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How a T-Shirt Screen Printing Supplier Uses InetSoft's Open Source StyleBI for Enterprise Reporting

A mid-sized t-shirt screen printing supplier found itself at a critical growth stage where it needed deeper visibility into operations, inventory, production efficiency, and customer order trends. Operating in a competitive market with fluctuating demand cycles, seasonality, and custom orders, the company needed an agile, cost-effective enterprise reporting tool that could combine data from its ERP, e-commerce, and production systems. They chose InetSoft’s open source StyleBI enterprise reporting tool to unify reporting and improve their operational decision-making while reducing reliance on manual spreadsheets.

Challenges Before StyleBI Implementation

Prior to StyleBI, the supplier’s sales, operations, and inventory teams relied heavily on manually generated Excel reports, exported from multiple systems including their custom order management software, QuickBooks, and their Shopify-based online storefront. These manual processes often resulted in:

• Delayed insights into which products were selling fastest across channels.
• No consolidated view of print production times and job completion rates.
• Difficulty forecasting blank t-shirt inventory for upcoming seasonal orders.
• Inconsistent KPIs between departments, leading to planning misalignments.

Leadership realized that maintaining competitive turnaround times and customer satisfaction required near real-time visibility across departments, scalable to handle the seasonal spikes in data volume without incurring high licensing fees. InetSoft’s open source StyleBI allowed them to implement enterprise-level dashboards and reporting without heavy vendor lock-in or ballooning TCO, aligning with the supplier’s pragmatic IT budgeting strategy.

Implementation and Data Sources Integrated

The IT team configured StyleBI to connect to:

• MySQL database hosting the custom order management system.
• QuickBooks via ODBC for financial data such as AR/AP and COGS.
• Shopify order exports via CSV for e-commerce data.
• Google Sheets where the production team logs machine utilization and downtime.

Using StyleBI’s visual data preparation tools, the IT team built reusable data mashups that blended sales order data with production scheduling and inventory levels, allowing cross-functional dashboards without requiring deep SQL knowledge for end-users. The supplier leveraged StyleBI’s ability to push down queries to the source systems when practical while using in-memory caching for high-frequency dashboards to ensure responsive performance during heavy usage periods.

KPIs Tracked with StyleBI

Key performance indicators (KPIs) monitored across the company using StyleBI included:

• Order Fulfillment Time: Measuring average time from order placement to shipment.
• Machine Utilization Rate: Tracking downtime versus uptime across screen printing presses.
• First Pass Yield: Percentage of print jobs completed without rework.
• Inventory Turnover: Tracking how frequently blank shirts and inks are used within periods.
• Gross Margin Per Order: Calculated by blending Shopify and QuickBooks data with direct cost allocations.
• Daily Sales By Channel: Comparing Shopify, wholesale, and walk-in sales.
• Late Order Ratio: Percentage of orders shipped after promised lead time.

These KPIs provided the supplier with a unified view across production, inventory, and sales, supporting proactive decision-making, such as when to prioritize certain print jobs, purchase blank t-shirts in advance, or adjust pricing based on production costs.

Dashboards and Charts Utilized

The supplier’s dashboards were designed to be clear and actionable. Using StyleBI, they implemented:

• Heatmaps: Used to visualize machine downtime by hour and day, helping operations identify underutilized windows for maintenance or rush orders.
• Bullet Charts: Displayed actual vs. target order fulfillment times with thresholds for SLA compliance.
• Stacked Bar Charts: Compared sales by channel across time to identify seasonality and shifts in buying behavior.
• Line Charts with Trendlines: Tracked daily gross margin and late order ratios to monitor operational performance trends.
• Inventory Aging Reports: Highlighted slow-moving t-shirt SKUs, helping purchasing teams decide on markdowns or bundling strategies.
• Pivot Tables: Allowed dynamic drill-down into customer orders by SKU, region, and sales channel for granular analysis.

Using StyleBI’s interactive dashboards, department managers could filter by customer, SKU, sales channel, or production shift without IT intervention, accelerating their ability to generate actionable insights.

Automated Alerts and Scheduling

StyleBI’s report scheduling feature was used to distribute morning operational summary reports to department heads, displaying overnight orders, open production jobs, and machine utilization summaries. Threshold-based alerts were configured to notify the operations manager if:

• Order fulfillment times exceeded SLA thresholds by more than 15%.
• Blank inventory for high-volume SKUs fell below reorder points.
• Machine downtime exceeded 2 hours during standard shifts.

These alerts enabled teams to take immediate corrective actions, reducing delays and missed revenue opportunities.

Benefits Realized After Deployment

After deploying StyleBI, the t-shirt screen printing supplier achieved:

• Reduction in manual report preparation time by 70%.
• Improved SLA compliance with on-time shipment rates increasing by 15%.
• Increased machine utilization by 10% through downtime analysis.
• Improved cash flow through tighter inventory management and reduced excess stock.
• Better decision-making for seasonal inventory and labor planning through historical sales trend analysis.

The open-source nature of StyleBI allowed the supplier’s IT team to extend and customize visual components to match the company’s evolving needs while avoiding high per-user licensing fees associated with many enterprise BI platforms.

Security and Access Control

Since order and customer data contained sensitive information, StyleBI’s role-based security was configured to ensure:

• Operations staff could view production and machine data but not financials.
• Sales managers could view channel sales and order margins but not cost breakdowns.
• Leadership retained full visibility across all dashboards.

Row-level security was applied to allow regional sales managers to view only their territories, ensuring data privacy while supporting decentralized performance management.

Future Plans

Encouraged by early successes, the supplier plans to integrate additional data sources, including social media advertising data and customer satisfaction survey results, to blend marketing effectiveness analysis with sales and operational KPIs. They also intend to pilot StyleBI’s predictive modeling capabilities to forecast demand spikes, enabling proactive raw material purchasing and staffing adjustments.