MAT HUGHES: It's just been a huge game changer for us. So instead of having to wait for something to already happen and then try to figure out why it happened, we're now proactively looking out. And we can see what's going to happen before it happens and then prepare for that, or maybe change it.
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Tableau was really the only one that followed through on making it as easy as the website made it seem. We actually downloaded one free trial. And during that 14-day time period, we were able to not only recreate all of the dashboards that we were already doing, and they updated much faster, but we also built several new ones. So by the time it was over, we went to our director for approval, and it was probably the easiest approval we've ever got because the ROI was already there after 14 days.
Originally we had just intended Tableau to be an internal analytics tool, but what we started finding was that it was so easy to build reports that we felt were visually compelling, that we wanted to actually start showing it to hotels. And so we started with a few hotels and maybe two or three reports, and started showing it to them, and then we showed it to a few more, and to a few more.
What we found was that within 60 days we had 300 hotels that we're asking for these reports once a week. We tried doing that in the past, and really the limitations was the tools and the data. So what we were able to do with Tableau is we have a small group of analysts now making proactive recommendations for all of our hotels in the Americas, with no additional staff, no additional resources. So in five months, we were able to make 1,200 proactive recommendations to hotels.
Just on a day to day basis I'm able to take business questions and we're able to turn them around in minutes, instead of things that literally took us days before to do. We've implemented Tableau Server, the amount of time I spent updating reports is now zero, very much zero. And not just that, but we have a lot more data being updated.
So before I was only doing weekly, now all of our data is updated nightly. And a year ago, before we even had Tableau at all, that data was being updated monthly. We started with just getting Tableau Server for our department, now we're looking at an enterprise-wide deployment just because of the value that we've already seen.
