Pharmaceutical company, Handok gains competitive advantage with sales forecasting in Tableau

For about 60 years, Handok has provided a variety of healthcare products and services including good medicine, medical devices, health functional food, food for special medical purposes, and genetic analysis services to improve people’s health and quality of life.

Kyu Bum Lee, Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Handok adopted Tableau “to bring sales related data from various sources and analyze them with diverse indicators. Today, approximately 900 executives and staffs have the foundation to analyze data. The executives and staff can increase visibility into sales and performance metrics and get more precise insights for portfolio management.”

Handok provides quality of products and services to improve people’s health and quality of life. Handok also established various alliances with leading global pharmaceutical companies. With innovative healthcare service and management strategy, it is growing into a global total healthcare corporation representing South Korea.

Handok regularly analyzes data around sales management, cost analysis, and inventory. But Handok’s previous analytics tools only yielded static reports. The existing analytics could only create twenty types of reports and data sources were limited. With static reports, users couldn’t drill down into the reports or customize them to suit certain business needs.

Handok wanted to reinvent itself as a data-driven organization to enhance its own competitiveness and sales performance. As part of this goal, the company needed to enable the entire organization to analyze data—even those who didn’t hold traditional ‘technical’ roles.

In order to meet these needs, Handok “adopted Tableau Desktop and Tableau Server to empower employees in the field. With Tableau, we created an environment where we can create diverse analyses and safely distribute dashboards across the company. Staff and executives at Handok use Tableau to increase their insights into sales and utilize various data sources,” said Kyu Bum Lee, Chief Information Officer at Handok.

Before Tableau, the data of various departments were siloed, and analytics results were not shared and edited in real-time. The data also couldn’t be connected with outside data. Thus, Handok wanted to integrate various data regarding sales into assets.

Especially in Handok’s BI system project, Tableau’s Korean partner, Planit, was pivotal in helping to introduce to Handok a proven BI software which met the need of the business to be able to share dashboards through a web portal and integrate business data from both within and outside Handok. Planit provided training to Handok’s sales and IT personnel which allowed them to enhance their data analysis capabilities with BI solution.

Today Handok employees analyze and integrate data from roughly 86 data marts, over 10 million instances of third-party data, spreadsheet data, and over 140 million rows of drug distribution data from wholesale merchants.

Employees create comprehensive financial reports based on profit and loss (P&L) as well as costs and start to analyze big data from the Health Insurance Review and Assessment (HIRA). Furthermore, employees can track key performance indicators and sales performance as well as interact with analysis report on mobile devices. After Tableau, employees noticed that there are less data silos across the organization and that departments were collaborating on analyses.

Handok sales staff manually inputted sales activity data into spreadsheets and produced only 20 types of static reports. The IT department also managed the entire process from analysis to report creation. But since the adoption of Tableau, the IT department now focuses on supporting field staff and ensuring data quality and governance.

Today, Handok employees can now build unlimited dashboards on their own and easily customize and iterate as their needs on Tableau Server. Handok can analyze correlations between sales activity and performance, track sales trends, compare sales staff performance, and instantly view sales forecasts with Tableau.

Furthermore, it can make strategic decisions about stock units and utilize additional sales opportunities at the right time. With this insight, Handok remains more competitive in the market because it can quickly respond to trends in the pharmaceutical industry.

With Tableau Server, Handok’s executives and staff can share reports in real-time and access sales activity data on the go—whether in the office or in the field. As a result, more and more business users are utilizing self-service exploration and advanced analysis.

PLAN-iT Partners provides a total BI service from the initial stages of defining the indicator tree to designing BI platform and developing BI system. We are skilled experts with BI development experience of more than 10 years from global consulting firms which helps companies enhance BI performance and achievement. The team is also equipped with IT expertise to provide internal solutions such as Big data search engine and cloud-based tax solution. Through broad and successful work experience mainly with enterprise clients in various industry, PLAN-iT delivers successful Agile BI(Self-service BI) platform and high BI value.