Our decisions rest on data from dozens of different sources. For five years, our BI department has been processing, connecting and shaping this data so that other teams can easily use it. Reporting and integration make up the largest part, creating the knowledge infrastructure for the growth of the whole company.
Our task is to turn a tangle of numbers from several dozen sources into meaningful reports, which we publish on Tableau Cloud. The reports are interactive and available to everyone who needs them for their work. Some reports are also sent directly by email in PDF format, at various frequencies. On average, we generate and send more than 5,000 reports a month this way.
Our reporting and integration team has six people. Although that may sound like enough, each of us actually handles two or three areas of work, along with developing new solutions and maintaining the old ones. That is why we try to automate as much of our work as possible.
Most pipelines run automatically once set up (from extraction and transformation through to clean data in Tableau), and we only return to them when a new request or an unexpected problem appears. Our daily work is mainly about integrations and connecting data for new use cases, new extractions, and creating and editing reports.
We typically process data for:
- Sales. We manage data on clients and deals from our internal CRM, data on specific orders and the performance of online advertising from ad systems, but also market data and information on how competitors are doing.
- Distribution. We supply the print edition with data on sales, subscriptions and subscribers.
- User Hub. We track registrations, logins and Premium users. Thanks to the connection with Meiro, we create segments for targeted campaigns and newsletters.
- Marketing. We process data from email marketing as well as from our social media channels.
- Finance, for which we prepare data from SAP, especially the financial P&L in detail for individual titles.
Put simply, we bring together all the data that does not directly concern content. Content is handled by Bára Drozdová’s team.
In addition, we look after the data architecture, including data quality monitoring (Keboola, Snowflake), the administration and monitoring of systems, and we also oversee Tableau. We know this BI tool very well, and we train not only business users but also colleagues within the BI team. For Tableau, we created a unified report template and set up a certification process, so that each report is clear and understandable for users.
Perfectly connected systems
We simplify the work of management, product and, typically, sales people too. For example, we automatically monitor the level of advertising discounts and track margins, so that sales people can be sure they are selling on fair terms.
Thanks to integration with our CRM, we can automatically assign potential clients to specific sales people, which simplifies and speeds up sales. This is especially useful for special events such as Blesk Tlapky, ABC Festival, the F.O.O.D. picnic or E15 events.
Data in one place
Meeting the financial plan is just one of the things we report on regularly. For Finance and Sales, we have prepared clear reports in unified templates that match the official company presentations. The reports are also optimised for export to PowerPoint, so they can easily be inserted into any presentation.
As a result, colleagues no longer have to laboriously gather data from different sources. They have everything prepared in one place and in a unified visual style. In a fast-moving media environment, it is important to make room for strategic decisions. Those can only be made calmly and with quality information. I am glad we are able to offer all of this.
Overall, we focus on making all our activities increase efficiency and save time for colleagues in other departments. We automate manual tasks, speed up work and enable deeper analysis by bringing data from many systems together in one place and in context. I am proud of our team and of how we keep pushing the data infrastructure forward.
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