From Manual Reporting to Automated Commercial Visibility
How a UK multi-brand e-commerce retailer turned fragmented, manual reporting into a structured, automated data environment.
Where they started.
Reporting was slowing the business down. The existing process relied on manual extraction and manipulation of data from their e-commerce platform, making performance visibility expensive in both time and resource.
- Monthly reporting cycles were time-consuming and resource-intensive.
- Data had to be pulled, cleaned and reworked manually every cycle.
- Performance analysis across brand and department took significant effort to segment.
- Complex KPIs required bespoke, repeat analysis each month.
The trigger. The CFO and finance team were spending a disproportionate amount of time extracting and analysing data and building reports, rather than using them. The result was slow turnaround of insight, difficulty answering commercial questions quickly, and no consistent view of performance. The business needed to move from report creation to decision support.
The engagement.
IllumiFi designed and implemented an end-to-end data and analytics platform, removing manual reporting and enabling consistent insight across the business.
Infrastructure. Automated data extraction feeding a centralised platform built on AWS and Snowflake, with a unified KPI layer ensuring consistent definitions across all reporting.
Delivery. A fully automated weekly data refresh with five integrated dashboards covering every commercial dimension of the business.
Where they are now.
- From manual cycles to always-on insight. Reporting moved from manual monthly cycles to automated, always-available dashboards. Finance and leadership now focus on analysis, not production.
- Complete commercial visibility. A single, unified view of performance across the business, brand and department, underpinned by consistent KPI definitions.
- New insight into customer behaviour. For the first time the business gained visibility into customer buying behaviour and cross-brand engagement, moving from retrospective reporting to genuine understanding.
- Faster, more confident decisions. Leadership can answer commercial questions immediately, not retrospectively, with less reliance on manual analysis and better alignment on performance.
Delivery model. Analytics as a Service. Platform build completed in under three months, then an ongoing managed service covering maintenance and continuous optimisation, with no requirement for the client to build internal data capability.
“This wasn't just a reporting improvement. It was a shift from manual, fragmented data to a structured foundation for confident decision-making.”
Service used: Analytics Platform →
Most growing businesses don't have a reporting problem. They have a data foundations problem.
If any of these sound familiar, IllumiFi can help:
- Spending too much time building reports rather than using them.
- Data sitting in disconnected systems.
- Struggling to trust or align on numbers across the business.
- Lacking clarity on what is actually driving performance.
- A poor data foundation holding back AI or automation.