Bayer Uses Tableau to Promote Employees’ Self-Management, Deploy Transparent Strategies, Achieve Refined Operations

Bayer is a global Life Science company with a more than 150-year history and core competencies in the areas of health care and agriculture. Headquartered in Leverkusen, Germany, Bayer entered the Chinese market in 1882. At present, Bayer has 12 joint venture subsidiaries in China, with various types of products, along with a massive amount and diversity of data.

In China, Bayer Healthcare Company Limited has a Pharmaceuticals Division, Consumer Health Division and Crop Science Division. David Wang, Head of Commercial Insights and Analytics Director, from the Pharmaceuticals in Bayer Healthcare Company Limited, shared how Tableau helped Bayer’s medical and health care business development. the strong data integration capability of Tableau, Bayer formed a standardized business language within the company, significantly improving data-processing and decision-making efficiency.

As a large global company, Bayer has a massive amount of internal and external data that needs to be integrated and analyzed. Facing a variety of massive user and sales data generated by different departments in business operations, Bayer was facing unified management challenges.

According to David, Bayer Healthcare Company Limited started using Tableau Desktop in 2016, in three stages. From 2016 to 2017, the marketing department in Bayer used Tableau Desktop to develop reports with dozens of users. From 2017 to the end of 2018, the analytics department started using Tableau Server to generate analysis reports, with more than 1200 staff from different departments using it to share and see data. From the end of 2018 to present is the third stage, where Tableau has been transformed from a traditional report analysis tool to a better decision supporting platform.
Bayer Global has deployed Tableau as its global decision analysis platform, which forms a standardized business language that can measure performance and make operations management more transparent and efficient.

Before Bayer started using Tableau, they would develop analysis reports on a certain product or brand with the data coming from different departments who had different data sources and analysis tools. It was difficult for the management team to form a comprehensive judgment and evaluation on the product according to all the reports from various departments. As a global enterprise, Bayer also needed to compare and analyze data reports from different countries and regions. Some reports took up to six months to generate.

The data integration capabilities in Tableau helped Bayer solve this problem. With Tableau, they could integrate multiple data sources and achieve a comprehensive analysis. They were also able to reduce the data integration analysis report production period from six months to one month, and the department analysis report production period was shortened from three months to two weeks. With all this time savings, it helped to improve data-integration and decision-making efficiency.

Tableau provides more analytical dimensions for data processing. In addition to describing how the statistics work, Tableau provides in-depth predictive and burst analysis to respond to rapidly changing market and competitive environments. Facing rapid changes in the pharmaceutical market policy, Bayer transformed professional knowledge into quantitative indicators through internal and external data integration analysis, taking a journey of intelligence and digitization, predicting the impact of policy changes on the market. At Bayer, Tableau has changed from a data integration tool to a decision support platform, no longer limited to the business department.

David said, “We call Tableau a ‘Smart Platform’, which means a faster and smarter decision supporting platform. Through Tableau’s predictive and scenario analysis, we can better evaluate how to achieve optimal results in the current uncertain market and competitive environment. Everyone can make faster, more agile, more targeted and more valuable decisions. It has become a habit for every manager to use Tableau every day.”

“Tableau Server encourages us to analyze data and develop reports through self-service, gradually leading to an impact of self-management,” said David. While people may use Tableau as a self-service analytics tool, Bayer experienced a new way to operate and manage through Tableau.

At present, the company management team uses Tableau’s data visualization capabilities to manage business operations after setting the strategies and assessments of functional departments and business units, creating exceptional value for the company.

Take the example of the Pharmaceuticals Division of Bayer - the KPI Score Card is a performance data evaluation system formed by the IT, performance and business departments. The dashboard platform reviews the different KPI indicators that are collected from these various departments. Business department staff can compare themselves with others as well as current, and past business status through KPI visualized report to identify and troubleshoot problems in real-time. Meanwhile, the management team can understand the business status of relevant employees, customer feedback and the execution of company strategies and regulations through data, thus forming a performance culture. As a result, employees have changed from self-service to self-management. The transparent policy development and management empowered the company with optimized operations from top to bottom.

David expressed that the next trend is the digital transformation of enterprises, and Tableau will help companies improve their competitiveness through data as part of this evolution.