HWAM Power BI

HWAM builds on its TRIMIT setup with Power BI

For more than 50 years, HWAM has built high-quality wood stoves, working closely with architects and a strong sense of design. When the company chose TRIMIT as its ERP platform on Business Central, the goal was to leave manual processes and Excel spreadsheets behind and build something more structured and future-ready.

Going live in October was the start, not the finish. One of the first things HWAM added on top of its TRIMIT setup was Power BI – and it quickly became the place the company turns to for its daily overview of production, sales, and stock. This is the story of what changed once the reporting moved out of spreadsheets.

The Challenge: Reporting Stuck in Excel

Before Power BI, much of HWAM's reporting was built and maintained by hand. Every morning, someone pulled numbers out of the system and into Excel: the previous day's order intake, the order book spread across the coming months, performance against budget, and how much had been invoiced. Other overviews – production status, delivery – were kept the same way and emailed around the building.

"All we used were Excel sheets, with some pivot tables," recalls Lene Stensig Ballebye, Product Specialist at HWAM, who handles much of the company's reporting and statistics.

It worked, but it was slow, fragile, and dependent on a few people keeping the spreadsheets current. The manual approach also introduced risk: numbers were copied from one sheet to another and re-sorted by hand, so there was always a question of whether the figures were right.

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“The biggest difference for me is the time we save. What used to take an hour can now be done in around fifteen minutes.”

Lene Ballebye

PRODUCT SPECIALIAST AT HWAM

Built on the TRIMIT Foundation

Because Power BI draws directly on the data already in the system, the reports reflect what is actually there – no copying, no manual transfers, no separate version of the truth.

"It goes right down to the data. If there's an error in the Power BI report, it's because there's an error in the system," says Anne Balleby, IT Project Manager at HWAM.

That direct connection is what gives the team confidence in what they are looking at. Just as important, HWAM has not been left dependent on outside help for every change. With support from TRIMIT, the team has started building and adjusting its own reports – moving fields around, adding elements, and creating new views as needs come up. When something is missing, a short message or a half-hour on Teams is usually enough to sort it.

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“Before Power BI, we spent a lot of time pulling numbers into Excel and maintaining reports manually. Today, much of that work simply runs automatically.”

LENE BALLEBYE

PRODUCT SPECIALIST AT HWAM

HWAM is a Danish manufacturer of wood-burning stoves, founded more than 50 years ago. The company develops and produces stoves for customers across a number of international markets.

One Place for Production, Sales, and Stock

HWAM uses Power BI across several parts of the business, with licensing that refreshes the data up to eight times a day.

Production overview

A delivery and capacity report shows how loaded production is against what the company has committed to: what is finished, what is planned, what is still outstanding, and what is running late. "It gives us a clear picture of how effective we are compared to what we've decided we should be able to deliver," Anne explains. Changes flow straight through – when she blocks a day or adjusts capacity, the next refresh reflects it everywhere, rather than requiring edits in several places.

Sales and budget

Management, sales, and ownership can see revenue and the order book against budget, by market and by period – both at a glance and month by month. Answering a question like how many grey stoves sell compared to black ones takes seconds, with no report to build from scratch.

Purchasing and stock

Where purchasing previously had no real tooling, Power BI now gives the team a daily list of items heading toward zero or into negative stock, so they can act before it becomes a problem. A re-ordering checkpoint warns them when consumption is running faster than expected, in time to respond. A separate supply-planning view looks back over five quarters of actual usage to help estimate demand.

Finance

A list of unsent invoices shows the finance team exactly where to follow up, instead of checking each case individually.

The Results: Time Back, Fewer Errors, Proactive Work

The clearest gains so far are in time and confidence. The daily order statistics used to cost Lene about 15 minutes every morning, pulling and assembling numbers by hand; that work now runs automatically. Monthly statistics – including reporting to industry organisations across Denmark, Germany, the UK, and the rest of Europe – once took around an hour.

"What used to take me an hour now takes about fifteen minutes," says Lene Stensig Ballebye.

Because the figures come straight from the system rather than from one spreadsheet copied into another, there is far less room for error – and far less of the "are you sure those are the right numbers?" back-and-forth that used to come with it.

The reporting has also become self-service. Instead of pushing spreadsheets out by email and interrupting people's work, colleagues open Power BI when it suits them:

"Now they can go in and look whenever they want," Lene notes – daily, or just on a Monday, depending on the role.

For the business as a whole, the shift is from reacting to anticipating: purchasing can see what is about to run short, internal sales can flag orders at risk of slipping, and decisions rest on numbers that are easy to reach rather than on gut feel.

It is worth being clear about what cannot yet be measured. HWAM is currently in its low season, so the full effect on delivery performance will only show once the high season returns – and the team is deliberately not claiming that result before they can see it.

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“Power BI gives us a much clearer picture of what is happening in the business – without having to piece the numbers together manually. Instead of spending time creating reports, we can spend more time using the information"

ANNE BALLEBY

IT PROJECT MANAGER AT HWAM

Built for the next chapter

HWAM is still early in what Power BI can do. New reports are added steadily, and the team's growing ability to build its own views means the platform keeps expanding without waiting on anyone else – exactly the direction HWAM set when it first chose TRIMIT: less manual work, more automation, and decisions grounded in real data.

For other production companies still living in Excel, Lene's recommendation is unequivocal – and her summary of the whole change is a single word:

"Time-saving."

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