As NielsenIQ (NIQ) scaled to $4B+ through acquisitions and organic growth, finance leadership needed analytics that could keep up. The company partnered with LevelUp to modernize its finance analytics platform.
As the organization scaled organically and through acquisitions, finance leadership increasingly required faster, more detailed analytics to support executive reporting, strategic decisions and long-term planning.
The company's existing analytics environment, built on legacy infrastructure, had become difficult to maintain and slow to evolve. What had once been sufficient no longer met the demands of a public company operating at scale. Reporting refreshes were lengthy and error prone, and critical workflows depended on manual processes and tribal knowledge.
With broader system modernization already underway, NielsenIQ identified an opportunity to decisively upgrade its finance analytics foundation by improving reliability, speed, and governance without adding unnecessary operational complexity.
The Challenge
Despite a strong internal finance and analytics team, the legacy reporting stack constrained the organization in several ways:
- Long refresh cycles (~90 minutes), limiting iteration speed and responsiveness
- Legacy, fragmented data pipelines where re-running jobs required significant manual intervention—pressuring timelines and adding unnecessary complication
- Manual exception handling and undocumented logic, limiting transparency
- Limited version control, testing, and peer review, increasing the likelihood and impact of errors
- Growing operational complexity, just as the business required greater rigor and repeatability
Compounding these challenges, NielsenIQ needed to execute this transformation without any disruption to ongoing reporting cycles.
The LevelUp Approach
LevelUp partnered with NielsenIQ to stabilize, document, and evolve the existing environment while laying the groundwork for a modern, scalable analytics platform.
Following an assessment of the current state, LevelUp recommended a Snowflake-native architecture using dbt Project on Snowflake, purpose-built for finance analytics.
Rather than introducing additional vendors or managed services, the solution was deployed directly within NielsenIQ's existing Snowflake environment—leveraging the native compute, security, and governance capabilities already in place.
Finance-First Architecture
The analytics foundation was rebuilt with finance workflows as the primary design framework. Core transformations were designed to be deterministic, repeatable, and auditable—providing faster visibility into the monthly refresh process and increasing confidence at every level of the organization.
Safe, One-Click Refreshes
Legacy, state-dependent refresh logic was eliminated. Pipelines now produce consistent results every time—removing an entire class of operational strain.
Automated Transformations & Governance
Using dbt, LevelUp implemented modern analytics engineering practices, including:
These capabilities reduced risk while improving developer productivity and long-term maintainability. By leveraging dbt Project on Snowflake, NielsenIQ avoided additional hosting contracts or security overhead—simplifying procurement, access management, and ongoing operations while reducing total cost.
The Outcome
NielsenIQ successfully migrated from a legacy Postgres-based analytics pipeline to Snowflake + dbt Project—From 90-minute refreshes to a finance team focused entirely on strategic decisions, not firefighting.
- ~95% reduction in refresh time (from ~90 minutes to ~5 minutes)
- Predictable, repeatable refreshes—same inputs, same outputs, every time
- Elimination of manual exception handling and undocumented logic
- Built-in version control, testing, and peer review for finance analytics
- Hundreds of legacy fields rationalized into a clean, well-documented model
- Dramatically improved performance in segment and product level financial reporting
- Repositioned the finance team to focus on strategic decision support vs. manual analysis creation and validation
When the new system went live at NielsenIQ, the most telling signal was silence. No alerts. No late-night escalations. Just business as usual.
By rebuilding finance analytics around deterministic transformations and Snowflake native execution, NielsenIQ improved decision-making speed, and established a durable foundation for future growth.