Johnson Matthey uses Tableau to optimise inventory management

Johnson Matthey is a global leader in sustainable technologies, catalysing the net zero transition through innovation and technological breakthroughs that improve the performance, function, and safety of their customers’ products.

The business is over 200 years old and has been at the heart of chemical and material science throughout its history. Today, as the world faces the challenges of climate change and resource scarcity, the company has a bigger role to play.

Over 13,000 people work across the business including its manufacturing and scientific establishments across Europe and the USA all central in accelerating the big transitions needed in transport, energy, chemicals production and creating a circular economy.

Inventory management also plays its part in supporting sustainability goals, enabling organisations to lower their impact on the planet, and Johnson Matthey uses Tableau data and analytics technology to manage production for optimal efficiency.

“We had a legacy of disparate systems that had never really operated well together, and we were struggling to get any sense out of the data,” says Richard Head, IT Digital Strategy Partner at Johnson Matthey. As a scientific business, Head says Johnson Matthey needed to be data driven in its decision-making.

“We started a data journey five years ago, which led us to working with Tableau,” Head says. Johnson Matthey demonstrates how data technology spreads across an organisation once data driven decision making takes hold.

Head reveals that the Tableau data and analytics implementation has had a powerful impact on the manufacturing arm of the business. “Getting an understanding of where our products are is important. We have multiple manufacturing locations globally, and we now use Tableau to visualise exactly what our inventory is, understand inventory losses, see the raw materials that we have purchased, the age of the inventory, and what intermediate products we have through to the number of finished products. We can see all that data globally at the click of a button. That has been hugely powerful as a level of insight,” he says.

Another major benefit to Johnson Matthey is the intuitive usability and training that is offered by Tableau. “We can train users very quickly, and it is not an expensive tool to deploy,” Head says.

Learn how other manufacturers use Tableau to enhance analysis.