Yeah, that's an obvious thing to do, right? However, the company armored themselves against this sort of competency attack against The Machine by having in-house IT by policy gate keep access to the ERP db tables, which are exactly as you describe, and can be reverse engineered. This does have the additional side effect of making it quite difficult (in practice impossible) to implement in-house statistical process control. Which, again, makes it much more difficult to, um, need to be diplomatic here... discover which processes could be improved. Much better to outsource to another corporate consulting parasite a multiyear/multimillion $$ effort indoctrinating the troops on the abstract importance of process.
However, I enthusiastically applaud your success! Seems it might be a tightrope act to balance "Ima worth a bunch of money to you" vs. management realizing "that nerd is a massive SPOF".