Iris Waves MPS Lineup
Consolidating fleet, contract and print-volume data into defined, explainable metrics. Along the way, a 'profitability' figure turned out not to be a real calculation at all.
The investigation
It started as a simple question from leadership: what does the profit number on this dashboard actually represent? Tracing it back through the data model, the answer turned out to be nothing solid. The figure everyone trusted had no definition underneath it.
The Margin2 field driving the Profitability page wasn't a calculation. It was a raw pass-through. Whatever number sat in a column alternately labeled Margin2 / Profit / Final Profit / Net Profit that month got summed, averaged and charted as a KPI, with no cost basis, no formula, and no link to what was actually billed.
Auditing every consumer found three places relying on it: the revenue-and-margin trend chart, the per-client profitability ranking, and the headline "Total Profit" metric. All had to change together.
margin = row.Margin2 // opaque import; meaning drifts month to month
margin = billed_revenue
− (usage × cost_per_page)
// billed_revenue: companion Billing System invoices
// cost_per_page: user-configurable
// legacy rows: fall back explicitly, never fake 0Why this mattered
A headline metric with nothing underneath it isn't just wrong once. It's wrong everywhere it's used, and it erodes trust in every other number on the dashboard. Auditing the field meant finding all three places quietly depending on it and fixing them together, so they'd agree with each other. The real deliverable wasn't a chart; it was a number leadership could actually defend.
Data integration
Alias map handles header variants like "A4 Colour Amount" / "A4 Color Revenue" / "Colour A4 Amount" → one canonical field.
Contract renewal risk
Client concentration
CEO dashboard KPIs
Outcomes
- Headline profitability metric went from unexplainable imported number to defined, auditable calculation
- Contract-lapse risk visible weeks ahead, not at renewal
- Revenue concentration computed automatically from source data
- Two disconnected systems now share one consistent revenue figure
Reflection
This project reinforced something I now treat as a rule: a metric you can't trace to a formula and a source isn't a metric, it's a rumour. Redefining margin from a real billed-revenue figure, sourced from the companion billing system rather than a re-keyed estimate, closed a data-integrity gap that had existed since the two tools were first built separately.