About Aaron Robbins
Bio
I’m an analyst, and I do the analytics engineering the analysis depends on. Twelve years of the craft: data governance, specification, semantic modeling, and defining measures other people will sign their name to. The tooling I pick up as the work demands it, which lately has meant Python, DuckDB, dbt and a publishing stack, each acquired in a matter of weeks.
At Lowe’s ecommerce arm I proposed the business intelligence function, hired its first analysts, and ran a team of six building the data warehouse and the reporting stack behind $100M+ in revenue. At Philips Healthcare I ran BI and analytics programs across ten factories, three continents and 200+ stakeholders in eight countries. None of those sites reported to me.
I ran a team, and I am looking for an individual contributor seat on purpose. I want more hands-on time with the new AI tooling inside a working organization before I take another manager title. I kept my own book of work the whole time I was managing; staying close to the data and the tools is the part I do not want to give up.
Selected outcomes
- Built the Open Quality Notification reporting that eight factories ran on. I built the original myself, before there was a development team, sourcing from SAP directly so nothing was copied between workbooks. It scaled from one site to 8, cut about 32 hours a week of manual work, brought average closure time down 5 days, and reduced the notifications aging past 30 days by 20%. Refresh went from weekly by hand to hourly during business hours, on a cadence set by how the work actually runs rather than by how often we could run it.
- Gave three plants one set of numbers. The monthly operations report pulled from Murrysville, Böblingen and Shenzhen, each calculating the same 12 KPIs differently. I ran the initiative end to end, surfaced 6 definition misalignments and reconciled 4 of them myself, and delivered one automated Power BI report on aligned definitions. It removed about 36 hours of manual compilation a month and moved the reporting cycle from the 15th to the 5th.
- Governed data at enterprise scale. I standardized 200+ Critical Data Elements and common data model definitions across a global manufacturing platform, enforcing semantic consistency across systems that had none.
- Eliminated 100+ hours a week of manual reporting. I moved disconnected spreadsheets and point-in-time extracts into automated, governed dashboards.
- Took $80K a year out of the reporting estate. I cataloged every pipeline under the Operations umbrella, traced each to the reports it fed, measured what people actually used, and retired the dead pipelines and over-frequent refreshes. No report was moved or deleted.
- Founded a BI function. I proposed the department at Lowe’s/ATG Stores, hired its foundational team, and managed six analysts and developers through the build of the data warehouse, the KPI definitions and the stewardship model.
Skills
The split below is the same division of labor described in How I Built This.
- Tools I work in directly: Power BI (data modeling, Power Query/M), Tableau, Qlik, SAP BusinessObjects, advanced Excel, SQL (queries, joins, views, transformations), SAP HANA, dimensional/star-schema & semantic modeling, ETL/ELT & data integration, data governance & quality
- Tools I specify against and validate: Python, DAX, DuckDB, dbt, Microsoft Fabric, Databricks, Azure data platforms
- KPI & frameworks: KPI development & governance, leading/lagging indicator frameworks, Critical Data Elements & common data models, BI rationalization
- Domains: healthcare (manufacturing, quality, pharmacy/public-health), ecommerce & retail, workforce/staffing, financial analytics
- Program & enablement: BI function ownership, analytics program & portfolio management, Agile (Scrumban) / Scrum Master, stakeholder management across eight countries, self-service enablement, mentoring analysts
Contact
GitHub github.com/RobbinsAnalytics