Komerční banka cuts weeks from decisions with Tableau & Inekon Systems

Komerční banka, a member of the Société Générale Group and one of the four largest banks in the Czech Republic, wanted to improve data usage across the company. Data prep for one report could take up to a day and results were hard to read and inflexible.

The bank embarked on a proof of concept with Tableau, turning to Inekon Systems, Czech and Slovak Tableau Partner, for help with technical consultation and training.

Today with Tableau, Komerční banka can:

• Create analyses in minutes
• Make decisions weeks faster
• Deliver interactive dashboards—with granular drill-down capabilities—built from multiple data sources

One day for data prep, weeks to decisions

The analytics team at Komerční banka spent a great deal of time analyzing and reporting data for use by various business units. For example, creating an analysis of new and lost clients—a regular report for the marketing department—took many steps. The team first had to prepare data through SQL queries, aggregate it, and then consolidate and analyze the results in Microsoft Excel. This took a full day.

Even then, the final results were far from user-friendly. To actually answer business questions, employees needed to be able to use advanced Excel functions, such as pivot tables. Decision makers struggled to understand the analytics reports. And answering ad-hoc questions was nearly impossible, as analyses were limited to the data identified in the initial query—following hunches or looking into outliers was often impossible without an additional reporting request.

Decisions were delayed, as teams struggled to understand the spreadsheets or waited for additional analyses.

“There were up to several weeks of delays between analytical data processing and management decision-making,” says Karel Štaud, Business Insight expert at Komerční banka.

Free trial delivers business value

The analytics team heard about Tableau and decided to tackle a real project during the free trial period.

“It was important for us not to only thoroughly get to know the system, but especially to try it out on a real pilot project that would run at least for several weeks and that would have serious predictive value,” Karel explains. He and his team decided to bring in a partner, Inekon Systems, to help them with this.

Inekon Systems helped Karel’s team extend the free trial to complete a full proof-of-concept. Inekon Systems also offered technical consultation and user training for users of various levels.

“I consider these trainings, in particular, to be very helpful,” says Karel.

Inekon trainers worked with business users who would view and interact with completed dashboards published to Tableau Server. They also took advantage of more in-depth training for employees responsible for building the visual analysis dashboards in Tableau Desktop.

“We created a relatively simple report that provided clear and cogent information on the growth of the number of our clients, the popularity of our products and attractiveness of accompanying services,” explains Karel.

The analytics team was pleased that Tableau allowed them to connect directly to databases through an online connection. This allowed the team to avoid the heavy hardware requirements of a data warehouse.

The team gave the Tableau analysis to several managers, who responded positively. These managers quickly got used to such regular, easy-to-understand results.

“After the end of the free trial license, it was then much easier to justify the purchase of the software,” he says.

Analyses in just “tens of minutes”

“Today, leading managers and analysts can simply and easily investigate various decision-making
variants during a single meeting, because they can get the necessary answers in real time,” Karel says.

The analytics team has expanded its use of Tableau, tackling a new project: marketing campaign reporting. They have created analyses that show which campaigns are under preparation and which campaigns are currently running. It also visualizes campaign sizes and targets, which products they promote and more.

This analysis helps managers understand how to prioritize campaigns, identify where campaigns might overlap or even compete with one another, and judge campaign success. The campaign committee now uses this report to decide which projects will continue and which will be realized at all.

“We have discovered new, previously unknown potential in the tool,” says Karel. “If there has ever been a system that provides its users with outputs they can easily understand, accept and present, then that system is Tableau.”

Overall, Komerční banka is enjoying a number of benefits from its decision to work with Tableau and Inekon Systems, including:

Faster analyses. The analytics team can create data analyses much faster than before—Karel estimates that a comparable analysis is completed in just “a few tens of minutes.”

Deeper, more fun analysis processes. Karel says that Tableau’s ease of use, visualization functions and continuous displaying of results has “truly changed the way of thinking of everyone who became familiar with Tableau.” For instance, analysts can now assess the meaningfulness of a query or answer basic questions much faster. They can also operatively adjust monitored KPIs so that the results can really tell the whole story.

Self-service. Business users are not simply handed the answer to a question, but rather can interact with visualizations to ask more questions for deeper understanding. “He or she can apply filters, remove or add data or display additional details, all on his or her own,” says Karel.

And while the data interaction is much more in-depth than before, employees are finding the process much simpler. “If you know how to browse the internet, then you are capable of working with Tableau analyses,” says Karel.

The easy-to-navigate, interactive tables often inspire managers to reach conclusions that would never be attainable from an Excel table, Karel notes.