TATA 1mg Ensures a Scalable Data Culture

TATA 1mg is India’s leading integrated healthcare platform. It aspires to be the trusted health partner for all Indians and make healthcare more accessible, understandable, and affordable.

To deliver on its mission, TATA 1mg provides several services, including e-pharmacy, diagnostics, and e-consultation services. The company also offers an extensive library of health content.

TATA 1mg has used Tableau almost since its inception to integrate and visualize data from multiple sources, making analytics more accessible to a growing number of employees. Results from the company’s data journey includes up to 3 times faster reporting, more than 50% improvement in operational cost efficiency, and a more than 25% reduction in order cancellations.

Enabling insights at the click of a button

Before partnering with Tableau, TATA 1mg’s analytics reporting cycle was slow and manual. It took nearly four hours of effort to gather and analyze data and share the results with stakeholders. The company wanted a solution that could quickly process large volumes of data and automate reporting. Tableau was chosen for its scalability and its features like scheduled data refreshes.

“We have a large database of transactional and clickstream information that helps us understand and serve our customers better. What we do as a team is filter out the noise from the data and provide the business with the information needed to make decisions,” said Nikhil Doegar, Vice President – Business Intelligence at TATA 1mg. “The challenge we’ve solved with Tableau is making that information available to everyone at a click of a button, even as we continue to scale.”

TATA 1mg implemented Tableau Server and Tableau Desktop in 2016 and has since integrated data from multiple sources to track and report on everything from sales trends to supply chain operations. This has included leveraging Tableau’s native integration with Amazon Redshift and Snowflake. The integration with Redshift enables TATA 1mg to analyze transactional data on a real-time basis, enabling it to better track the customer journey and identify potential fraud.

Goldstone Technologies Limited, a business intelligence, and IT services company, has supported TATA 1mg’s data journey by helping to manage Tableau and related business systems. This has not only minimized downtime, but freed up developers to focus more of their time on creating dashboards.

“You need partners you can depend on to keep things running smoothly and ensure your business is not impacted when things go wrong. Goldstone provides that reliability,” said Nikhil.

Scaling a data culture

Data-driven decision-making has been part of TATA 1mg’s ethos from the beginning. Tableau has helped scale this data culture by equipping teams with a shared platform for data analytics. Teams can track and collaborate around shared metrics, and they speak a common language when it comes to data analytics.

“Having common dashboards to support our decision-making helps with collaboration and I believe that alignment between teams is reflected in our results,” said Doegar. 

Starting out with a handful of Tableau licenses for its analytics team, the company now has 200 viewer licenses,70 explorer licenses, and seven creator licenses. It also has plans to grow its user base by approximately 50% year on year. 

Users come from across the business and include developers responsible for creating dashboards as well as mid-to-senior level management in areas like sales, procurement, supply chain and human resources. For business users, TATA 1mg runs regular training sessions on Tableau and emphasizes the importance of using data to drive performance. These include monthly orientation and training sessions known as ‘happy hours’ where new employees and existing users can learn about new features and product highlights. 

There’s also an internal group known as ‘Tableau users’ who help to support their colleagues by answering Tableau related questions and sharing new information. In the future, they plan to create a repository of internal use cases, answers to frequently asked questions, and other resources to promote best practice and save users time. 

Optimizing costs and performance

Data analytics at TATA 1mg is now evolving towards self-service. Teams have access to dashboards that are refreshed on a regular basis, and they can use the filters provided to drill down into the data and uncover new insights. This has significantly increased reporting efficiency while making it easier for teams to monitor their key performance indicators (KPIs).

Benefits provided by Tableau include a greater understanding of customers and how to optimize customer acquisition costs. For example, TATA 1mg growth teams can monitor their new customer acquisition trends by marketing channel through Tableau dashboards, which helps them optimize their marketing spends for a better ROI. 

“As you invest in digital channels, you need immediate access to data to measure the return. Then, if a campaign isn’t working, you can improve it or turn it off right away, rather than spending money on something that will not deliver the desired results,” said Nikhil.

Supply chain management is another area of the business that’s benefited. Through the availability of fast, accurate data, TATA 1mg is able to ensure the right products are available in the right quantity in each location.

Nikhil shared that the pandemic accentuated the importance of having readily available information to manage customer demand and turnaround times. “The need for medication, consultations, and testing became critical during the pandemic. If our team did not have access to real-time information, these things would have taken longer to provide,” he said.

The next step in TATA 1mg’s data journey is to enable true self-service where datasets are made available to employees, and they can create their own dashboards by dragging and dropping in different fields and filters. This will ultimately help the company democratize data.

“Dashboards are important, but I don’t think that should be the limit of what’s made available to employees. Instead, they should have access to the source and be able to explore the data on their own. That’s where we are headed and Tableau will help make it possible,” said Nikhil.

Goldstone Technologies Limited is a Business Intelligence and IT Services Company. Founded in 1994, we are publicly listed on the BSE Limited and National Stock Exchange of India Limited (NSE).