Tableau Saves Manufacturer Thousands of Dollars with Simplified Information Sharing

• Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Visualization

• Business Operation

• Predictive Quality Analytics

• Data Science Services

Blastrac Manufacturing was facing a challenge with its reporting method. The company did not have a consistent reporting method in place and, consequently, preparation of reports for the company’s various needs was tedious. Blastrac’s analysts each spent nearly one whole day per week extracting data from the multiple Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, loading it into several Excel spreadsheets, creating filtering capabilities and establishing pre-defined pivot tables. These massive spreadsheets were often inaccurate and consistently hard to understand, and they were virtually useless for the sales team, which couldn’t work with the complex format. In addition, each consumer of the reports had different needs—while some thought the reports were lacking detail, others thought there was too much.

Blastrac Manufacturing is a mid-sized worldwide manufacturer that operates in the Americas, Europe and Asia. The company depends on the creation and distribution of reports across the organization to make business decisions. However, the company did not have a consistent reporting method in place and, consequently, preparation of reports for the company’s various needs was tedious and time-consuming. The company's analysts each spent nearly one whole day per week extracting data from the multiple Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, loading it into several Excel spreadsheets, creating filtering capabilities and establishing pre-defined pivot tables.

Blastrac Vice President and CIO Dan Murray began looking for a solution to the company’s reporting troubles. He quickly ruled out the rollout of a single ERP system, a multi-million dollar proposition. He also eliminated the possibility of an enterprisewide business intelligence (BI) platform deployment because of cost. What Murray needed was a solution that was affordable, could deploy quickly without disrupting current systems and was able to represent data consistently regardless of the multiple currencies Blastrac operates in. Working with IT services consultant Interworks, Inc. out of Oklahoma, Murray and team finessed the data sources. Murray then deployed two data visualization tools from Tableau Software: Tableau Desktop, a visual data analysis solution that allowed Blastrac analysts to quickly and easily create intuitive and visually compelling reports, and Tableau Reader, a free application that enabled everyone across the company to directly interact with the reports, filtering, sorting, extracting and printing data as it fit their needs.

• With only one hour per week now required to create reports, there was a 95-percent increase in productivity.
• Updates to these reports are happening automatically through Tableau.
• Murray and his team are able to proactively identify major business events reflected in company data- such an exceptionally large sale - instead of reacting to incoming questions from employees as they had been forced to do previously.

• 95% increase in productivity in report creation.
• Cost of Tableau was less than one third the lowest competing BI quote.