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Tableau Reveals Key Opportunities in Sales Performance Data
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Visualization
Applicable Functions
- Sales & Marketing
Use Cases
- Demand Planning & Forecasting
- Predictive Replenishment
Services
- Data Science Services
The Challenge
The Operations Department at First American Corporation was responsible for collecting, shaping, and analyzing sales performance data across all segments, products, and geographies. They were using Excel pivot tables, but they were slow, inflexible, and difficult for people to learn. Also, the graphics being generated from Excel didn’t effectively communicate the critical insights to executive management. The primary challenge was to find and implement an analysis application that supported First American’s wide-ranging requirements. The Operations Department was charged with reporting monthly sales performance trends to senior managers categorized by channel, market segment, and product mix, analyzing price points by product then recommending pricing strategies that would positively impact revenue and simplify current customer pricing plans, and investigating dozens of sources of marketing, customer, and financial data to drive strategic initiatives and uncover trends and themes previously not known.
About The Customer
First American Corporation (FAF:NYSE) is the nation’s leading provider of business information. Founded in 1889, First American continues its service commitment by providing the information businesses need to make timely, accurate decisions. Backed by industry leading technology, First American delivers efficiency to support clients’ information needs. First American Real Estate Solutions is the nation’s largest and most comprehensive source for property and ownership information.
The Solution
First American selected Tableau Professional. Tableau’s “visual analysis” enables Operations to find important trends, relationships, and outliers in large datasets quickly and effectively. Improved insight into product pricing and usage now drives better decision making. The application had to be able to connect to hundreds of thousands of records every month from 4-5 separate production systems via Excel exports and Access, allow data be “sliced” by many attributes (e.g. regions, products, partners, etc.) and be especially flexible when investigations required multiple time dimensions, and deploy easily, enable multiple analysis cycles very quickly, and provide flexible visual displays.
Operational Impact
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