Tableau: Emami moves from basic MIS reporting to visual analytics and automation with Tableau
Established in 1974, Emami is a leading personal care and
healthcare business in India whose vision is to naturally make people healthy
and beautiful. The business has a portfolio of more than 300 products which it
sells into 60 countries under brands such as Navratna, BoroPlus, and Zandu.
Tableau helps Emami measure brands' health and performance and has played a
central role in maturing the business' use of analytics.
According to Sudipta Mukherjee, Deputy General Manager of
SAP BI and Analytics Projects at Emami, the business started its data journey
in 2012. However, for many years, reports were compiled using spreadsheets and
took too long to prepare.
Emami wanted to speed up reporting by providing each
department with dashboards that could be refreshed automatically by pulling
information straight from its data warehouse. It also wanted to make use of
predictive analytics rather than always looking at the past.
This is when CRG Solutions, a leading Tableau partner in
India, stepped in to convert Emami’s vision into reality.
With CRG’s help, the business chose to roll out Tableau
because of its broad visualization capabilities. In evaluating Tableau alongside
other analytics tools, Emami also found that it was the easiest to use.
"Tableau stood out for the simplicity with which users
can interact with the user interface and get their questions answered,"
said Mukherjee.
Building a data culture
Establishing Tableau as its analytics platform has allowed
Emami to move towards a self-service model for analytics. Departments no longer
need to wait ten days for month-end reports. Instead, they can simply click to
refresh dashboards on the second day of each month. They also better appreciate
the value of using data in their day-to-day decision making.
CRG supported Emami in advancing its use of analytics and
building its data culture. "When we started with Tableau, there was some
hesitancy about using a new platform, but CRG helped us engage people through
workshops, which led to a steady stream of requests for dashboards and
visualizations," Mukherjee.
Emami now has 150 employees using Tableau to visualize a
wide range of performance metrics. These include product sales by region and by
channel. Emami also has a brand heatmap that it can drill down into to
understand which brands generate the most growth. These insights help the
business make better decisions about where and how it sells products. For example,
knowing which products are performing well in each region Emami can make
data-driven recommendations to retailers on what they should purchase to sell
in their stores. Emami can also pinpoint any loss of sales across regions by
visualizing brand, product, and SKU data and using a decision tree for root
cause analysis.
Other visualizations help Emami track financial and
operational metrics. For example, the business can see all purchase orders at a
glance and drill down to investigate those which have been open too long. It
can also monitor productivity and operational hygiene.
Mukherjee said that the visualizations in Tableau had been
particularly useful in analyzing business changes during COVID-19 and been used
by some teams to conduct virtual business review meetings. He shared that Emami
is now focused on making more use of predictive analytics. Advanced analytics
use cases include providing sales reps with cross sell and up-sell
recommendations and optimizing sales routes to improve Market Representative
productivity and Market Representative sales success rates.
"We have gradually moved up the value chain from ad hoc descriptive analytics to self-service visualizations and are now moving towards predictive analytics which will help us optimize our business activities," said Mukherjee.
CRG Solutions is a Business Performance Improvement company, helping organizations traverse their Data to Insights journey and beyond. CRG provides full lifecycle support right from training, to license procurement to support, including customized customer requirements. In close to two decades of its existence in India, CRG Solutions has delivered business performance improvement via technology solutions across Business Intelligence, Process Efficiency & Collaboration. Visit www.crgsolutions.co for more information.