Ipsos Automates Reporting to Cut Weekly Production from 100 Hours to Half a Day

Ipsos faced very high recurring production costs and error risk from manual report creation. An annual weekly tracker required 20 market Excel reports every week (≈5 hours each → ~100 hours/week) and a complex quarterly programme required multiple 75‑slide PowerPoint reports (10–12 hours each → 40–48 hours per wave). The repetitive manual work scaled linearly with volume and created frequent opportunities for mistakes, consuming researcher time that could otherwise be used to generate insights. The stakes were lost analyst capacity, high labour cost, slower delivery, and elevated risk of reporting errors reaching clients.

E‑Tabs Enterprise: E‑Tabs built reusable automated reporting frameworks that populated reports, ran statistical tests, applied suppression rules, sorted results and enforced consistent chart formatting and colour‑coding. For the weekly tracker a single automated report was built in five days to generate all 20 market reports each week with automated stat testing and suppression. For the quarterly programme an 18‑hour setup automated population of current, year‑to‑date and prior‑year figures, multi‑level stat testing, sorting and consistent brand colour filling across slides. Each framework was reused across markets, categories and waves.

Weekly production time dropped by ~96%: automation replaced ~100 hours of manual work with a half‑day process, saving more than 1,100 hours across the 12‑week programme and paying for the five‑day setup in the first week. Quarterly delivery time fell by ~85%: waves that took 40–48 hours manually were reduced to about 6 hours (up to ~160 hours saved annually), with the 18‑hour setup recovered within the first wave. Outputs became consistently QA'd (automated stat testing, suppression and sorting), and researchers were freed to spend time on analysis and insight generation rather than manual report production. The solutions were built to scale so additional reports and waves could be produced without proportional increases in effort.