When ARM first adopted Tableau, the engineering team immediately received requests for more licenses. Today, many departments access reports through Tableau Server. With automated reporting, the engineering team saves time and resources, and employees find new value in their data. With help from Tableau, ARM has a solution that fosters self-service data exploration and scales with their business.
Tableau: Can you share a little bit about ARM? Andrew Jones, Staff Engineer, ARM (silicon chip IP design): ARM produces the data as most companies do, and one of our biggest data sets are around testing and verification of our hardware designs, and also around the compute clusters on which these applications happen. Tableau: When did you introduce Tableau? Andrew: So we introduced Tableau to ARM around four years ago as one of the front ends to our metrics platform. Our metrics platform already had a simple web user interface (UI) and a REST API. But we wanted to produce some reports and visualizations, and we wanted to do them as quickly and easy as possible. So we wanted something quick and easy to build, and easy to maintain going forward.
Tableau has enabled us to build and deliver a official, standard reporting across all projects, automated every week, without engineering having to spend that precious time doing it themselves each time.
Tableau: What challenges were you facing before Tableau? Andrew: Before we used Tableau, a lot of this was done in Excel and PowerPoint, and they projected it themselves. Every Friday they'd create these Excel metrics and deliver them. Tableau: How has Tableau helped you solve those challenges? Andrew: So Tableau has enabled us to build and deliver official, standard reporting across all projects, automated every week without an engineer spending that precious time doing it themselves each time. So we started using Tableau around four years ago, [where we had] two to five people as a team. Since then, other departments in ARM heard about Tableau and seen what we've done in Tableau, and they've come to ask us for access to Tableau Server and for licenses. And they've just gone off and built their own Tableau reports since then. So now it's used by many parts of the company. Tableau: What are you planning for the future? Andrew: As part of our team, our future is always to enable others to [get self-service access to data]. So giving users the ability to process their data, put data to Tableau in a clean, structured way, and then use Tableau to build reports. I think what I want to do going forward is kind of create more of a Tableau community at ARM, so you can have the regular user groups that can meet up, some may share knowledge, maybe we've got an internal communication channel that we can use to do that. And just try and get more ways of community so we can kind of learn from each other. We can kind of share best practices. And just generally share the work that's being done in Tableau. Not only to improve our knowledge of Tableau, but also to help share knowledge generally in ARM, which is always a good thing.