial markets. Managing nearly 5,000 SKUs across multiple brands, customer segments, and sales channels, the business operates in a highly complex manufacturing environment where accurate, timely information is critical to operational performance.

As the organisation expanded through growth and acquisitions, reporting demands increased significantly across sales, manufacturing, finance, and leadership teams.

The Challenge

Like many growing manufacturers, HSG relied heavily on spreadsheets to answer critical business questions.

Teams spent hours downloading data, maintaining formulas, and manually preparing reports to understand sales performance, profitability, customer trends, and manufacturing efficiency. Reporting often took six to seven hours each day, creating delays in decision-making and increasing reliance on manual processes.

The challenge was not only the time involved. Leadership also needed confidence in the numbers being used to make business decisions.

As Allison Mitchum, Vice President at High Speed Gear, explains:

One wrong formula can change everything. When you're managing millions of dollars spent across multiple brands, it has to be accurate.

The business needed a reporting solution that could provide faster access to trusted information while supporting future growth.

Why High Speed Gear Chose Business Central Insights

HSG evaluated several reporting and analytics solutions but wanted something that could deliver value quickly without requiring extensive custom development.

Business Central Insights provided a ready-to-use reporting framework built specifically for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central. Instead of building data models, dashboards, and measures from scratch, HSG could immediately access proven Power BI reports designed around operational and financial reporting requirements.

The team also valued the collaborative approach provided by Business Central Insights.

The flexibility that Dejan from BCI offered straight out of the gate was a game changer.

Rather than simply providing software, Business Central Insights worked closely with HSG to ensure reporting aligned with how the business operated.

From Spreadsheet Reporting to Real-Time Visibility

Following implementation, HSG quickly moved away from many of the manual reporting processes that had previously consumed large portions of the day.

Leadership gained real-time access to information across:

• Sales performance

• Daily shipments

• Profitability

• Manufacturing operations

• Customer purchasing trends

Information that previously required multiple manual steps became available instantly through Power BI dashboards, subscriptions, and saved views.

For executives, this meant faster access to the information needed to make informed decisions.

If it's Saturday morning and I need to know what I'm walking into on Monday, I can get that information instantly.

The Results

Faster Reporting

One of the most immediate benefits was the reduction in reporting effort.

Key report preparation dropped from six to seven hours per day to around fifteen minutes, allowing employees to focus on analysis and decision-making rather than report creation.

The business also eliminated approximately $40,000 in annual manual reporting costs while enabling 15 users to self-serve information without relying on reporting support.

Better Sales Visibility

With improved access to customer reporting, HSG gained a clearer understanding of customer performance and purchasing behaviour.

The sales team identified 36 declining customer accounts that required attention and implemented year-over-year tracking across more than 500 customers and dealers.

Rather than discovering changes months later, account managers could identify trends early and take proactive action.

Manufacturing Optimisation

One of the most valuable discoveries came from manufacturing reporting.

By analysing product performance, production requirements, and operational efficiency, HSG identified 211 SKUs that were creating inefficiencies in factory runs.

Removing these products from production schedules helped improve manufacturing efficiency and reduce operational disruption.

We were able to eliminate 211 SKUs from factory runs that were creating inefficiencies.

The Bigger Business Impact

The benefits extended far beyond reporting efficiency.

Sales teams gained greater visibility into customer performance and opportunities. Manufacturing leaders gained clearer insight into operational efficiency and production requirements. Executives could access profitability and business performance information whenever needed, without waiting for reports to be built.

The result was a more informed, data-driven approach to decision-making across the organisation.

We can make better and more informed decisions because we finally have leverage with data.

Building a Foundation for Future Growth

As High Speed Gear continues to grow, access to accurate information becomes increasingly important.

By replacing spreadsheet-based reporting with Business Central Insights, the business established a reporting foundation capable of supporting future expansion, operational complexity, and evolving reporting requirements.

Today, teams spend less time gathering information and more time acting on it.

As Allison Mitchum puts it:

We've gone from manually building spreadsheets to having instant visibility into the business. That changes everything.

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