Trading Excel Gymnastics for Data Excellence: How DMS Automated 150+ Hours of Manual Work Weekly

When Nick Shirals joined Detroit Manufacturing Systems (DMS) four years ago, the picture was all too familiar: data trapped in silos, manual Excel processes consuming hours of valuable time, and teams pulling reports from 25 different systems just to get answers to basic business questions.

Today, DMS has transformed into a data-driven organization saving over 150 hours of manual work each week (and they're just getting started.)

The Challenge: Breaking Free from Data Silos

As a tier-one automotive supplier working primarily with Ford and Volvo, DMS faced the operational complexity that plagues many manufacturers. Nick Shirals, Senior Manager of Data and Analytics at DMS, describes the initial state: "We had around 25 different data structures inside of them, so we needed to unify that. The company itself had been doing a lot of just manual tasks—pulling data out of one source into an Excel file and then doing Excel gymnastics on top of that where it's just a repetitive process and it gives us stagnant data."

The company had an aggressive goal: automate their supply chain. But CEO Bruce Smith and CTO Tom Schwartz knew that achieving this vision required something fundamental first: a unified data foundation.

"They had an overall goal that they wanted to be collecting data on everything so that we would be able to, in a way, mic up the plant so that if something was going wrong, we would know beforehand," Nick explains. "In order to do that, we had to get the technology to make that happen."

Why Incorta? Culture, Capability, and Commitment

DMS evaluated several solutions before landing on Incorta. The decision came down to three critical factors:

Partnership over sales. "The company culture was great. It felt like you were working with a partner rather than a salesperson," Nick notes.

Proof of value. Incorta offered to demonstrate value upfront through a proof-of-concept engagement. "They came out and did the POV. They met us in person. They had conversations with our IT and our C-suite. And they said, 'Let's kick this off. You have a problem, we think we have a solution, so let's do this together and we'll do it for free.'"

The right fit. Some solutions were too large and expensive for DMS's needs. Building internally would have required hiring a data engineer, data architect, and additional BI analysts - a significant investment in both cost and time.

The Implementation: IT as True Partners

One of Nick's key insights centers on the importance of involving IT from day one. "Having them sit with the Incorta team and looking at how the data agent connects, does it meet our security standards, what do we have to do to make it meet our security standards - that was a really big thing."

Rather than the typical scenario where IT gets a solution "dumped in their lap," DMS's IT team was involved from the proof-of-value phase forward. Dan, the senior IT engineer who led implementation, reported that the process was "a lot easier than other projects that he's had to set up. It went really smooth. It didn't have a lot of hiccups where some things may last months to years to get set up and working efficiently. This was a matter of weeks."

First Win: The KPI SOA Project

DMS chose a challenging but high-impact use case to start: the finance team's KPI SOA project. This executive dashboard consolidated 110 different metrics from six different sources - financial, HR, safety, and production data - all previously assembled manually through Excel and Adaptive.

"It was so manual and had so much opportunity to save somebody's time and even maybe increase the accuracy of some of the numbers that were coming out. It just seemed like a perfect fit for a starting point," Nick recalls.

The success of this initial project laid the foundation for broader adoption.

Expanding Impact: From Purchasing to RPA Integration

As word spread about what Incorta could deliver, more departments came calling. The purchasing team emerged as particularly "data hungry," requesting supplier spend reports, indirect spend analysis, and working closely with Nick's team to ensure data validation.

But perhaps the most innovative application came from integrating Incorta with DMS's Robotic Process Automation (RPA) team. By creating business schemas in Incorta, the RPA team could extract data and automatically populate documents for HR, eliminating manual form-filling while keeping humans in the loop for validation.

"The manual task of going in and filling out a Word form has been eliminated at this point," Nick explains. "Trust but verify—the human's still somewhat in the loop because you still have to validate."

Another breakthrough came through partnership with Holland & Parker (Incorta's implementation partner), when consultant Trenton tackled the negative inventory challenge. Previously, supply chain staff had to pull SAP reports daily, then manually investigate each line item to determine why inventory showed negative. Trenton consolidated everything onto one dashboard, automatically applying business rules to explain the root cause—whether parts weren't back-flushed properly, weren't scanned correctly, or other issues.

The Results: 150+ Hours Saved Weekly (And Counting)

The CEO's initiative this year focused on reducing manual hours per week across the organization. From Incorta-based reports alone, DMS has eliminated 150 hours of weekly manual tasks—and that number doesn't include projects partnered with the RPA team.

Beyond time savings, DMS has discovered additional value in improved data quality. "Some of the sheets that they're inputting data on right now don't completely match up, so getting all of that data quality at one standard level has been awesome," Nick notes. In one case, the HRIS system wasn't calculating totals correctly—an issue that might have gone unnoticed indefinitely without Incorta.

The platform has also helped unify how different departments view the same metrics. Finance might look at total numbers while operations focuses on recovery amounts, but now both teams work from the same underlying data, just sliced differently.

Lessons for Other Manufacturers

Based on DMS's journey, Nick offers three key pieces of advice for manufacturers considering similar digital transformation:

Start with a problem.
"Have a nail ready before you have a hammer. Don't just have a hammer and start looking for nails. Start with the problem."

Bring IT along from the beginning. "Make sure your IT team is definitely in with you the whole time. I can't tell you how many times I meet with vendors and they say, 'Well, we can just connect to this,' and it either doesn't work out as planned or it becomes an afterthought."

Secure executive sponsorship. "This is going to be a big investment for many different reasons—financially, change management, people management. If you have that support from the top, it helps with the change management of the organization to accept the goal of what you're trying to do."

What's Next: Self-Service Analytics and AI Readiness

Looking ahead, Nick's vision is to move beyond the "bubble" of centralized analytics toward a self-service model. "My dream for DMS is that we have a self-serving analytics platform so that each group is able to look at their own data and be able to do their own analytics on it."

And as the industry buzzes about AI and agents, Nick recognizes that the data foundation they've built positions DMS perfectly for the next wave of innovation. "In order for us to be able to have good data being either predicted or presented or whatever the case may be with AI, you got to have good data in your data lake."

Nick's role has transformed along with the organization. Coming from change management and launch ("almost like a necessary evil") where he made people's jobs harder - he now makes everyone's jobs easier. "That has been one of my favorite things about coming into this role," he reflects.

Every day brings something different: building new solutions, working with subject matter experts to solve problems, or planning what's next. And there's always a "what's next"—which is exactly the point. The more people use the platform, the more ideas they generate, and the more value DMS can deliver.

From 25 disconnected data sources to a unified analytics platform. From 150+ manual hours saved weekly to a foundation for AI-driven decision intelligence. DMS's digital transformation journey shows that with the right technology, the right partners, and the right approach, manufacturers can turn data from a burden into a competitive advantage.
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Interested in learning how Incorta can help your manufacturing organization build a data foundation for digital transformation? Contact us to discuss your unique challenges.

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