By automating recurring multi-market and multi-category tracker reporting with E-Tabs, Toluna reduced production effort from 31 working days to just 4, freeing researchers from repetitive reporting work and giving time back for analysis, insight and client value.
About Toluna
Toluna is a global insights leader helping brands make smarter, faster business decisions through data-driven strategy, research expertise, the Toluna Start platform and a global panel of 79M+ consumers.
The Challenge
For Toluna, the biggest challenge was the production effort required to turn recurring tracker data into client-ready reports at scale.
While the reporting structure remained largely consistent from wave to wave, producing reports was still a highly manual process, copying data from input files into PowerPoint, updating charts, and proofing each report to confirm the right numbers were pulled for the right brand and time frame before they could be shared with clients.
Across nine projects, reporting production required approximately 235 hours of effort, creating a substantial operational burden and a real risk of manual error at that volume.
The Solution
Toluna used E-Tabs Enterprise to automate the production of its recurring brand tracker reports, across projects spanning multiple countries and categories.
Brand funnels, brand imagery grids, sorted tables and market-specific elements like country flags were populated automatically instead of entered by hand. New markets ran off the same automated process against their own tables, rather than rebuilding each report from scratch.
Reports still went through proofing, but once the first output in a batch checked out, the rest needed only a light check, freeing the data visualization team to focus on report quality rather than manual entry.
The Results
The impact was immediate and measurable.
Across 9 automated projects, Toluna produced 104 reports and 5,518 slides through the automated workflow. Reporting effort dropped from approximately 235 hours to 30 hours, while total working days fell from 31 to just 4.
In total, automation returned 27 working days to the team, time that could be redirected from repetitive production work into analysis, storytelling and client support.
The Bigger Impact
The impact of automation went beyond faster report production. By removing repetitive manual work, Toluna created a more scalable reporting operation, capable of delivering high volumes of client-ready outputs with significantly less effort.
Researchers could spend less time building and checking reports, and more time focusing on the work clients value most: analysis, storytelling and insight.
For recurring tracker programmes, that shift matters. It means faster turnaround, greater consistency, reduced manual handling and more capacity to support complex, repeatable reporting at scale.
Watch Laura Pienkowski and Benjamin Rietti discuss how E-Tabs helped Toluna moved their reporting into the fast lane.
Looking to automate your reporting?
Whether you’re managing tracker studies, multi-market research, segmentation projects or recurring client reports, E-Tabs helps research teams eliminate manual reporting effort and focus on delivering insight.
