Uniper cuts speed to insight by 70% and empowers over 500 employees with self-service analytics

Prior to Tableau, employees in data heavy departments such as trading and generation were completely reliant on the IT department for all their analysis and reporting needs. Not only was this both expensive and time consuming, but it created a damaging disconnect between key data insights and those that needed them the most.

“The IT department was a big bottleneck to productivity,” said Rene Greiner, VP of data integration at Uniper. “Reports took a long time to come back and when they eventually did, many of them were invariably ‘not quite right’, causing even more delays and frustration as teams had to go back and ask for them to be done again.”

Rene knew that adopting a self-service approach to analytics had the potential to eliminate these issues but doing so first required a major overhaul to the way data was handled within the company. So, in 2015 Rene and his team began a major project to replace the existing data warehouse with a new data lake. Then, following an extensive competitive review process, Tableau was chosen as the sole visualization and analytics solution to integrate with the data lake, forming the new Atonyx data platform, which was opened to employees in January 2018.

“We spent a lot of time looking at all the leading solutions on the market from vendors such as SAP, IBM and Oracle,” said Rene. “In the end, Tableau’s powerful visualization capabilities, seamless integration and ease of use made it the top choice in nearly every category.”

With Tableau in place, over 600 employees can now self-serve their data analytics needs, eliminating reliance on the IT team and keeping data firmly in the hands of those that need it.

“Using Tableau, key teams can pull data, conduct high quality analytics and create visual dashboards in the timeframe that suits them, not somebody else,” says Rene. “As a result, business intelligence and operational performance have improved across the board.”

This new approach to data has also had a significant impact on time to insight across the business, which Rene estimates has been cut by over 70% in some areas.

“Before we transitioned to the new platform, the complex nature of our data warehouse was making it very difficult to produce comprehensive reports and analysis as quickly as needed,” says Rene. “In key business areas like trading, the faster they can get the insights they need, the more informed their decision making can be. Even small delays can cost the business money.”

Now, data can be pulled up and visualized incredibly quickly in Tableau, giving traders, asset managers and many other commercial decision makers the information they need to make the right decisions at pivotal moments. Every user is also able to analyze their data about business success much more closely than was previously possible.

“In the past, it would take almost a full day for the IT department to compile and deliver reports for the previous day’s trading, so by the time the traders got them, they were pretty much redundant,” says Rene. “Now, traders can generate their own report shortly after markets close every day via Tableau Mobile, giving them immediate feedback.”

In 2018, massive progress has been also achieved in the Power Generation business, with employees able to access their data through the platform and gain fast insights using Tableau. Stephan van Aaken, Head of Asset IT & Digital Transformation said:

“Tableau made the benefits of a digitalization program tangible to our colleagues in our power plants. It feels like a revolution, our userbase grew from 0 to more than 300 users within 15 months. Tableau strengthens our compliance as well, as our Tableau server instance provides access to a vast amount of highly confidential asset data. The strict authorization capabilities ensure we can prove that our trading colleagues can only access data in accordance with internal and external regulations.”