Does this replace our warehouse system?
No. Your warehouse management system stays exactly where it is, and your floor keeps working the way it works today. We connect to it with a read-only account and copy data out on a schedule. Nothing we build writes back into it, and nothing about your picking, packing, or billing process changes. If a vendor ever tells you the reporting layer requires replacing the system underneath it, that is a sales position, not a technical one.
Who owns the database?
You do, and that is the point of building it this way. It sits in a cloud account in your company's name, on your billing, with credentials your team holds. We are a user on it, not the landlord. You can point any tool that speaks SQL at it, hire anyone you like to work in it, and if you stop working with us the database, the queries, the refresh schedule, and the documentation all stay behind and keep running.
How current is the data?
As current as the schedule you pick. Nightly is the common answer and it is usually the right one, because most of these numbers get read in the morning and acted on during the day. Hourly is available where someone genuinely acts on the difference. We do not pretend this is real time: a report that is a few hours behind and always correct beats a live feed that quietly stops on a Friday.
Will this slow down the system our floor depends on?
It shouldn't, and that is treated as a hard requirement rather than a hope. Reads run on a schedule, off-hours where the vendor prefers it, paged and inside whatever rate limits the API publishes. After the first full load we only pull what changed, so the ongoing traffic is small. If your system has a documented limit or a maintenance window, we build around it and say so in the handover notes.
Our system already has reports. Why add anything?
Because those reports answer the questions the vendor chose to anticipate, and the report builder stops at the edge of that list. The moment your question involves a field the builder won't group by, a period it won't compare, or data from a second system entirely, you are back in Excel. The vendor sells the warehouse system. Nobody sells the layer on top of it, which is why every operator we talk to has built one by hand in a spreadsheet.
What if we change systems later?
The database stays and the extract gets rewritten. That is a real advantage of keeping your history somewhere you own: a system change does not take five years of operational data with it, and you can report across the boundary instead of starting a new spreadsheet on cutover day. It is also useful during a migration, because the old and new systems can be compared on the same numbers.
Can our own people work in it, or does everything come through you?
Your people can work in it. The whole design assumes an analyst, a controller, or a curious operations manager will connect to the database directly, and the field documentation is written for that person rather than for us. Plenty of clients take the reports and run with them. Others keep us on for new questions. Both are fine, and you are not locked into either by the way it is built.
What systems can you pull from?
Extensiv 3PL Warehouse Manager, NetSuite, Dynamics 365 Business Central, ShipHero, CartonCloud, Infoplus, and QuickBooks today, and the list is not a partnership list — it is where we have done the work. CargoWise is a different conversation, and worth saying plainly: getting data out of it is its own project with access questions to answer first, so we would scope that before promising anything. If your system is not named here, ask. What actually matters is whether it has an API or can produce a scheduled export.
How does an engagement start?
With a conversation about the reports you can't get today, not with a quote. We look at what your system exposes, what questions you're trying to answer, and whether there is a smaller version worth doing first. Sometimes the honest answer is that one report your vendor can build gets you most of the way, and we'll tell you that.