KS&R: 50% Faster Market Research Reporting with Posit & Quarto

Summary

The Decision Sciences & Innovation (DS&I) team at KS&R successfully modernized their survey reporting pipeline to provide clients with deeper, more tailored insights using Quarto and Posit Team. This upgrade drastically improved their efficiency, allowing them to generate 100 reports in just 5-7 minutes.

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ABOUT:

KS&R is a nationally recognized strategic consultancy and marketing research firm that provides clients with timely, fact-based insights and actionable solutions through industry-centered expertise.

INDUSTRY:

Consulting

TECHNOLOGY USED:

Posit Team (Posit Workbench, Posit Connect, Posit Package Manager), Quarto, Positron

The Challenge

A key client and business stream for KS&R wanted to be able to gain deeper insights through more tailored reporting of their survey data. With survey data from hundreds of respondents in recurring waves, generating individual PDF reports for survey respondents to be submitted to their client weekly required completely rebuilding and automating KS&R’s reporting pipeline.

Like many established research firms, KS&R’s infrastructure was built on years of proven processes that were ready to be modernized, which created initial challenges for delivering the requested reports. The team recognized it was time to “turn the ship” toward a more modernized, sustainable approach.

Legacy Process:

Multiple specialized pipelines: Survey data moved through SPSS, Excel, and manual wrangling before reaching reporting teams. This created bottlenecks, as pipeline knowledge resided with individuals and was lost when team members departed.
Outdated reporting workflows: Client-ready PDFs were generated with legacy tools, which limited flexibility and version control. Changes were time-consuming, and scaling reports for hundreds of respondents across multiple survey waves proved difficult.
Limited reproducibility and collaboration: The lack of GitHub-based version control and standardized environments led to inconsistent code management, process documentation, and project collaboration, hindering reproducibility.
Growing need to accelerate time-to-insight: Clients required timely results for critical business decisions, but the process from raw survey data to actionable insights was often too slow.

The Solution

KS&R leveraged Posit’s suite of tools to modernize their data science environment and reporting workflows. By rebuilding their reporting pipeline with Posit Team and open-source frameworks like Quarto, KS&R’s DS&I team transformed a key client’s challenge into an efficient process.

This process allows them to now produce approximately 100 individual PDF reports in just 5-7 minutes, facilitating weekly client submissions. While this is just one project, KS&R has leveraged a variety of additional tooling from Posit Team.

The Path to Modernization:

Standardized development environments: Posit Workbench provides DS&I with a consistent coding environment for R and Python, reducing setup time and making collaboration easier.
Automated, reproducible reporting: Quarto has replaced manual legacy workflows. Parameterized reports can now be generated for hundreds of survey respondents in minutes, with version control and documentation hosted on GitHub.
Scalable deployment: Posit Connect enables secure deployment of Shiny apps, Plumber APIs, and Quarto documents at scale. For example, a Shiny app integrated with a Plumber API now automates the categorization of open-ended survey responses using external AI/NLP models.
Improved package management: Posit Package Manager simplifies sharing internal R packages across the team, ensuring consistency and reducing maintenance burdens.
Closer IT partnership: By integrating Posit Connect with existing infrastructure, DS&I reduced deployment friction and strengthened collaboration with KS&R’s IT team.

“The project teams reported that they saw efficiency gains of 50%. Which is pretty big. We cut their time in half that they have to spend generating these reports and interacting with it.”

Ben Cortese

Vice President at KS&R

The Results

KS&R’s modernization efforts have delivered measurable impact:

50% efficiency gain: Automating PDF reporting pipelines halved the time business teams spent generating reports.
Faster client delivery: Reports that once took days now run in hours, improving responsiveness and strengthening client trust.
Reproducibility & resilience: Knowledge is no longer siloed – pipelines and codebases live on GitHub with thorough documentation, ensuring continuity even as teams evolve.
Better stakeholder experience: Cleaner, better-designed reports improved QA/QC internally and boosted client confidence in KS&R’s outputs.
Creative capacity unlocked: With automation handling routine tasks, staff can devote more time to analysis, storytelling, and developing new client-facing products.

Advancing Insight Through Innovation

KS&R continues to expand its capabilities, with future plans centered on Positron, Posit’s new multilingual IDE.

Keaton Wilson adds, “It’s really exciting to have a multilingual data science focused IDE that feels a little bit like VS Code and a little bit like RStudio, but has all of these great new tools and features that are really designed for the modern data scientist toolkit – particularly the integration of AI tooling.”

Multilingual support: Positron enables data scientists to effectively work with Python, R, and other languages within a single, unified interface to streamline development workflows and reduce context switching.
AI integration: Positron Assistant helps data scientists write and debug code, making suggestions that accelerate development quality, while Databot is designed to dramatically accelerate exploratory data analysis for data scientists

By continuing to modernize its data science stack, KS&R ensures it can deliver timely, fact-based insights at scale – helping clients make better business decisions in a rapidly evolving world.