A railcar services roll-up had bought 35 businesses across 14 locations and left each on its own Sage 300 CRE instance.

Work orders sat in RailcarRX, labor hours in ADP, and invoices and payments in Sage, with cash spread across about 90 bank accounts. No shared ID joined a service order across those systems, so management could see margins falling but could not say which jobs, shops or car types were behind it. Reporting ran through 35 Excel workbooks linked by lookup formulas and refreshed a few times a year for board meetings. On that view, paint and blast and rubber linings looked unprofitable, and management planned to cut both.