// case study
Custom Dashboard Live in 2 Weeks — While the $4K/Month Tool Stayed Broken for 9 Months
The Situation
SharkNinja EMEA had just rolled out a new ERP system. The migration was supposed to modernize their operations. Instead, it silently broke every single BI report the business relied on.
Each morning, the team was manually reconciling revenue figures in Excel — pulling numbers from multiple systems, cross-checking them by hand, and preparing summaries for leadership. This was happening every day, including for the CEO. The $4,000/month official BI tool the company was paying for? Still broken. Their vendor was working on a fix. No ETA.
They called us. We were on-site the following week.
What We Built
A decade ago, custom meant year-long engagements and six-figure capex — the SaaS model existed precisely to make that trade unnecessary. Since 2024, that calculus has inverted. Development cost has collapsed, first-party APIs are everywhere, and the vendor layer that used to shield buyers from complexity has become its own source of fragility.
Rather than waiting on the official vendor or trying to patch the broken integration, we built a purpose-fit replacement from scratch — designed around the specific data structures of the new ERP, not the assumptions of a generic BI platform.
- ✓Direct ERP integration— connecting to the new system's data model without relying on any third-party middleware or vendor timelines
- ✓Automated revenue reconciliation— the figures that previously took hours of manual Excel work each morning were now calculated and updated automatically
- ✓Executive-ready dashboard— live revenue figures, regional breakdowns, and key metrics surfaced in a format ready for the CEO's morning review
- ✓Production deployment in 2 weeks— scoped, built, validated against known figures, and handed over while the official tool remained offline
The Result
The custom dashboard went live in two weeks. The team stopped reconciling in Excel the same day. Leadership had their numbers back.
Nine months later, the $4,000/month official tool was still broken. The custom dashboard we built was still running — untouched, unchanged, and accurate.
The speed wasn't a coincidence. When the cost of building custom has collapsed and first-party APIs fill the gaps that used to require vendor intermediation, the fastest way forward on a broken SaaS stack is often to walk around it. The $4,000/month subscription wasn't protecting SharkNinja from complexity. It was the complexity.
“Colin was building dashboards faster than our BI team could meet to discuss the problems.”
Related
Want a result like this? Tell us what you need →