Cepro stuurt sneller met Business Intelligence voor NetSuite

Cepro International B.V. develops products that make welding workplaces safer. But within an international organisation, how do you quickly identify what is driving a revenue variance and where action is needed?

Cepro regularly faced this question. The company operates worldwide through different sales structures and had all the relevant data available in Oracle NetSuite. However, there was no quick way to drill down from a notable figure to the underlying customers, products and transactions. As a result, identifying the cause of a revenue variance could take four to five hours.

Cadran Analytics brought the relevant NetSuite data together in reliable dashboards with validated figures. From the overall view, users can drill down directly into customers, products and underlying transactions, allowing them to spend less time investigating and take action more quickly.

Safety for everyone around the welder

Cepro has been developing products that make welding workplaces safer for more than thirty years. The company focuses on protecting colleagues, visitors and others in the vicinity of welding activities. Its product range extends from welding curtains and screens to complete, custom-designed welding workplaces. Cepro sells worldwide through technical wholesalers and distributors. In nearby markets, the company works with its own sales representatives and many local customers; further afield, it more often works with a single exclusive importer.  This international sales structure makes reliable management information essential. In a country with one exclusive importer, a revenue variance is easy to explain: one phone call is often enough to identify the cause. In markets with hundreds of purchasing customers, this is far more difficult. Cepro had extensive data available in Oracle NetSuite, but lacked a quick way to move from an unexpected figure to its cause and a concrete commercial action.

Plenty of figures, too little insight

Cepro has been using Oracle NetSuite since 2021. The ERP system provides a solid foundation for day-to-day transactions and targeted searches.  For broader analyses and comparisons across multiple periods, the organisation also used various reports and Excel overviews. The required information was available, but combining and analysing it further regularly involved additional manual work.

One important tool was OPA, short for Omzet Per Artikel, or Revenue per Item. This was a large Excel file that semi-automatically retrieved data from NetSuite. The totals were accurate and showed, for example, how a market or product group was performing. However, the file mainly consisted of fixed tables across different worksheets. Users could not drill down from a total to a period, product or customer to determine exactly where a variance originated.

Cepro also used Saved Searches: reusable queries within NetSuite. These allowed the organisation to display all orders above €5,000 each day, for example, or identify customers who had not placed an order for three months. Saved Searches worked well for these kinds of operational lists, but were less suitable for integrated trend analysis. In addition, only one employee within the organisation could build the more complex searches effectively, so many questions ended up with the same person.

For customer-level analysis, Cepro also used the visit report. A button on the customer record generated this custom overview as a simple web table showing annual revenue by product group. It was useful for customer meetings, but static: users could not select another period, view developments over time or navigate smoothly from market level to the underlying customers.

For Ruud Looijmans, Sales Director at Cepro, this meant that salespeople could spend a great deal of time searching. As Ruud explains: “I would rather have a salesperson selling than searching the system for information.”

A needle in a haystack

The problem was particularly apparent in Cepro’s larger home markets. In Germany, the company has around 350 active purchasing customers. When a variance appeared at product-group level, Sales then had to investigate each customer individually to determine where the increase or decrease came from.

“When we identified a variance like that, people sometimes spent four to five hours searching the system before they found the cause, without exaggeration,” says Ruud. The lack of a shared overview that was easy to search also created uncertainty. Colleagues consulted one another, discussions arose about the cause, and only then could the conversation turn to the right action.

Finance also worked with manually compiled monthly Excel overviews for items including the balance sheet and profit and loss statement. During the subsequent validation process, these were found to contain errors on a regular basis. This was not because employees were insufficiently careful, but because the process involved many recurring manual steps.

A practical alternative to Excel and separate reports

Finance, Sales and management increasingly needed a faster way to analyse and visualise the available NetSuite data. Maarten explored various options, including Excel and SuiteAnalytics Workbooks. Ultimately, Cepro was looking for a single visual environment in which data could be combined and users could easily navigate from an overall view to the underlying details.

A colleague in Finance introduced Cepro to Cadran Analytics. The combination of NetSuite knowledge, BI experience and an existing foundation of dashboards proved decisive. This meant Cepro did not have to develop the data connections, definitions and reports from scratch.

Cadran Analytics made the relevant NetSuite data accessible and brought it together in dashboards for Sales and Finance. Existing dashboard models formed the starting point, after which the setup was tailored to Cepro’s processes and information needs. Definitions and figures were checked together with end users, so Cepro could not only analyse faster but also rely on the information in the dashboards.

The project started in January 2026, with the first delivery following in March. Some work on the finance component continued afterwards, as the process revealed that several internal processes still needed improvement. Cepro received a Sales & Margin dashboard and validated finance overviews for Profit & Loss, Balance Sheet, Accounts Receivable, Accounts Payable and Cashflow.

Careful validation was especially important for Finance. For Cadran Analytics, reliable and traceable figures are a key requirement before a dashboard is put into use. Cadran Analytics and Cepro’s end users therefore devoted considerable attention to checking the finance overviews during the implementation. The results in Power BI were compared with the existing reports, and any differences were jointly traced back to the underlying data.

This revealed that some of the differences were caused by the many manual steps in the existing Excel reports. “When we examined the Excel overviews in detail, we found that they contained errors time and again because everything was done manually,” says Maarten. Cepro therefore decided to remove several unnecessary calculations and intermediate steps from its own reporting process, instead of adapting the new dashboard to the old way of working.

From investigating to taking action

For Sales, the difference quickly became tangible. During a visit to the sales manager in France, Ruud noticed a variance within a product group in the dashboard. Instead of opening numerous customers in NetSuite based on experience, they could drill down directly from the overview.

“Within one minute, we had identified the four customers behind the variance,” says Ruud. “That makes a world of difference to us. It saves us a tremendous amount of time, allowing us to move into action mode instead of investigation mode.”

Because everyone now looks at the same overview, less time is lost collecting, sharing and interpreting different files. The question is no longer simply what happened to revenue, but primarily which customers need attention and what action is appropriate.

The wider rollout across Sales was still in progress at the time of the interview. Ruud therefore stresses that the total time saving is an estimate. For five sales employees and himself, he expects a saving of around 10 to 15 hours per week over time. “We can spend that time taking action and calling customers. That is far more important to us.”

Room to build further in-house

Cepro deliberately chose an approach in which standard dashboards form the starting point, while the organisation can continue building independently afterwards. Maarten was therefore closely involved in setting up the Power BI environment during the implementation. He gained insight into how the reports are structured and, following delivery, can modify dashboards and develop new analyses himself. This keeps Cepro flexible when future information needs arise and avoids the need to start a new implementation project for every extension.

One example is the Sales Expense Overview. Travel and entertainment expenses were included in the regular profit and loss statement, but were not immediately clear for each market manager. Maarten therefore created a separate overview that allows Sales to compare quarterly expenditure with the budget. This means that not every new question requires a completely new external project.

Rolling out step by step

The dashboards are currently used by a small group across Finance, Sales, Operations and management. The next step is to give more sales representatives access, enabling them to prepare their meetings independently and drill down directly into the customers and products in their market.

Ruud expects the commercial benefits to become increasingly visible as the dashboards are rolled out more widely across Sales. Cepro then wants to track market trends at product level and measure the impact of product-focused actions by product class. This will show how individual products are developing in each market and what effect those actions have.

After that, Cepro sees opportunities to add other data, such as information from email marketing, Google and LinkedIn campaigns, and future sales forecasts. The company is also exploring whether selected insights can be shared with key international partners, allowing them to respond more quickly to developments in their markets.

For Maarten, the direction is clear. Going back is not an option: “We can only make this bigger and extend it further throughout the organisation.”