For me, personally, Tableau is a huge time saver. I use it every day. And I'd say roughly it cuts down my production time by about 30 percent. I'd say overall we've increased our productivity by at least 10 to 15 percent, in terms of man-hours for results.
With data on millions of Australian businesses and citizens, database marketing agency Inivio needed help making sense of it all. In this video, senior analyst Yao Tang discusses how Tableau is “a huge time-saver.”
Tableau: Can you tell us a little about Inivio?
Yao Tang, Senior Analyst: Day-to-day, Inivio is a database marketing agency. We do data-driven marketing as well as analytics. We've been collecting data for a very long time. So we have information on over, I think, 16 million Australian consumers and two million businesses, and hundreds of attributes along those lines. And these are attributes not only at the personal level, but at geographic levels, research information, all sorts of unstructured information that we do need to blend in from time to time.
Tableau: How did you see and understand your data before Tableau?
Yao: We felt that a lot of the tools that we were using before to analyze and visual and report back to our clients and even internally weren't really fit for purpose anymore.
We needed to go out into the market to find a tool that was more compatible with the way that we were working now—in a space that's very multi-channel, it's very dynamic, it's very responsive—whereas a lot of our processes from before were quite standardized and structured.
So we investigated a range of visualization tools, and we settled on Tableau mainly because of two things, speed to insight as well as connectivity, because we use a lot of disparate data sources and a lot of different types of databases to store all our information. And we found that Tableau is really good at blending all of those together.
A scatterplot of demographic data, filtered by single parent household status
Tableau: How does Tableau help exactly?
Yao: So with all of these different data sources at different levels of detail, we find that Tableau is a really quick way to explore the relationships between our different data sets without having to go through a really rigorous process of joining them in, and interpreting them through a database system.
Tableau allows us to really connect things and blend them at whatever level is available, and also very quickly. So for me personally Tableau is a huge time saver. I'm a really big proponent of it and a big user of it. I use it every day. And I'd say roughly it cuts down my production time by about 30 percent.
I'd say overall we've increased our productivity by at least 10 to 15 percent, in terms of man-hours for results. But, more importantly, I think it's enabled a lot of analyst created self-service tools through publishing that we don't need to go to a development team to implement.
Without Tableau I think we'd find it a lot less efficient and a lot more difficult to present insights to clients.
So without having Tableau I think our efficiency would be down our profitability would be down.
Tableau: Do you have anything else to add about Tableau?
Yao: I really like using Tableau. I even use it in my daily life.
Outside of work I've recently been on a bit of a fitness and health kick and trying to lose weight and gain muscle and things like that. As an analyst it's a bit difficult, because you don't get out much. And I was just doing some data entry through a little phone app. But, then I managed to download that information and really analyze my own progress through Tableau. And it's allowed me to sort of get an insight into the workings of even my own fitness and my own body. So that was really interesting.