Making terrifying data intuitive

"Tableau entered our organization thanks to the Sales Marketing Manager. He knew the platform from a previous job and was convinced that Tableau was the right tool for us now - and in the years to come. A complex data platform can be terrifying for the average business user. Tableau’s ease of use and the intuitive visualization design for primary users convinced us. Where other tools can't manage to go beyond visualizing lists, Tableau is the only one that truly offers dynamic visualization."

"We have a data team of 15 power users that prepares the datamarts and has access to the raw data. To avoid mistakes, we want to safeguard our data as much as possible as the setup is pretty complex. Hundreds of business users can visualize the information that is hidden within the data and do self-service analytics with it."

Our Microsoft solutions, our custom-made data platform, and Tableau all work harmoniously together.

Data-first is a given

“All the prominent players in the market, think of Facebook, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Uber, etc., have data culture in their DNA. They don’t even question if data can be an asset to them: they have built their whole business model on it. There are for sure plenty of insights hidden in their data that they haven’t even thought of using. But data cannot stand alone. The added value comes from combining data with day-to-day business insights and being able to link the two. That’s when it becomes powerful.”

“The reporting dashboards are essential to the meetings of the different sales teams. They use it to define the following actions. And as it tracks their performance, they are very motivated to look at it a lot (chuckle). The marketing department uses it to visualize market research and customer data. Top management mostly tracks financial information: revenue, invoicing, cash flow, general costs, and granular costs per department. The next step will be to supply these granular costs also to each department head."

Tableau is used by almost every department in our company. 54% of users use it daily.

Don't be a bottleneck

“It's not good to keep all the data analysis within one BI team because it becomes the bottleneck of the business, as we can never answer all the internal requests. Moreover, as data analysts often are not part of the business, you risk missing essential insights. I'm currently working on making departments self-sufficient with their data. It's their data; they need to learn how to play with it. I have identified power users within teams that have a natural affinity with data. They will become our evangelists and can support each other. We, on our end, will give them extra support and training.”

If you are contemplating a data journey like this, you really need to have a partner by your side with extensive knowledge because the road ahead is complex.

The right partner is essential

"But we didn't stop there. In 2018 we had a 2-day workshop with Biztory to figure out how to use our data setup for comprehensive reporting in our customer’s dashboards. Our goal was to have a Proof of Concept after two days. We didn't manage to get there as it became clear that we didn't have access to the correct data. As it often goes with projects like these (laughs). We spend a lot of time figuring out how we could securely export data from the mainframe in such a way that the end-customer only gets to see the kind of information he's entitled to."  

“Biztory's expertise has been essential in figuring out our Row Level Security approach. Thanks to their hands-on experience with a wide variety of BI tools, they could show us the most efficient way forward that would actually get the job done. It saved us a lot of time and headaches. Their expertise makes them truly stand out. There are very few consulting companies in the market with this in-depth knowledge. I’m not saying this lightly; I’m speaking from experience with other suppliers.”

I have a deep trust in Biztory’s expertise. I can also appreciate the transparent and frank discussions we have.

The next big challenge

“End-customers won’t be happy anymore with just a static reporting dashboard. Customers want added value and the ability to do predictive and prescriptive analyses. In the coming years, I expect an increase in self-service analytics requests from customers, allowing them to combine Partena Professional’s data with their own data sources. This will be a big challenge for us in the coming years. But it will also create untapped market opportunities and generate new revenue streams. Exciting times ahead, I won’t be bored, that’s for sure (laugh).”