Accenture: "We can do things that were simply not possible before."

Accenture analyzes huge data volumes to provide customers with interactive presentations about current financial performance and new market trends. With Tableau, Accenture can now quickly generate reports that used to take three to four people over two weeks. Instead of static PowerPoints, Accenture relies on interactive dashboards—enhancing data conversations and encouraging exploration. Daniel Hüdig, Senior Research Principal at Accenture, said, “We can do things that were just simply not possible before.”

Tableau: How does Accenture use Tableau? Dr. Hüdig, Senior Principal at Accenture Research: We at Accenture Research use Tableau to enable our own people to be able to speak to their clients about their own context. Our role is to make sense of the massive amounts of information. We look at financial performance of our clients to identify potential weak spots. We look at the emerging challenges they may have and we packaged that into a presentation which is interactive, enabling a common ideation about what should be the next steps for our clients.

Dr. Hüdig: At the moment we have largely Tableau Desktop. We have started to experiment with Tableau Server. Our reasoning is here to enable better workflow processes, so that we can work between our different units across the world, we have colleagues from Japan, China, India, Europe, to the Americas, North and South America, using the software, you will collaboratively different specialties coming in. Tableau: How satisfied are your users? Dr. Hüdig: It’s always really nice to see how people receive this when they see how they can interact with the data themselves. Tableau: What benefits has the solution brought to your organization? Dr. Hüdig: It enables new insights and that is much more powerful than what we used to have when there was very little interaction. We try to anticipate what they may be looking for to solve their own problem and to hence create an offering which enables them to pursue those questions. We looked at 1,200 companies. We have 177,000 data points and we are basically instantly able to produce a very specific cut on each of the industries we observe. We can do things that were just simply not possible before.

Dr. Hüdig: When you get data—once you have done it for an hour, structured the data, put it into the tool—you are instantly able to create a story that normally would have taken probably three, four people, and a week or two to come up with, all the way from data collection to having it in a stable PowerPoint deliverable or slide. It’s also the benefit of automation. You have automatic data feeds going in and enhancing. You can update the data quite frequently without having to re-present everything again, and it’s instantly available.