How Nactarome Built a Scalable Reporting Infrastructure to Support M&A Growth

Nactarome is a leading company in the development and production of natural solutions for the food industry.

In 2022, the company entered a new growth phase following its acquisition by the private equity fund TA Associates. This transition significantly increased the need for:

• Reliable and frequent reporting to shareholders
• Consistent performance visibility across teams
• A scalable data infrastructure able to support future M&A activity

Before working with expecta, Nactarome’s reporting process was:

• Highly manual, relying on spreadsheets and ad-hoc data extraction
• Slow, both internally and toward the private equity fund
• Inconsistent, with different teams working on different versions of the data

As a result:

• Management lacked a single source of truth
• Reporting cycles absorbed significant operational time
• Integrating new data sources for acquisitions was complex and time-consuming

This setup was no longer sustainable for a fast-growing portfolio company.

expecta partnered with Nactarome to design and implement a complete reporting and BI infrastructure, following a structured approach:

Implementation Phases

1. Assessment of existing data sources and reporting needs
2. Creation of a centralized Data Warehouse
3. Development of a unified analytics model
4. Automated reporting delivered to internal teams and the PE fund

The solution was built to work on top of Nactarome’s existing systems, without disrupting their operational infrastructure.

With expecta, Nactarome achieved:

Automated reporting across:

• Sales
• Operations
• Human Resources
• Commercial pipeline
• Finance
• Procurement
• Retention analysis

Company-wide adoption of reporting, from:

• Shareholders
• Executive management
• Department heads
• Commercial teams

A scalable Data Warehouse, designed to:

• Easily integrate data from future acquisitions
• Support ongoing M&A activity without re-engineering reporting

The new infrastructure turned reporting from a bottleneck into a strategic asset.

What sets this platform apart is not just the breadth of its reporting, but how each module connects to form a single analytical narrative that mirrors the business itself. The seven reporting areas follow the natural flow of Nactarome’s operations — from the first commercial opportunity to the people who make it all happen.

Commercial Pipeline

Everything starts with the pipeline. The Commercial Pipeline report provides end-to-end visibility into the business development process, from opportunity creation through close, across all entities. Key capabilities include:

• Pipeline health monitoring — classifying every open opportunity as healthy or unhealthy based on configurable audit rules, tracked per company, business line, and sales representative
• Forward-looking outlook — the full open pipeline segmented by expected close date and opportunity status
• Performance tracking — waterfall bridge visualization decomposing pipeline movement into its core components (initial stock, created, won, lost, closing stock) with year-over-year trends and win rates
• Cross-sell intelligence — analyzing pipeline distribution across group entities and business lines, highlighting cross-selling patterns
• Pipeline bridge analysis — monthly flow view showing how pipeline stock evolves over time
• Pipeline vs. actual sales comparison — measuring pipeline coverage against last-twelve-month (LTM) net sales
• Sales representative productivity — tracking individual rep performance across pipeline creation, win rates, opportunity volume, and average deal size
• Top changes tracking — surfacing the largest pipeline movements

Operations & Service Levels

When pipeline opportunities are won, they become customer orders. The Operations & Service Levels report provides end-to-end visibility into order fulfillment performance, delivery reliability, and logistics efficiency. Key capabilities include:

• SLA compliance monitoring — dual-layer analysis of both Operational SLA and Commercial SLA, tracked monthly and segmented by customer grade (A/B/C/D tiers)
• On-Time Delivery (OTD) tracking — measuring delivery punctuality against confirmed and requested dates, with benchmarking across plants, business units, and product categories
• Request window analysis — understanding how far in advance customers place orders relative to SLA commitments
• Freight cost intelligence — tracking carrier costs, road distances (calculated via geocoding), and CO₂ emissions per delivery
• Order-level drill-down — granular detail view showing every order and delivery with full lifecycle dates and SLA classification

Sales Analytics

The Sales report captures the end result of the pipeline-to-delivery chain: revenue, volumes, and margins across the entire group. Key capabilities include:

• Year-over-year pacing analysis — tracking current performance against prior periods at both the group and entity level
• Portfolio evolution — analyzing how the customer and product mix shifts over time
• Multi-dimensional drill-downs — slicing performance by region, business line, plant, customer grade, product type, and more
• Top N rankings — identifying top-performing customers, customer groups, and products by revenue, volume, or margin
• Raw material margin distribution — analyzing margin spread across the portfolio
• Sales team performance — tracking individual account manager and sales representative performance

Customer Retention

The Customer Retention report decomposes changes in both revenue and gross margin into their underlying drivers: customer churn, product gains and losses, price movements, volume shifts, and cost changes. Key capabilities include:

• Revenue and margin bridge analysis — waterfall visualizations decomposing the change in net sales and gross margin into seven distinct categories: customer churn, product downsell, comparable volume effect, comparable price effect, comparable cost effect, product upsell, cross-sell, and new customer acquisition
• Seven-category customer classification — every customer–product combination is automatically categorized each period
• Dual time horizons — every analysis available in both Year-to-Date (YTD) and Last Twelve Months (LTM) views
• Comparable customer deep-dive — isolating pure price effect, volume effect, and cost effect using weighted averages
• Year-over-year retention breakdown — retention rates, revenue evolution, and margin evolution by customer, product, region, and sales representative

Finance

The Finance report provides the official P&L view built from trial balances. Key capabilities include:

• Dual P&L view — an Accounting P&L built from trial balance data and a Reporting P&L constructed from transactional sales data, reconcilable in a single dashboard
• Full P&L waterfall — from Net Sales through COGS, Raw Material Margin, Industrial Costs, Industrial Margin, Fixed Costs (17 categories), down to EBITDA
• Cost driver allocation — fixed costs allocated using three distinct drivers: net sales share, volume share, and invoice line count share
• Accounting vs. Reporting reconciliation — comparing both P&L perspectives side by side with variance analysis
• P&L Drivers deep-dive — interactive drill-down into each P&L component by entity, plant, product type, customer, and time period

Procurement

The Procurement report provides complete visibility into the purchasing lifecycle from open purchase orders through delivery to final invoicing. Key capabilities include:

• Full portfolio view — combining open purchase orders, open deliveries, and invoiced purchases
• Supplier performance monitoring — analyzing net purchases, volumes, and order line counts by supplier with year-over-year comparisons
• Open order and delivery tracking — automatic delay detection with delay categorization and lead time analysis
• Product-level procurement intelligence — analyzing purchases by product, category, and type, with make-vs-buy classification and unit cost tracking
• Multi-dimensional drill-downs — analysis by company, plant, region, supplier, product, and buyer

Human Resources

The HR report closes the loop by providing a complete workforce planning and cost control platform. Key capabilities include:

• Dual-track workforce planning comparing actual vs. budget for both headcount and FTE
• Semi-additive headcount and FTE measures that correctly compute point-in-time workforce size
• Payroll cost breakdown into salary, social charges, bonuses, benefits, severance provisions (T.F.R.), and accruals
• Employee flow analysis showing new hires and departures per period
• Workforce demographics including age distribution, gender, nationality, tenure analysis, and contract type breakdowns
• Payroll-to-accounting bridge linking HR cost categories to general ledger accounts
• Row-level security by legal entity so local HR managers see only their own entity