Danny Mawani Olsen gives a presentation on automation and repetitive tasks at Superweek 2019. He discusses how automation can help reduce repetitive tasks by performing processes with minimum human assistance. He talks about his own journey of automating repetitive reporting tasks using tools like R, PowerBI and Zapier. He emphasizes documenting work, using available tools, and scaling solutions so work is not dependent on single individuals. The overall message is that automation can help workers spend more time on interesting tasks rather than repetitive ones.

1. SUPERWEEK 2019
REPETITIVE TASKS
ARE SLOWLY
KILLING US FROM
WITHIN
01. February 2019

2. 01.
INTRODUCTION

3. • Danny Mawani Olsen
• Copenhagen based
• Lead analyst at IMPACT EXTEND
• 2nd Superweek
• Worked with Analytics for 5 years (Thanks Steen)
I’m Danny! The guy
always asking
questions on
#measureslack
@dannymawani

4. 100% focus on digital
commerce Long customer relations 7 x Gazelle
A A R H U S – C O P E N H A G E N -
L I S B O A
1 2 6 E M P L O Y E E S
E S T A B L I S H E D I N 1 9 9 8
Market leader in commerce
Established in 2018 17 Employees Aarhus - Copenhagen
Part of IMPACT A/S
Clients: Largest retailers in the
nordics
Focus is on datadriven marketing

5. WHAT DO WE WORK
WITH?
Datacollection
Marketings
initiatives and
userbehaviour
• Making data avaliable
• Telling the right story
Consolidating data
• Work with multiple datasources
• Make sure that they can tell the right story
Dataarchitechture
• Development of KPI
frameworks
• GTM
• Mapping out datastructures
Data
aggregation
A lot of GDPR in
the mix
Make sure that what we do is legal
• Permissions
• GDPR flows
• Mapping data the right way
Visualization
@dannymawani

6. Lead Analyst
THE
TEAM
Analytics and tracking specialist
Analytics & Dashboard specialist
CEO
Head of BI & Statistic modelling
Head of traffic & Inisights
DANNY OLSEN RASMUS
CHRISTIANSEN
CHRISTIAN
VERMEHREN
MAIKEN TORRILD THOMAS RODE DENIS HANSEN

7. What is the definition of automation, and what can we learn from the
past?
02.
AUTOMATION AS A
CONCEPT

8. ”Automation is the technology by which a process or
procedure is performed with minimum human assistance.”
Groover, Mikell (2014). Fundamentals of Modern Manufacturing: Materials, Processes, and Systems.

9. ”Automation is the technology by which a process or
procedure is performed with minimum human assistance.”
Groover, Mikell (2014). Fundamentals of Modern Manufacturing: Materials, Processes, and Systems.

10. THE INDUSTRIAL
REVOLUTION
The industrial RevolutionModern age
1780 1850
Contemporary age

11. FROM RURAL TO URBAN
SOCIETY
From farming
to factory

12. STEAM ENGINE

13. From Factory
to office

16. From office
to modern
office

18. THE NEXT STEP
From modern
office to
collaboration
with
machines

19. WE ARE ALWAYS AFRAID
OF BEING REPLACED

20. AUTOMATION IS
ESSENTIALLY?

22. 03.
HOW TO START
AUTOMATING
YOUR WORK

23. This is my fiancé Sandra
• She automated having to put the plate back
and on the table
• Also build in a spill tray for toast crumbles
and cheese
• By reducing her time reaching the plate for
the plate, she can save the mental energy to
withstand me!

24. How I got
started: This
is me at my
first Senior
job
• Mainly worked with GA and
GTM implementations
• Used some javaScript but
didn’t know how it was all
connected

25. Business
unit A
Business
Unit B
Business
Unit C
X = 36 SEO REPORTS
A task was given: Create the same SEO report
for the client

26. This is me
when after
the brief

28. SO I
BEGAN A
JOURNEY
LEARNIN
G R

29. FIRST I LEARNED HOW TO
PULL GA DATA

30. LEARNED GGPLOT2

31. FINALLY CREATING A
RMARKDOWN DOCUMENT TO
BE SEND TO THE CLIENT

32. I SPEND A RIDICULOUSLY
AMOUNT OF TIME BUILDING
IT, BUT IT GOT ME STARTED
TO BE BETTER AND FOCUS
ON MORE FUN PROJECTS

33. HOWEVER, ALSO REDUCING
THE TASK FROM 2 ANALYST
WORKING 3 DAYS TO ME
SPENDING 3 HOURS A
MONTH

34. SINCE THEN WE
HAVE TRIED TO
BUILD
FRAMEWORKS
For plug and play to
things like cost uploads
For things that the tools
doesn’t support and to
transform the data
For storing data and
large calculations

35. R Cron jobs: Ubuntu R server in Google Cloud
Master machine boots the ”slave machines” when needed. A cost price around 25 euros a month.
When it is set up. We only use VM with the capacity needed in order to reduce costs.
SETUPPIPELINE: R
Master Machine
(Always online)
Cron Job (starts
and stops
machines)
Refund Data
Pulls script from
storage
Formats data and
uploads it to GA
COGS upload
Pulls script from
storage
Formats data and
uploads it to GA
Datawrangling
Pulls script from
storage
Formats data and
sends it to the right
places
Datavalidation
Pulls script from
storage
Checks for
deploys, and does
an audit should
there be changes
Sends an email if
there are issues
and also creates a
task in asana
GDPR Check
Pulls script from
storage
Checks if there are
GDPR challenges
Sends an email
and creates a task
in asana

36. GOOGLE
ANALYTICS
VALIDATION Generates an Google Analytics audit based on
API parameters
 Makes it into a formatted PDF

37. QA ON DATA
 Check the data quality after a deploy
 Should something have happened, then it will
send an email and create a ticket mentioning the
errors it have found
Event To Google Analytics
Category: Deploy | Action: Jira ticket
Did something happen with the data?
Yes No

38. UPLOAD OF
REFUNDS
 Daily upload of refunds
Data from cient
VM With R
Upload toGA

39. COGS UPLOAD
 Monthly upload of product purchase prices to
see how much is actually earned on marketing
expanses
Data from cient
VM With R
Upload toGA

40. GDPR CHECK
 If there are any issues with the data send that
shows PII (differs from client to client), we
identify it across datapoints
 In GA, should there be any issues we delete the
user affected
Data from client
VM With R
Check for GDPR breaches

41. Datasourc
e
MA Tool
Google Big
Query
BI ToolGoogle Cloud
Storage
Google
Compute Engine
Other sources
R studio
server
Attribution
tool
Action on data
Fra tool to action
1. Datasource is established and
connection is set up
2. It is then added to BigQuery on
a client project they have control
over
3. Data is then pushed to either
the marketing automation tool if
a consent is given for the user
4. For dashboards and attribution
that same dataset gets
encrypted to ensure that people
cannot identify users if they do
not have the right permissions

42. ONCE THAT IS IN PLACE, WE CAN
START TAKE ACTIONS

43. AND DO STATISTICAL SEGMENTING
THAT IS NOT POSSIBLE IN THE
AUTOMATION TOOL

44. TO SEE HOW OUR CLIENT
SEGMENTS PERFORM

45. AND PUSH CALCULATED
DATA INTO RULES FOR THE
MA PLATFORM

46. HOWEVER, IT
DOESN’T HAVE
TO BE THIS
COMPLICATED

47. IF THIS THEN
THAT

48. ZAPIER

49. UPLOAD TO
GA
I F C H A N G E S I S
M A D E TO A
T H E N S E N D T H AT
I N F O R M AT I O N TO G A

50. ALERTS
I F G A S E N D S A N
E M A I L A L E RT
T H E N C R E AT E A TA S K I N
A S A N A W I T H A L L P R O P E RT I E S
A N D S I T E S A F F E C T E D O N C E A

51. ZAPIER

52. ALERTS
I F G A S E N D S A N
E M A I L A L E RT
T H E N C R E AT E A M E S S A G E I N
S L A C K W I T H A L L P R O P E RT I E S
A N D S I T E S A F F E C T E D O N C E A

53. • Rasmus eksempel
ZAPIER

54. OTHER
TOOLS

55. REMEMBER,
DO WHATS
AVALIABLE TO
YOU• This is our Brilliant Lead
SEO spcialist (Being a
lead is like being a head
of an department without
having to talk politics,
pay and employer
conversations)
• He is not a tech guy and
can’t code
• He is really great with
excel
• Ranked #1 on the danish
words for Loan and New
year meals

56. • What he did was to take
the data that he needed to
do an SEO report
CHRISTOPHER
S WAY TO
AUTOMATION

57. POW
ERBI
• Takes google Ads
data and combines
that with the
position to see how
much value that is
in each search term

58. POW
ERBI
• Use the other tool to
assess how other
companies rank for
all of the clients
search terms

59. ALL HE HAS
TO DO TODAY
• Download the data
• Add it to the powerBI
template
• And do a little adjustment
for outliers etc.
• A process that has taken
days and know only
takes a few hours
• In the future it will be
faster as we are working
on making API
connections to all the
search tools

60. 04.
DUMB WAYS TO
DIE AT WORK
FOR NOT
AUTOMATING

61. MAKING YOURSELF
UNREPLACABLE ON THE
WRONG FOUNDATION
• Not involving your team mates in
your activity or highligting what
processes that you handle
• Not documenting any of your work

62. BEING AFRAID TO ASK
QUESTIONS
• People in this community
are smart – Scary smart
• It is quite easy to think
that you are stupid and
that you are embarrassing
yourself
• The same can be said for
answering questions,
sometimes it can be
frightening to answer
questions because you
are afraid of being
ridiculed

63. NOT
DOCUMENTING
YOUR WORK• This is Maiken one of
our junior analyst
• Her job is mainly to help
with GA and GTM tasks
• For tasks she has not
done before, we
document that task for
next time, or use the
existing documentation
to do the work

64. NOT
OUTSOURCING• We can all agree that
Hussein is a smart guy!
• When I was a junior i
used Odesk (Now
UpWork) to help me
with some of the tasks i
couldn’t do
• Because of this, I got
the job done fast and
with a lot of quality and i
could learn from his
solutions

65. NOT REALIZING WE ARE
WORKING WITH
ANNOYING SIZE DATA• Data on our computer is annoying
size, meaning that big data tools
doesn’t nessescarily be the best way
for us to work with data
• Divide and conquer your data to
ensure that it can be processed in a
good way
• Remember to use the right tools for
the right dataset

66. NOT BEING
LIKE PETER
MEYER
Q U A L I T Y A S S U R E L I K E
C R A Z Y
D O T H I N G S T H E R I G H T
W A Y A N D S T O P U S I N G
” N I N J A H A C K S ” E V E N
T H O U G H I T T A K E S
M O R E T I M E
M A K E S U R E T H I N G S
C A N B E S C A L A B L E I N
O T H E R P R O J E C T S
K E E P U S I N G N E W
T E C H N O L O G Y I N Y O U R
W O R K

67. 05.
ROUNDING OFF

68. “Automation, It’s not necessarily a way to obsolete
the human equation, but instead thinking about how
we can spend our time better doing other things when
it comes to repetitive tasks, and by that saving time to
do awesome things instead of doing the same things
over and over again”
AUTOMATION: TO
ME

69. I
PROBAB
LY
DON’T
DO
THINGS
THE
SMARTE
ST WAY

70. BUT FOR EACH ITERATION I
GET A BIT CLOSER TO A
SMARTER SOLUTION

71. MY
BEST
ADVICE
D O N ’ T B E A F R A I D T O
U S E T O O L S
A U T O M A T E W H A T Y O U
C A N W I T H I N Y O U R
T E C H N I C A L
L I M I T A T I O N S
D O T H I N G S T H E P E T E R
M E Y E R W A Y
( S C A L A B L E , A N D
S T A B L E )
D O C U M E N T A L L C O O L
T H I N G S Y O U D O
A S K F O R H E L P W H E R E
Y O U C A N ’ T D O
E V E R Y T H I N G
Y O U R S E L F
K E E P L E A R N I N G A N D
I M P R O V I N G Y O U R
F R A M E W O R K S

72. AND REMEMBER TO
HAVE FUN

73. Repetitive tasks are killing us
from within
Do what is in your disposition to make the
best out of your work
By Danny Mawani Olsen
/dannymawani @dannymawani