2026 Carter Machinery Team

The Challenge

Carter Machinery is moving off its legacy CODA system and onto Microsoft Dynamics 365, and the entry codes that drive its financial and operational reporting had accumulated across decades of use in that older environment. Many were no longer active, many overlapped with one another, and no consistent standard governed how new ones were created. Carrying that clutter into a new ERP would have compromised data quality and reporting accuracy from day one, so the company needed a full review of its current entry codes, a consolidation of redundancies, a standardization approach, and a ready-to-use governance plan it could run long after the project ended.

The Solution

The student team began with data extraction and structuring, working directly in Snowflake to write SQL against Carter's transactional history, establish baseline entry code counts, and identify consolidation opportunities. They examined both the distinct entry codes and the entry code and output combinations that tie each code to a specific bank, division, and store. From there the team moved into Microsoft Excel to perform quality checks, validate the Snowflake pulls, and assemble a list of potential entries to delete.

For the sustaining half of the work, the team developed a governance plan built on a search-enabled Power BI dashboard for continuous auditing after project completion. Instead of scrolling thousands of rows, a user can search any portion of a record and read the result against a removal flag column that marks every row not used in the last three years. That column is the most critical piece of the design, because it turns a one-time cleanup into a repeatable review the business can run on its own.

The Impact

The analysis gave Carter a concrete picture of how much of its entry code structure was dead weight: 21.91% of distinct entry codes and 37.73% of entry code and output combinations were inactive, and the team surfaced 16 potential entry consolidation opportunities as the strongest candidates for further review. Those findings position Carter to enter Dynamics 365 with less clutter to migrate and a clearer standard for what belongs in the new system. The team also recommended two extensions of the dashboard — a flow trends comparison showing how customers connect to their specific purchasing outputs, and a flag correlation analysis pairing a timeline view with a heat map so Carter can see when flagged activity occurs and whether it concentrates in particular stores or divisions.