WHO ARE MATERIAL??
Material is a global strategy, insights, design, and technology partner to companies striving for true customer focus and ongoing relevance in a customer-led world.
By leveraging science-based tools, Material inform and create business models and deploy measurement systems – to build transformational relationships between businesses and the people they serve.
THE ISSUE
Material were faced with an extremely complex continuous multi-national monthly brand tracker that covers over 15 countries per wave, that’s 180 reports a year all being reported by hand.
Christine Sathre, Vice President at Material, detailed some of the complexities of the project, “The countries rotate in and out with no set cadence, there is no order to it at all. Survey content brands vary, country to country, month to month, and the KPIs have different definitions depending on which market you’re talking about.”
The variation of data and markets made the reporting very time-intensive to populate and to ensure accuracy.
To top it off, the reports needed to be delivered in Google Slides with the underlying data in Google sheets. Google Slides can be very difficult to operate, as Christine explained, “If you have ever worked with Google slides for market research, you’ll understand how difficult it is to accurately populate those charts and how tedious and time-consuming it can be.”
Given the two-week turnaround needed for this project each month, this was an ominous task.
THE SOLUTION – E-TABS ENTERPRISE FOR GOOGLE SUITE
Material had been partnering with E-Tabs to automate their repetitive PowerPoint reports for years and have recognised how powerful E-Tabs’ report capabilities are. Once they discovered E-Tabs Enterprise’s new integration with Google Suite, they knew they had to implement it into their workflow. From just a single Google Slides or Google Sheets template, Enterprise fully automates the production of Material’s multi-country tracking reports with just the click of a button.
All the charts generated by E-Tabs Enterprise are native to Google slides and includes the data in the underlying Google sheets. No images or fixed charts, all charts and tables are fully editable.
“WE SAVE OVER 40 HOURS EACH MONTH, SPEEDING UP DELIVERY BY AT LEAST A WEEK. OVER THE YEAR, WE HAVE SAVED 100’S OF HOURS ON THIS PROJECT ALONE. WE SEE the SAME RESULTS USING E-TABS WITH MANY OTHER PROJECTS.“
Christine Sathre,
Vice President, Material
Christine continues that, “With E-Tabs, we’ve really been able to unlock true automation; nimble, flexible, and efficient automation that can adapt to whatever our strategic work requires.” From the single template, the automation has been able to handle the nuanced differences between the different markets and waves.
Quicker Production
Manually populating 180 reports was one of the most time-consuming and labour intensive parts of Material’s multi-country frequent cadence tracking study. Christine tells us, “In the past it’d be all hands on deck trying to populate hundreds of pages of reports and many layers of data reviews to ensure accuracy, it’d be weeks of time. But with E-Tabs’ automation, this has truly been cut down to hours.”
While the time saving is really exciting, Material are even more excited to see the way that E-Tabs’ automation has benefited their clients.
Christine says that “due to the significantly reduced amount of labour, we’re able to pass that saving onto our clients so they’re getting the same volume and quality of reports but they now have additional budget to utilize elsewhere.”
“WE’RE FINDING THAT E-TABS’ AUTOMATION ALLOWS US TO BE BETTER PARTNERS AND PROVIDE A BETTER SERVICE ALL AT ONCE.“
Christine Sathre,
Vice President, Material
More Time for Greater Insights
By freeing up time that was previously spent producing slides, Material have more time dedicated to the storytelling and the insights of the data rather than worrying about the charting itself.
Christine informs us that, “Our researchers now devote more time to higher level analysis, thinking and levelling up the insights. More time is being reinvested into helping our clients solve their business questions instead of just reporting trends. We can now spend time digging into the ‘why’ and provide a deeper level of analysis. It leads to both happier clients and happier researchers ourselves.”
“E-TABS’ AUTOMATION HAS BEEN A TOTAL GAME-CHANGER, IT’S FLEXBILE, CONVENIENT AND FAST. IT’S BEEN AMAZING.“
Christine Sathre,
Vice President, Material
Taking the Power of Report Automation to the Cloud
Material also asked E-Tabs to develop a custom dashboard to complement this Slides-based deliverable. Their client had a requirement that the dashboard needed to export into a fully editable Google Sheets report. Harnessing the power of ‘E-Cloud’, our cloud-based automation platform, we were able to integrate this export capability within their online dashboard, pushing the user’s choice of filtered data ‘on-demand’ into editable Google Sheets.
Christine, her team and their client were extremely pleased with the result. “We were also able to leverage that work into developing a custom dashboard which also exports the data straight into Google Sheets. This dashboard has enabled us to eliminate several manual data table deliverables in Google sheets that are now automatically populated in our dashboard.”