​Self-Serve Data Extraction, Normalization, and Validation

Self-serve data preparation is the modern solution to convert “dirty” data into well-structured and accurate data for analysis. Self-service data prep has become a required part of any self-serve analytics platform. It lets a broad set of business users explore large and complex data sets, transform the data to fit their needs, and ultimately have greater control over the end analysis.

Before self-service, analysts depended on their IT department to prepare and deliver data. Now, analysts and other business intelligence users can run the data preparation process themselves and free up IT resources.

​Koala’s Data Prep is the only data extraction, harmonization, and exploration tool built for consumer goods data sets. Businesses of any size can use the tool to extract, normalize, cleanse, integrate, profile, and visually explore their data sets. Routine data preparation tasks can be quickly and easily automated.

​Accelerate Your Speed to Insight

Organizations that invest in a self-serve data prep tool like Koala offers see better outcomes by integrating it into their routine data management tasks:
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  • Puts Decisions in Context: results in better insights since the people preparing the data understand how it’s being used to drive decisions.
  • Empowers Users: business data users have a greater sense of ownership of data-based insights and reporting. Users can also leverage the collective intelligence of the broader organization to achieve better outcomes faster.
  • Increases Process Efficiency: allows a larger number of people to work with larger and more numerous data sets, while streamlining the data supply chain. A self-serve data tool lets business users have data at their fingertips, while giving IT the ability to focus on broader issues like reuse, standardization, security, and compliance.

​Core Features of Self-Serve Data Prep

  • Interactive Exploration: Koala’s tool visually depicts the data prep process, as well as a visual representation of the data. Detailed visual representations, and a rich set of data analysis tools, provide analysts with an immediate understanding of the data at both high and granular levels.
  • CPG-Specific Data Handling: Data used by the consumer packaged goods (CPG) vertical presents special challenges that most data preparation tools aren’t designed to handle. Koala’s solution natively understands retail data, and has special data transformations that allow you to normalize data sets including shipping, manufacturing, warehouse, syndicated, e-commerce, and point-of-sale (POS).
  • Intelligent Execution: A specialized AI engine carefully examines every data extraction, transformation, and validation operation performed by a user in Koala Data Prep. The AI “learns” the most efficient way to perform each step for maximum performance across even very large data sets. Depending on a data set’s size and characteristics, operations are performed in a NoSQL, relational, or specialized framework.
  • Collaboration: Users can work together as a team to prepare data, and share best practices across the organization.

​Why Self-Serve Data Prep Matters

As data storage and compute resources have gotten cheaper, the amount of available data has exploded and so has the difficulty in getting it to users in a usable form. The solution is to use a self-service data preparation tool that’s tightly integrated with your reporting; and increases business intelligence, capabilities, and opportunities. You can build a company-wide culture of data-driven decision making by adopting Koala’s Data Prep tool.

Key Takeaways:
  • A high-quality self-service data prep solution lets business users, regardless of skill level, pull their own data into reports and other analysis work product.
  • Self-service reporting increases an organization’s efficiency by allowing direct access to data and freeing up IT resources.
  • Self-service analytics extracts the maximum value from an organization’s data and work cycle time.
  • Users feel a greater sense of ownership of insights used to drive decisions.