Notes · Nov 2, 2026 · 4 min read · Reporting

How we cut 2,000 reports to 200 after a merger

Executives had stopped trusting the numbers. The fix started with interviews, not code.

Romel PrashadPrincipal consultant, marketing technology & data

When two media companies merged, the analytics team inherited roughly 2,000 reports across Teradata and SQL Server. Different teams reported different subscriber numbers, and executives had stopped trusting any of them.

Start with people

Before touching a pipeline, we interviewed executives, team leads and analysts: which decisions do you make, and which numbers do you use to make them? That told us what actually mattered.

Count what gets used

Usage logs showed that more than half of the reports were never opened. Most of the rest were near-duplicates of each other, built by different teams for the same question.

Rebuild in layers

We moved everything onto one Databricks platform, wrote standard definitions for revenue, subscriber and marketing KPIs, and rebuilt reporting in two layers: a small executive set and operational reports underneath it. About 200 reports remained.

What changed

Leadership got one set of numbers, analysts stopped reconciling spreadsheets, and new questions could be answered from clean tables instead of another custom report.