Three people, three different numbers for the same metric

Ask the same question of three people in a mid-sized company: what was last month's revenue, or the margin on a given product line. It is not unusual to get three answers. None of them is wrong: each one is calculated from a different source, a different scope and a different cut-off date.

The symptom is ordinary, and more serious than it looks. As long as it persists, no performance management holds, no automation can be trusted, and no artificial intelligence project will produce anything at all. Above all, decisions end up being taken on instinct, because nobody trusts the numbers.

What it reveals

• No owner. The figure belongs to nobody. Everyone rebuilds it for their own purposes, with their own conventions.
• Competing sources. The ERP, a reworked export, a spreadsheet maintained by one person. All three coexist and slowly drift apart.
• Implicit definitions. Is revenue invoiced or collected? Does margin include logistics? Nobody wrote it down, so everybody decided on their own.

The work involved, and how big it really is

This is not an IT project, and it needs neither a data warehouse nor a BI tool. It is a piece of organisational work, and it takes a few weeks.

• Identify the ten to fifteen numbers that genuinely drive your decisions. No more than that.
• For each one, write down the definition, the formula, the source and the frequency. A single page covers the lot.
• Name an owner for every number. A person, not a department.
• Retire the competing sources, or make them explicitly secondary.
• Run the test again three months later, with the same three people.

The return is not measured in euros saved but in decision time. Once the numbers stop being argued over, meetings move from checking the figures to making the calls.