Cracking Nielsen's ETL: From 20 Days to 3

Faster POS data: cutting Nielsen ETL from 20 days to 3.

Founder's Track Record

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Services:Unified Data Foundations, Automated Reporting & Dashboards

While at P&G Canada, Arturo rebuilt Nielsen's POS ETL, bypassing its slow and failure-prone UI with direct ODBC automation. This gave sales and planning teams faster access than even Walmart — turning data bottlenecks into competitive advantage.

The Challenge

The Nielsen data pipeline was a major bottleneck:

Downloads took up to 20 days through the standard UI
Frequent failures and timeouts required constant restarts
Sales and planning teams operated with stale data
Competitors with faster data access were gaining ground

Our Approach

We bypassed the limitations with direct automation:

Reverse-engineered Nielsen backend via ODBC connection
Built automated pipeline using KNIME and VM infrastructure
Implemented cron scheduling for continuous extraction
Distributed refreshed datasets weekly to P&G Walmart team

The Outcome

The automation transformed data access across the organization:

SLA reduced from 20 days to just 3 days
Sales teams sold with fresher data than competitors
Walmart Category Captaincy secured in Oral, Fem & Baby Care
~$5M annual POS uplift attributed to faster insights

What the Client Says

Arturo rapidly learned new technologies and applied them to business problems—redesigned our bulk data extraction to be 10× faster within two months, then enabled others to scale the approach.

Aamir Mohatarem

Senior Manager - Business Analytics, Procter & Gamble

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