Global beverage researcher replaces spreadsheets with ingest automation

IWSR is the global leader in beverage alcohol data and insights, produces data reports that the market relies on. By adopting CloverDX, IWSR revolutionized their data ingestion processes, enabling them to reduce repetitive manual data entry, handle diverse data formats, and free up domain-expert researchers to focus on higher value tasks.  

Read on to discover how CloverDX helped IWSR streamlined their processes...

IWSR's initial process involved: 

• Inconsistent data formats that all needed to be converted to a consistent structure.  
• Cumbersome manual entry to copy data cell by cell into collector tools, increasing the likelihood of errors.  
• High resource demand where highly knowledgeable researchers were spending hours on manual tasks that didn’t make use of their expertise.  
• Inefficient scalability to meet growing data volumes and ambitious growth plans. 

Similarly, the IWSR Product Manager, Jamie Connolly agrees, “It was a very, very manual process up until this point. Every number that we publish, a researcher had to type into a spreadsheet.”  

As data volumes were increasing, and the company was looking to grow, IWSR recognized the need to transition from the labor-intensive process to a scalable, automated solution to ingest the thousands of Excel files and free up valuable time. 

David Green, IWSR CTO, remembers the frustration of seeing researchers spending time on manual tasks:

The solution

How IWSR automates data mapping and ingestion with CloverDX

IWSR turned to CloverDX, and specifically CloverDX’s Business Tools features, to automate and streamline how data was transformed, mapped, and ingested into their systems.

File mapping with CloverDX Wrangler  

Wrangler, part of CloverDX Business Tools, serves as the first line of defense in tackling incoming, unstandardized data. With Wrangler’s intuitive drag-and-drop interface, domain experts could categorize and standardize data columns, mapping them into a consistent structure.

Data matching and validation in Data Manager  

Once the files are standardized, domain experts use CloverDX Data Manager to take incoming data and match it to IWSR’s standardized taxonomy for market names, brandlines, and product categories.  

David Green explains that “The really valuable bit that the researchers were doing was that they weren’t just copying blindly, they were using their domain knowledge to know which rows went with which rows. It was that matching process that was key.” 

Using Data Manager eliminated the need to manually reconcile fields, and meant users didn’t need to remember previous matching decisions. IWSR has created a ‘seen it before’ repository, where decisions are logged for use in future research cycles, reducing duplication of effort and increasing consistency.

As Product Manager Jamie Connolly explains: “When we see that same file from that same source again, we can automatically skip the matching step. Everything is centralized, repeatable, and consistent.” 

Bridging the gap between automation and essential human oversight  

IWSR’s market-leading position comes from the expertise of their researchers – so while much of the manual, repetitive process was automated, it was important that the researchers still had oversight over final validation and approval. This approach balances automation with human expertise, safeguarding trust and accuracy. 

Head of Product and Programs Sam Landers points out how much easier the process is now for the researchers: “Researchers receive the prepared data in collector tools, ready to review. This is a marked improvement over hours spent matching, reformatting, and typing.” 

Results

Saving time without compromising data quality

Since implementing CloverDX, IWSR has redefined its data processes, achieving measurable and far-reaching outcomes:

8 days saved per researcher  

“We believe we’ve saved an average of 66 hours per researcher during this research cycle” says CDO Andy Noble. 

Saving what equates to over 8 working days for every researcher has freed up time to be spent on more valuable tasks that make use of their expertise, such as industry interviews and analysis.  

CTO David Green explains that it wasn’t only about saving time, but about being able to make the most of the researchers’ knowledge: “We were trying to free up as much of the expert time as possible – getting other people to do more of the heavy lifting and leave the real domain expertise to the domain experts. We weren’t trying to reduce headcount, we wanted them to be spending their time doing other things to add more value to the business.” 

The feedback from the researchers themselves has also been positive. Researcher Jose Luis Hermoso says “It was much easier for me to have everything in one place and to see the progress. It’s really nice to be able to trust such a tool in this very busy period for us.” 

The Future

Scaling with a solid data foundation 

CloverDX – and the CloverDX Business Tools specifically – has been a valuable part of IWSR’s digital transformation, helping eliminate wasted time, automate data ingestion, and maintain integrity.

More time to spend on new projects  

CDO Andy Noble remarks that “The more we can use tooling like CloverDX to free up time to do things that humans are better at doing, the better we get, the faster we get, the easier it is to scale. It’s easy to think we automate to save costs, but we don’t, we automate to save time.” 

These significant time savings are making it easier for IWSR to grow their business. 

Scaling data ingestion without having to scale the team 

IWSR has plans to expand the CloverDX integration into new products and verticals, building on the robust data foundation to scale future growth while providing reliable, critical market insights to their customers.  

As David Green says: “The goal of this project was to help us scale, so we could handle more markets and more data without having to just hire more people. Now we’ve made the process so much more efficient we can keep growing, and grow the business without necessarily having to scale the team itself.” 

Unlocking new opportunities for growth 

Having a strong, repeatable data ingestion pipeline that’s scalable across the business is also opening up completely new business opportunities, as Jamie Connolly explains: “By having this generic process, we start to be able to link up completely different datasets that we’ve never linked up before, or that would take weeks and a huge amount of manual effort to do.” 

Sam Landers adds: “It has the potential to unlock other data product opportunities, by giving our custom analytics teams much easier access to data to draw out insights for clients." 

Building automated data ingestion pipelines, and freeing up the time of domain experts, has given IWSR a platform to continue to scale and grow. As David Green says:  “We’re just scratching the surface. Scaling across new project verticals is forthcoming, and everything we’ve built is flexible for future growth.”

As one team defined the rules—how the data should look, how categories should align, and what validations mattered—the technical team ensured those rules were built into scalable pipelines that handled data in the right sequence. Together, they created a process where expertise and CloverDX automations worked hand in hand.