Analysis

With Tableau’s IPO this past Friday (trading under the ticker symbol “DATA”) and IDC’s title as “the world’s fastest growing Business Intelligence Company” back in 2012, Tableau is making big strides as a top data visualization tool. With more than 100,000 users, Tableau is being used in revolutionary ways to solve diverse problems from maximizing customer loyalty for a clothing brand to minimizing patient wait time in hospitals.

Tableau is a BI analytics solution that lets you probe, question, interact and understand data through visualization. Tableau allows you to instantly filter, zoom, compare, sort and group your data to tell a story. From GI mapping to heat maps, Tableau offers many visual formats to help discover data-driven answers to business questions.

What distinguishes Tableau from other tools is how seemingly user friendly it is. Data analytics is now becoming accessible to the masses with Tableau’s easy drag-and-drop interface. Analysts who were previously limited to interpreting reports are now empowered to build their own unique views of the data. IT developers who used to create these reports now have more time to work on proactive technology initiatives. You can share Tableau reports to a viewer, group of viewers or even the public. Tableau is additionally accessible in any web browser or on tablets.

CIO’s are looking to Tableau as a top Business Intelligence analytics tool for their businesses, recognizing even its structural power to increase efficiency amongst analysts and enable IT to delve into other projects. The accessibility and usability further brings Tableau to the forefront of CIO’s interests.

Hilary Perry is a business analyst with Bodhtree who focusses on emerging Big Data technologies. Bodhtree empowers enterprises to navigate Big Data challenges and opportunities with its GPS solution portfolio: Growth, Productivity and Security. To explore what your business can achieve with Big Data, contact Bodhtree at [email protected].

Most organizations use spreadsheets as their standard analytical tool and spend significant efforts to obtain data for making critical business decisions. Business Intelligence: The Definitive Guide for Midsize Organizations from SAP provides a comprehensive overview of BI and the facts you need to make an educated investment that will change the course of your business for years to come!

BI allows business users to analyze and better understand organization’s plans and results. It provides insight into what’s working correctly while identifying potential problem areas in time for corrective actions to be taken. It can be used to recognize opportunities as well as problems, and alert your organization to potential issues when exception conditions occur—such as sales dropping 20% below forecast or inventory falling below a threshold value.

The following scenarios represent typical situations that could benefit from improved business intelligence (BI):

•Multiple versions of the truth. Interdepartmental meetings frequently turn into shouting matches as participants argue about whose spreadsheet has the correct figures.

•Inability to perform in-depth analysis. Your company knows which of its retail outlets have the greatest sales volume, but it doesn’t know which products have the highest sales.

•Need for simple-to-use production reporting technology. Your accounting department uses a word processor to generate customer invoices. Customers frequently complain about being invoiced twice for the same purchase or shipment.

•Historical values are not being retained. The sales department is conducting account reviews and wishes to compare each customer’s sales-to-date this year with its sales-to-date at this time last year. Sales maintains a spreadsheet for this year’s results, but the person who maintained the spreadsheet last year has left the company—and no one has any idea what happened to last year’s spreadsheet.

Business Intelligence provides relevant, actionable and near real-time information for enhanced decision-making capabilities. Find out how you can improve organizational efficiency and effectiveness – and eliminate Spreadsheet Chaos – with Business Intelligence: The Definitive Guide for Midsize Organizations.

Download Business Intelligence: The Definitive Guide for Midsize Organizations - and see what SAP BusinessObjects can do for you.