90-day Tableau adoption rescues Retailer before the Holiday Rush
The Challenge
A growing supply chain services company was dealing with multiple difficulties associated with their legacy reporting tools. As it stood, charts took several hours to generate due to data latency & inefficiencies in the data transformation process. This prevented data consumers from having the ability to make real-time decisions.
With no internal data & analytics teams in place, other issues quickly began popping up:
• Data Quality – Stale data created a lack of confidence with reports
• Accessibility – More time spent wrangling than analyzing data
• Autonomy – Business groups were dependent on data experts to produce static reports
In their current state, data consumers were unable to leverage data as a strategic asset. To make matters worse, the holiday season was quickly approaching, and leadership needed to find a solution sooner rather than later to keep up with customer demands.
The Conflict
An e-commerce fulfillment organization was in serious need of a modern data visualization tool to gain valuable insights into their operation. Heavy reliance on static reports with no self-service capabilities left both IT and business groups unhappy. With the holiday season on the horizon, there were less than 90 days to scale a BI solution.
The Solution
Our analytics team identified Tableau as the appropriate data visualization resource based on our client’s needs and was able to quickly connect the business intelligence (BI) tool directly to their source systems in a more modern and automated way that follows data management best practices. To help further expediate the analytics request process, our team, in conjunction with key stakeholders from the organization, established an intake form to properly gather reporting requirements. We assigned testing and approval completion to the data consumers to establish the importance of ownership for data quality purposes. Finally, we empowered data consumers within business groups through customized training and by sharing dashboard prototypes so they could see and understand the interactive visualization capabilities of Tableau.
Goals
Accelerate the Tableau adoption by engaging stakeholders with beta testing and customized training for better understanding of the BI tool’s capabilities while increasing self-service capabilities and streamlining data processes.
The Result
We were able to design and build a dozen dashboard prototypes that are currently in production (with more to come). The self-service analytical insights gained from these dashboards has led to an increase in meeting sales quotas as well as enhanced monitoring capabilities for the manufacturing process. Additionally, real-time decision making is now a reality after the modernization and automation of data sourcing.
Our expertise and methodology also served as a driver for our client’s development lifecycle. We were able to redefine their analytics process and identify new key performance indicators (KPI) that highlighted problems as well as successes. And most importantly, we were able to achieve all this before the holiday season and meet the client’s 90-day deadline.
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