Honestly compared
What you probably have already.
Almost nobody buying a control tower is starting from nothing. There is a spreadsheet that works, or a dashboard somebody built, or an ERP with reports in it. This page is about what each of those is genuinely good at, where each stops, and the honest cases where you should not buy this.
The spreadsheet
It is not the enemy. It is the requirement document.
Somebody in your plant has built a workbook that genuinely works. It knows which supplier is slow, which material always runs short in March, and which customer will accept a part shipment. That knowledge is real and most software replaces it with something worse.
What the workbook cannot do is the part nobody enjoys: refresh itself at six in the morning against last night's transactions, survive the person who built it going on leave, and answer "where did this number come from" six weeks later. A spreadsheet is a snapshot with a formula in it. When the formula and the data are the same file, every refresh is a person, and every person is a chance to paste over a column.
| A good workbook | SIAARU | |
|---|---|---|
| Set-up | Already done, by somebody who understands the plant | One month of exports, about half an hour |
| Refresh | A person, when they remember | Overnight, against the source |
| Provenance | The formula bar, if the cell is still a formula | Formula, inputs, row count and as-at date on every figure |
| Survives the author leaving | Rarely | Yes — nothing is in one head |
| Cost | Nothing, plus the mornings | On the pricing page |
| Handles a question nobody anticipated | Very well, in five minutes | Poorly, unless it was built in |
That last row is not a throwaway. A spreadsheet answers a brand-new question faster than any product will, and the plants that run best keep one alongside whatever they buy. What should move into a system is the part that runs every day whether or not anyone is watching.
The BI dashboard
A chart is not a decision.
If somebody has already built Power BI or Tableau over your ERP, you have the hardest part done — the connection, the refresh, the shared definition of a month. A BI tool will draw anything you can write a query for, and it will draw it better than this does.
The gap is what happens after the chart. A dashboard shows that on-time delivery fell. It does not rank the eleven things that caused it by the rupees attached, name the purchase order behind each one, propose the action, hold it for a person to approve, carry it out against the source system and then check a fortnight later whether the condition actually went away. That loop is the product. The chart is the first frame of it.
| BI over your ERP | SIAARU | |
|---|---|---|
| Draws any chart you can query | Yes, and better | No — a fixed set of measures |
| Decides what is worth looking at | You do, by building a view | Detection runs and ranks by value at risk |
| Says what to do about it | No | A recommendation with the record behind it |
| Writes back to the source | No | Only after a person approves, with an audit row |
| Checks whether the fix worked | No | Verification job, or it re-escalates |
| Who maintains the semantics | Your analyst | Us, and the formula is on the card |
The two sit together perfectly well. Several of the measures here are ones an analyst would have built anyway; the difference is that they arrive with a threshold, a worklist and an approval trail attached, and nobody has to keep them alive.
The ERP's own reports
Right, and a fortnight late.
SAP, Oracle and Dynamics all ship reporting, and it is accurate — it is reading the same tables the transactions were written to. Two things make it hard to run a plant from. It is organised around the module that owns the data rather than around the question you have, so a stockout that is really a supplier problem and a scheduling problem lives in three reports. And getting a new one usually means a request, a consultant and a quarter.
SIAARU reads that same data read-only and puts one screen over it. It is not a replacement for the ERP and it never writes a transaction without a named person approving it first.
Said before you ask
When not to buy this.
If your master data is not maintained. No lead times, no safety stocks, units that mean different things in different plants — this will detect that and say so, which is useful, but it will not give you a control tower until somebody fixes it. That is weeks of unglamorous work and it is yours to do.
If you have fewer than a few hundred active materials. Below that a good workbook and a person who knows the plant genuinely wins. The value here comes from ranking more exceptions than a person can hold in their head.
If you need it to place the order itself, today. Write-back to the ERP is deliberately narrow and every action stops at a human approval. If what you want is autonomous procurement, this is not it, and we say the same thing in the platform page and every deck.
If you need the three modules that are not finished. Sixteen are listed on the modules page and three of them say coming soon on their own page, with the reason. If your case is one of those, wait for it rather than buying on a promise.
The fastest way to settle any of this is your own data. Bring one month of exports — materials, stock, purchase orders — and you will be looking at your plant, not a demo tenant, inside half an hour. Book a slot, or try the landed cost calculator and the demurrage calculator first; both run entirely in your browser and need no account.