Alliance Nationwide Exposition is a full-service trade show general contractor specializing in small-to-midsize events. That focus has driven rapid growth: Alliance scaled to 1,500+ events across 1,000 venues over four years, expanding from four department heads to 20+ VPs and directors along the way. That growth outpaced the infrastructure behind it.
Margin visibility across every show ran through a manually maintained report - the Snapshot Report - pulling data from four separate systems. Alliance partnered with Invisible to rebuild that reporting process in ~3 months, replacing a fragmented, laborintensive workflow with a single, automated source of truth, laying the groundwork for a broader operational data platform.
What I like about Invisible? They listened. They understood the business importance of why we needed to build: a data platform that populates from our various data streams every single day. They heard what we wanted, and they built our box—not to jam us into their box.
Alliance tracks margin on every show through an internal report that serves as the company's financial source of truth, drawing on data from CRM, contact center, and financial reporting systems. The report had been built and maintained manually for almost a decade, consuming a significant portion of a senior leader's work week before any analysis could begin – up to 60 hours a week across leadership.
As Alliance scaled from a small leadership team to 20+ VPs and directors, the underlying data remained siloed by department, limiting visibility across the business at exactly the point where that visibility mattered most. Alliance had engaged other external partners previously to automate this process; those engagements stalled during data integration, unable to reconcile inputs from disparate systems into a usable, unified model.
Using Neuron, our data platform module, Invisible deployed a team of forward-deployed engineers to build an automated Snapshot Report. This established automated data pipelines from various systems into a single validated data model and production-ready margin dashboard; the data pipeline ingests ~360K rows of data across 35+ tables.
The engagement was scoped deliberately: rather than attempting a full operational overhaul at once, Invisible and Alliance started with the highest-priority reporting workflow and built from there. The success of that initial deployment has since shaped a broader roadmap of use cases Alliance and Invisible are now evaluating together, including expanded integrations back into Alliance's existing systems, and solutions across forecasting, supply chain, and inventory optimization.
