In this video, Filip Dousek, Business Analytics Lead at Mibcon speaks about his experience sharing Tableau with customers. Customers realize that they can connect to systems like SAP BW in seconds. Even better, they can replace noisy reports with rich, interactive visualizations and immediately find business stories from gigabytes of data.
Tableau: What is the end goal when you start working with customers? Filip Dousek, Business Analytics Lead: The end product of our work with Tableau is typically some improvement in performance of our clients. That is pretty much what we're looking for in the data and why we are doing visualizations, because they can improve the performance of a company. Tableau: And what sort of client data are you usually looking at? Filip: Typically our customers have some ERP systems. This might be SAP, this might be other systems. And we're giving them some further insights into their data using Tableau. So the typical customer using a traditional BI tool would have a set of reports, and maybe there are several hundred reports in a given company. And they are 95 percent noise. So when somebody is using these standard reports, you always will be looking every week at the same reports, and trying to look for some insight, trying to see whether something has changed from the last week, from the last month. Tableau: And how is it different with Tableau? Filip: Now when we come into the company with Tableau, we actually make sense of the data. There's a lot of data, a lot of different reports, and we really look for what is important, what are the business stories present in the data? And Tableau helps us visualize these business stories to pull just the important meaning out of gigabytes of data. Tableau: What reactions are you seeing from your customers? Filip: What I can see very clearly in the discussions that we have with our customers on the board level is that there is a change of mindset often happening during these discussions over our visualizations. It could be a new view of who their customers are. It could be a different perspective on what they are actually selling. So the result of mine may be one week, two weeks, three weeks of working with data in Tableau would be two or three slides that really shows something important for the company that it can take action on.
One of the advantages of coming into a company equipped with Tableau is that there isn't really almost any setup needed so that I can connect to the internal systems. I need to get permissions—I need to tick a box on each view that I want to be consuming with Tableau, and that's it.
Tableau: How is the customer engagement process different between customers that have Tableau and those that don’t? Filip: One of the advantages of coming into a company equipped with Tableau is that there isn't really almost any setup needed so that I can connect to the internal systems. I need to get permissions. I need to tick a box on each view that I want to be consuming with Tableau, and that's it. And I can work. I can work with the full history, with the full, rich data set, and there is no other controls, changes that augment needed. Tableau: Can you speak a bit about your process for connecting Tableau to different SAP systems? Filip: So we usually have about two scenarios for connecting Tableau to SAP systems. The first one will be connecting to an SAP BW system, and that's very straight-forward. So any views that are present in an SAP BW system can be directly accessed through Tableau within five seconds or so. And the other scenario that we use is connecting to an SAP HANA instance. So sometimes we would export multiple data sources from our customers, load it into our own SAP HANA instance for the speed, and sometimes for some transformations. And then we would be connecting Tableau to our own SAP HANA instance. Our customers would usually be the top tier companies within their industries in my country. It would be 90 percent customers who have implemented SAP and who have some working relationship with us.