The client had several tracking studies that were running in 1-10 countries with weekly fieldwork and monthly reporting. The client explained that data management for these studies had gotten “out of control” despite the studies appearing on face value to be relatively straightforward. The surveys actually relied on repeat variables for multiple products which quickly resulted in huge datasets that required significant processing to work with the data.

The questionnaires consisted of many demographic and profiling questions, standard questions about awareness, usage, liking and one complex question that included a list of platforms/channels with which the product could be associated. There were 30-50 products shown in a single country.

The reporting requirements were complex because each product’s variables need various processing to be shown on ‘all’, ‘all aware’, ‘all with experience’, etc. and platform/channel attribution only reports channels/platforms that can be relevant to a respondent in a country.

The client maintained an aggregate datafile of all countries and all waves that needed to be continuously updated as well as a dashboard of all data in all countries to be updated. The client carried out monthly table runs of approximately 3000 tables for each country separately as well as combined.

The size of the datafile had grown rapidly and the client was preprocessing data in SPSS which required a manual process. The tables and weighting required further manual steps and significant time working in Q which was problematic as Q loads data into local memory and cannot access multiple cores. Overall the process was inefficient and increasingly unmanageable. 

The client wanted the ability to easily work with the data on a macro as well as a time series level and to query across the historical data set however was limited in their ability to do so with the old set up.

Their clients also had very strict requirements for the design of the outputs so Sequence worked with the client to design custom outputs as a short term solution and advised on possible options for alternative dashboard solutions that are more suited to the size and format of the specific tracking data. 

In addition to automating the data management, data reporting and visualization, the Sequence team helped the client to centralize the questionnaire assets (product lists, translations, questions) which were previously managed in Excel and create an automatic output from the questionnaire builder to XML for Forsta to automate the pre-field setup by removing the step of manual survey programming, further automating the data production process and reducing FTE.