Unified KPI Command Center

The leadership team had a reporting rhythm that worked when the group was smaller and broke under growth. Six spreadsheets covered supply chain, finance, customer service and growth. Each one had a different owner, a different cadence and a different definition of the headline numbers. Friday afternoons were spent reconciling, and by Monday the reconciliations were already stale.

Before any build, we ran a trust audit on the underlying numbers. For each KPI we asked the same three questions: who owns the source, how is it calculated and how often does it change. About a quarter of the metrics had no single owner. Another set were calculated two different ways depending on who was asked. We resolved those disagreements before we wrote any code, because a dashboard built on contested data has a half-life of weeks.

The unified-view design came next. Rather than collapsing everything into a single warehouse, we built a thin orchestration layer that pulled live from each source on request. The advantage: the source teams kept ownership of their data and their cadence. The reporting layer never went stale because it never had its own copy.

Each source got a specialised skill: one for the ERP, one for the eCommerce stack, one for the service desk, one for the warehouse system, one for the ad accounts and one for the finance ledger. Each skill knew how to translate the source's idea of an entity into the unified view's idea of one. The four trading entities rolled up cleanly because the entity normalisation lived in the skill layer, not in human heads.

Orchestration was where the leverage compounded. A single request from the leadership channel triggered the relevant skills in parallel, waited for the slowest, and assembled the snapshot. The same plumbing powered the weekly review, the monthly board pack and the ad-hoc question. The grind disappeared because nothing was being rebuilt; everything was being assembled.

Six months in, the most-used surface was the simplest: a one-line request from the leadership channel that returned the snapshot in under a minute. The dashboard the team had originally asked for got built and barely used. The lesson was clear: on-demand beats scheduled when the cost of asking is low enough.