Metabase helps Cetec ERP deliver white-labeled, enterprise-grade BI to manufacturers.

The Challenge: Users of cloud ERP wanted an out-of-box fully integrated business intelligence platform and custom reporting engine to provide greater customizability of their core ERP business data, but at a more affordable price point that Microsoft Power BI.

The Solution: Cetec ERP built out an ETL (exchange/transform/load) layer to transform the ERP data structures into a data structure that could be leveraged by Metabase; thus Metabase was able to be white-labeled into “Cetec ERP BI”.

The Results: An enterprise-caliber ERP customer reporting and business intelligence engine that is both modern, beautiful, and dramatically more affordable than other data analytics platforms like Microsoft power BI.

"Metabase helped us deliver a quick, easy-to-use reporting tool to our customers who thought their data was too sticky and weighty to run legitimate reports to help them run their business. "

Jordan Jolly
Director at Cetec ERP

Why Metabase?

Cetec ERP found Metabase through word of mouth. After looking at a few options, their engineering team landed on Metabase as the best fit in terms of capability, long-term vision, and cost. The open-source mindset resonated strongly: powerful software shouldn’t be limited to big enterprises with big budgets.

Cetec ERP customers generate a lot of data as part of their day-to-day manufacturing operations. While Cetec ERP already had an ETL process to flatten and prepare that data, they didn’t have a flexible reporting layer that customers could really work with.

The goal was simple: give customers an integrated reporting and BI experience comparable to tools like Microsoft Power BI, but priced for small and mid-sized businesses. Cetec ERP had built a basic BI solution in-house, but maintaining it alongside the core ERP quickly became a distraction. Metabase solved that problem and let the team stay focused on building and scaling the ERP.

Open source was a big reason for choosing Metabase. It aligned with Cetec ERP’s belief that enterprise-grade tools can be more accessible, more flexible, and often better than closed alternatives.

Today, Cetec ERP offers a white-labeled Metabase experience that allows customers to build their own reports on top of their operational data. The team started with a handful of default dashboards, but most new dashboards have come directly from customer requests-everything from revenue grouped by customer and pivoted by month to detailed inventory aging dashboards based on FIFO, bin level, and receipt date.

The data

The Cetec ERP system is built on a LAMP stack model in addition to GOlang, React, HTML, CSS, etc. - the database is MariaDB.

Data is collected by users and employees across the enterprise in real-time as operational processes are performed in the business. It’s stored in MariaDB and delivered through various reporting mechanisms throughout the ERP platform. The database and application are hosted in Google Cloud Compute, although many of our customers opt to host in their own private cloud or resident server (we are server/hosting agnostic).

The data in that database, for customers using Metabase, is transformed through an ETL process which we maintain to prepare the data and transform it into a format which Metabase an leverage.

How Cetec ERP teams use Metabase

Cetec ERP uses Metabase as the foundation of its embedded BI and analytics offering for manufacturing customers. Rather than exposing raw ERP tables or requiring a separate BI implementation, Cetec ERP white-labels Metabase as a first-class part of the platform.

Each customer receives their own Metabase account, connected directly to their ERP data. Cetec ERP uses ETL to shape operational data into clean, business-ready tables that non-technical users can query and report on immediately. For more advanced teams, Cetec ERP also provides live database access, enabling direct SQL-based reporting on real-time data.

Customers build and manage their own reports and dashboards inside Metabase. Any dashboard can then be embedded directly into the Cetec ERP application by adding the dashboard URL. This allows custom analytics to appear alongside Cetec ERP’s native KPIs and default dashboard widgets on a user’s home screen at login.

This approach keeps reporting tightly coupled to the system of record while supporting a wide range of reporting maturity, from basic operational visibility to advanced, analyst-driven exploration. Metabase enables Cetec ERP to deliver flexible, self-service analytics without introducing another disconnected tool or data layer.

The results

Metabase helped Cetec ERP deliver a fully integrated reporting and BI layer that works out of the box with their ERP system. Customers can now automate how they group and summarize their core business data. While this data already exists in standard ERP reports, Metabase gives them far more freedom to customize and explore it.

“When I figured out the search function inside a query, everything changed. I added search to half of my reports. That was cool,” says Jordan.

The Cetec ERP team was also surprised by how many customers had SQL-savvy admins who wanted to write raw SQL. Those users appreciated the flexibility Metabase gave them, while leadership valued the dashboards and visualizations that came with every query.

Another unexpected win was how much people enjoyed working with employee-level data-not just high-level sales or purchasing metrics, but insights tied to specific people behind the numbers.