With most processes already in the cloud, Tableau Cloud was a natural fit for AMAG Pharmaceuticals. Today, salespeople access dashboards in the field on smartphones and tablets—and the data is available when they need it. AMAG’s analytics team sets permissions, customizing each dashboard to fit the user—from field representatives all the way to the C-Suite.
Tableau: Why did you choose a cloud solution? Rachel Kell, Manager, Commercial and Decision Analytics: We have about four Tableau Desktop licenses, but our data is all in the cloud. We are completely on the cloud. We have an outsourced vendor that does our data warehouse, our ETL, and normalizing of the data. And they're all virtual. Our e-mail and our storage are all in the cloud as well, and then we use Tableau Cloud. The company was already completely virtual and they wanted to sort of fit the business platform within the paradigm of being on the cloud, but at the same time having sales reps that are traveling around with tablets instead of laptops it just sort of made sense. Tableau: How many people at AMAG use Tableau? Rachel: I think we have we have about 250 active Tableau Cloud licenses and they range from your average sales rep all the way to the CEO. They regularly check Tableau and get all of the data that they need and some of them have subscriptions sent to their e-mail.
I know I can refresh [the Tableau dashboard] and it's going to work. It's going to be consistent.
Tableau: How did people digest data before Tableau? Rachel: Before we deployed Tableau we would disseminate all the data via giant spreadsheets, which then each rep would have to customize to whatever particular like region or segment they wanted to look at because it would be everyone's data. And so that definitely saves them time and it prevents them from making any mistakes analyzing the data. Tableau: What have been some of the reactions from employees? Rachel: I think they're very excited, they're very grateful. They like that they can tell exactly how current the data is, have a field that says data current as of this date. And they love the fact that they can use the visualizations to make their lives a little easier. Tableau: How does Tableau Cloud help them do their jobs better? Rachel: They use it on their iPads, they use it to prepare for any call they're about to make on a healthcare provider to see what competitive products that provider is prescribing and the amounts and what they can use it to sort of focus what they're going to talk to the healthcare provider about during a given visit. It allows them an opportunity to figure out what sort of education the providers might need. So it helps clinical performance. It helps sales. Tableau: Has Tableau Cloud been scalable for AMAG? Rachel: It definitely seems very scalable. I think that for somebody in my role, being able to set groups of users is very helpful. You can just add a particular new sales rep to a group, and they automatically have access to a variety of dashboards for their specific needs, and I don't have to go do it manually one-by-one. So that's helpful in my job.