Rakuten’s Travel Business Domestic Sales Department analyzes travel data to enhance revenue, including room inventory, facilities, and sales achievement. Chihaya Akaike, from Rakuten's Strategy Planning Group, shares how Tableau allows his team to analyze data that was previously too big to handle—leading to improved performance, particularly in sales. With Tableau, the group can leverage data in their strategic planning efforts—and share their analyses to other departments using Tableau Server.
Tableau: What does Tableau allow you to do? Chihaya Akaike, Strategy Planning Group: Using Tableau, we can effectively handle large amounts of data that we couldn’t before, or arrange multiple data items collectively. It's now possible to improve the network environment, and we can analyze and organize data from a new perspective. Tableau: What does your job involve? Akaike: I currently work at Rakuten Inc. I am in the Strategy Planning Group in the Travel Business Domestic Sales Department. This mainly involves analyzing data for facilities in Japan, and work related to expanding the travel business in Japan. I mainly analyze sales achievement, manage registration status for room inventory of the affiliated accommodation facilities, and support sales to enhance revenue. Tableau: What data challenges did you have before adopting Tableau? Akaike: With our previous system, it was difficult to manage our enormous data. By accessing it with Tableau, the efficiency of data analysis has been improved. We can now make decisions with right data. By introducing Tableau, we have realized big data analysis and integration of multiple data items. This enabled highly advanced analysis of the data that we could not leverage before, and brought us significant discoveries. Also, we can now visualize problems quantitatively to clarify which actions bring improvements, and prioritize them to effectively utilize our limited resources. There were limits in how we show our data with our previous system. With Tableau, we can visualize data variously with different shape and colors enabling viewers to understand them easily. I feel it is one of the biggest benefits of using Tableau.
Tableau: How has Tableau impacted you personally? Akaike: Using Tableau in my own work has meant I've gained the capability to analyze and leverage data to bring specific actions such as planning strategies. I think this is a big benefit for our company. Tableau: What does the future look like now that you have Tableau? Akaike: In the future, we would like to analyze and share data more efficiently using Tableau Server. Tableau: What do you find to be the biggest benefit of using Tableau for data analysis? Akaike: While I think there are several benefits in using Tableau, by far the biggest benefit comes from the beautiful visualizations of data.