From Excel to Excellent Data Culture: A Real-World BI Playbook from GlobalData
A breakfast briefing on how GlobalData replaced 10 years of spreadsheets with live BI on Astrato + Snowflake — without forcing anyone to change overnight.
GlobalData is one of the world's leading data analytics companies, delivering intelligence to clients across healthcare, technology, financial services, and consumer markets. With 4,000 employees and world-class external reporting capabilities, the business had one gap: internal analytics.
When Christopher Smith joined as Group Enterprise Data & Analytics Manager in late 2024, he inherited a decade of Excel-based workflows. 😓 Monthly management accounts took a team of 250 accountants 4–5 person-weeks to produce. The CFO received ARR data via a monthly spreadsheet that was out of date before it arrived.
Every previous attempt to introduce a BI tool had ended the same way — people exported to CSV and went back to their pivot tables.
Christopher deployed Astrato as the BI layer on Snowflake and took a different path. Instead of mandating a new tool, he used Astrato as a bridge — keeping the Excel and PowerPoint outputs the business relied on while gradually shifting workflows into self-service dashboards. No ultimatums. No "no more Excel." Just a better path to the same destination.
Seven months in:
📊 Management accounts that took 4–5 person-weeks are now produced in one click
📊 The CFO has live ARR data for the first time — with constant vs. reported currency and granular churn analysis
📊 Hundreds of hours of manual work eliminated per month
📊 40+ finance users now in Astrato regularly, up from zero
📊 The BI team has gone from building reports to shaping strategy across departments
What Christopher will cover
📋 The manual reporting workflow he inherited — and why replacing it wasn't a technology problem
📋 Why direct Excel export into pre-formatted templates was a critical requirement
📋 The specific dashboard/data app that became the turning point for leadership buy-in
📋 How sales ops and finance adopted the platform through two completely different paths
📋 What "changing culture without a sledgehammer" looks like in practice — the step-by-step approach to weaning a 4,000-person organisation off Excel
Who this is for
🎯 Data and analytics leaders at companies where Excel is still the dominant reporting tool
🎯 Teams running on Snowflake who need a BI layer that people will actually use
🎯 Anyone responsible for getting a finance or operations team from manual reporting to self-service
☕️ 🥐 Breakfast and networking included.
Hosted by Astrato and Snowflake.