Accelerating Insights: How Torq Helped Enhance Wakefield’s Data Pipeline

THE CLIENT

Wakefield is a research firm specializing in sports sponsorship analytics across top professional leagues and teams. They saw an opportunity to enhance existing data pipelines to better support business growth. With some remaining manual data touchpoints in their workflows, Wakefield recognized the potential to improve efficiency and scale by further automating workflows. Team members, who previously spent time wrangling, validating, and distributing data, could now spend more time focused on analysis and deeper insights.  

THE MACRO TREND

According to a recent Alteryx report, a shocking 76% of data analysts still rely on spreadsheets to clean and prepare data today, costing organizations in the form of operational inefficiency, data management costs, and decision-making. Indeed, it’s estimated that bad data quality and processes cost organizations an average of $12.9 million every year according to Gartner. And with the rapid advancement of Artificial Intelligence, the speed and quality of data processing is more important now than ever to compete in the market.

OUR APPROACH

Teeing up Wakefield’s data management transformation, Torq delivered a comprehensive data engineering strategy that addressed every layer of the data stack—including acquisition, architecture, modeling, governance, and security.

Automated Data Pipelines

Using Qualtrics APIs, R, and Shiny, Torq improved existing pipelines and built-in app to seamlessly ingest survey data from multiple clients, covering responses from thousands of fans. This significantly reduced manual effort and improved processing speed.

Secure, Centralized Data

A structured, cloud-based data warehouse was implemented to centralize and organize incoming data at scale. Security and access controls were introduced to ensure a robust, compliant, and controlled environment.

Data Quality & Governance

Torq optimized ETL pipelines ensuring consistent, high-quality datasets ready for analysis, while reducing risk of user-driven error and additional labor costs.

RESULTS

By enhancing data pipelines and implementing modern cloud-based solutions, Torq delivered immediate value to Wakefield, freeing up team members to focus on high-impact analytics and insights.

This transformation not only shifted the members’ time toward more strategic work but also equipped them with a modern platform and improved data model to support deeper analysis and more scalable insights.

With less time spent on data ingestion and transformation, Wakefield increased reporting frequency—delivering insights faster and more efficiently across multiple clients. The streamlined infrastructure also laid the groundwork for future innovations, including interactive dashboards and data sharing capabilities.

“Through collaboration with Torq we have been able to refine and strengthen our existing ETL processes. This has opened new avenues to enhance the quality of our existing product and provide additional value to our partners. During the process there was a responsiveness and expertise from Torq that reassured me that they had the ability to execute on what we needed.”

Ian Young, Wakefield Lead Data Scientist