BANDAI NAMCO liberates data with Tableau

Tokyo-based BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment Inc. is an entertainment publisher best known for its arcade, mobile and home video games.

We spoke with Hans Lui, BANDAI NAMCO’s Director of Applications & Operations about how the gaming company is using Tableau to help instill a more data-driven environment (video 1).

In video 2, Hans discusses how Tableau Gold Partner, InterWorks, helped people get up-to-speed with Tableau faster.

Tableau: Why did you decide to bring Tableau into BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment?
Hans Lui, Director, Applications & Operations: We're evangelizing the data-driven culture within the company so people can make decisions based on data instead of a gut feeling, right? I think that's something we're trying to promote within the company.

People should start looking into data that we have obtained from our games, from our users, from social network, from all the transactions that we have on hand.

Tableau: What sort of challenges have you had in the past and how is Tableau helping?
Hans: To be honest, we have more data than we can consume. So one thing we're trying to do is to educate our users to say, "Hey, this is a great, easy-to-use tool for you to get access to this information without too much of a hassle."

And we will try to help and build the dashboards for you guys at the beginning. But we'll empower you to do more and train you guys to do more on your own when you ask those business questions.

Tableau: How does implementing this type of self-service approach to data help?
Hans: We have this theory about data ownership. A lot of time, the users maybe own the business process, but they don't quite own the data. All the data still resides in the IS and the IT department.

What we're trying to do is make the business owner own the process and the data at the same time. So when they need the information, they don't have to come to us. There's no time lag in terms of getting their data analysis done. They can just go right on to the tools and allow them to get the info immediately.

We're trying to educate our users: Don't rely on your IT too much, you know, to provide the report. You should be the one owning the information and analyze it. Because when you own it, you kind of have a sense of what this data is. You kind of ‘feel’ the data, right?

That's one of the key elements why we picked Tableau in this case. So we're trying to liberate the data so that the users can use it on their own. Of course, we still provide the support if they don't see the data they need.

Tableau: What benefit does that offer your IT team?
Hans: This way, my manpower can be more focused on providing the support rather than be the report creator within the company. But more like we call it 'data provider' in the company so that people can say, "Hey, here's a Tableau tool, data's in there already, use it."

Tableau: What made you decide to bring in InterWorks to help you introduce Tableau?
Hans: Our company is new to the business intelligence thing, so we tried to bring a little bit more hands-on experience to the users, and then bring a consultant to actually interview with them.

We brought in a consultant from InterWorks to help us to do the basic framework.

Tableau: What was the benefit of working with InterWorks?
Hans: It definitely saved us time with the help of a consultant. Right now, like, he is able to create dashboard for about three to four departments without much of a hassle in two weeks.

We're able to get into some kinds of difficult business questions already for one department. And we're able to align something fairly complicated in terms of our game server data with our transactional data. So those are the things that we can correlate fairly easily using Tableau tools.

So it helps us to basically bring someone on board and so kind of like throw them the data and say, "Hey, give me some dashboard of this." So I think that's a key advantage of using InterWorks.

Tableau: What is it like to work with InterWorks?
Hans: They're friendly. Very easy to work with. Very accessible. When I call them or e-mail them, they will get back to me within the day. When I have questions, they're very willing to help us.