GLADD K.K. coordinates diverse brand partners and customers as part of its invitation-only, online flash sales model. We spoke with GLADD K.K.’s Director, of Buying & Merchandising, Junichi Katori about how Tableau is helping his team:
- Slice analysis timeline by up to 30%
- Make more data-based decisions
- Quickly understand data generated by 300 events per month
- Tap into data from Google Analytics, Salesforce as well as MySQL and PostgreSQL
- Overcome limitations of Microsoft Excel
Tableau: What’s the main focus of your job? Junichi Katori, Director, Buying & Merchandising: Personally, my biggest job as a director is making judgments based on facts and hypotheses, rather than analysis. The greatest benefit I've had from the introduction of Tableau has arisen from its ability to free up time for thinking by reducing time spent on analysis. I'm repeating myself a little here, but when it comes to reporting, being able to use a unified format for all the data that has so far been processed by staff members has given us significant time savings of about 20 to 30%.
Personally, my biggest job as a director is making judgments based on facts and hypotheses, rather than analysis. The greatest benefit I've had from the introduction of Tableau has arisen from its ability to free up time for thinking by reducing time spent on analysis.
Tableau: What do you use Tableau for specifically? Katori: Principally we use Tableau for three things: analysis, management, and reporting. When I say analysis I mean looking into sales, goods, and customers. Management of course means management of sales, but also management of business linked to Salesforce. In terms of reporting, our company has partnerships with 3,000 brands and we use it to report to them. Tableau: What types of data sources are you using? Katori: The key elements of connectivity are MySQL, PostgreSQL, Google Analytics and Salesforce. We run around 300 events per month using Google Analytics data, which allows us to capture the number of page views or number of visitors for each. Tableau: What was your job like before Tableau? Katori: Before Tableau we would send a query to the database—such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, Google Analytics—then take all the data and process it with Excel (to carry out analysis). The problem is that Excel itself can't handle that much data. All those barriers have gone now, and we are able to process data in a one-stop manner. The preparation time for analysis has been drastically reduced. Tableau: What have you found to be the biggest advantage of using Tableau? Katori: Along with that, the big thing we can do with Tableau is view, share and evaluate the same data as a group by creating standardized reports. I think that's the biggest point. It allows you to overcome the barriers to data access and ensures data analysis is always on hand. The whole team is familiar with this data, and so it is really useful. I emphasized visualization earlier; our clients are essentially from the fashion and cosmetics industries and the visual aspect is very important for them. This part is very popular with them. Tableau: What else can you tell us about GLADD? Katori: Our company handles simple, invitation-only sales online. I run the buying and MD teams. There are around 25 people in the teams overall and we hold about 300 brand events a month, for which I source and select the products.