The Branch Ledger · Contribution-margin board

SmartSource × BI Consulting Services

One force-ranked view of 20 branch markets1 across Rentals, Event Technology and Managed IT — replacing 256 Cognos and data-warehouse reports with a single Power BI model.
Prepared for TomSenior Vice President, Technology Services · September 2026
Demonstration · Illustrative data · BI Consulting Services

Contribution margin by service line · 24 months

02 Trend

Monthly contribution margin (revenue less direct cost of fleet, labour and freight). Shaded band marks the selected period.

What this board answers

06 Questions

Three questions a Technology Services leader asks every month — each answered from the filtered board.

20 branch markets · revenue and margin band

04 Map

Dot size = revenue in period. Colour = contribution-margin band. Click a branch to filter the whole board; click again to release.

Force-ranked branches · contribution margin

03 Leaderboard

Ranked by contribution margin in the period. Movement column is rank change versus the prior period. Dashed tick = 32% margin floor.

256 reports → one model

05 Model

Every legacy Cognos and data-warehouse report was inventoried and mapped to a measure in one Import-mode star schema. Three report pages replace the lot; five people are trained to run it.

256
legacy reports inventoried (manual + automated)
41
measures in one semantic model, incl. contribution margin and force rank
3
report pages for ~30 consumers; 5 trained self-service authors
256 legacy reports mapped to 3 pages and 41 measures — 118 Cognos, 74 data-warehouse, 31 Salesforce, 22 ERP and 11 SharePoint/Excel reports; 63 were duplicates of one another and retire on day one.

Ask the data

07 AI layer

A natural-language layer over the same model. Every figure in the answer is cited back to a panel on this board.

Which branches dropped in the force ranking this period, and what is driving it?
Answers are generated from the governed model only — no figure appears that is not on the board. Shown here as a static mock.

1 Anchored figure: SmartSource states it maintains "fully-staffed and equipped branch offices in 20 major metropolitan markets" (company press release, February 2019). Branch cities, revenue, margins, utilisation, tickets and report counts on this page are illustrative and internally consistent, not SmartSource's actual results. Fiscal year is treated as the calendar year. Contribution margin = revenue less direct cost of fleet depreciation, labour and freight.

Also from BI Consulting Services

Private AI on your own server

The "ask the data" ideas on this board are designed to run on a GPU server inside your own network — an open-weight model over your own documents, cited answers, no per-seat licence, nothing leaving the building. The short deck below explains how it works. Scroll through, or download it as a PDF.

Private AI Servers — slide 1 of 14
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