Around 10,000 orders a week. Four supermarkets.
One report.

SXOLLIE is a cider company in London. I joined in July 2021 as a data analyst apprentice through the government's Kickstart Scheme, and stayed until February 2023.

SXOLLIE sold through four of the biggest supermarkets in the UK. Tesco, Sainsbury's, Morrisons and Waitrose. Each one sent its own sales data in its own format, and every week I pulled around 10,000 orders together into one KPI report in Excel.

The report tracked sales, stock, top products and which supermarket was performing best, with year to date and month to date comparisons. I built the charts myself, so the numbers were easy to read at a glance.

The report went to the CEOs and managers, and they used it to make real decisions about where to focus and what needed fixing.

It wasn't just about reporting the numbers. When a supermarket or a product performed badly, I'd dig into the data to understand why, and look for a way to solve it.

Building the report by hand every week showed me how much time goes into moving data around. So alongside the day job, I taught myself Google Cloud and started building something better.

I wrote the SQL myself. I designed the tables in MySQL, imported the supermarket data into them, and started moving it all into Google Cloud so it could feed reports without the copying and pasting.

I got it about 70% of the way before I left. It wasn't finished, so it never went live. But it was the first time I'd built something like this from scratch, and it's where I first understood how databases, the cloud and reporting fit together.