Dallas Cowboys Go Big with Tableau

Lately, the Dallas Cowboys story has generated a lot of news and activity.

We've seen news coverage in ComputerWorld magazine, a featured story on network television in Dallas, a video case study on TechTarget and even in our own case study with our partner Teknion.

Nothing like asking a former MTV video producer to look at well over 40 minutes of footage and boil it down to the essential 3 minutes. Check out the results in YouTube.

If you love football, you probably know the Cowboys won Sunday November 7. Did you also know that their business teams scored a big win too?

After Sunday's game, Dallas Cowboys Merchandising COO Bill Priakos was featured on an NBC news video feature in Dallas about the success Bill, his merchandising team and the IT team are having with Tableau. Check out the embedded video.

The video tells the story of the Dallas Cowboys’ huge merchandising success and their use of Tableau. In fact, the voice over from the reporter mid-way through the story is: “Another key element is something called Tableau. Software that is so sophisticated that we can’t show it to you on the screen. We can tell you that it tracks every Cowboy item in real-time.”

You've got to love the irony of a highly visual business intelligence application (Tableau) being something so sophisticated that it can't be shown on screen.

Eric Lai of ComputerWorld recently told the Cowboys story in his article “BI visualization tool helps Dallas Cowboys sell more Tony Romo jerseys.”

Cowboys Merchandising COO Priakos used vivid words to describe one of his key operational systems that just couldn't deliver integrated reporting and analytics. To quote Bill, "As we were going through the installation, they kept telling me, 'the BI piece is coming.' That turned out to be French for them not really knowing what they were going to do."

But then Bill goes on to describe Tableau. "It has taken a somewhat disappointing software installation on which we had spent multiple millions of dollars, and just by layering this software piece, [Tableau] made it run better, and let us find answers instantly."

For more details, check out the article itself or our blog post.

We were fortunate to catch Bill on video when he and his team presented at our 2009 Customer Conference. Check out the video.

What I particularly love is when Bill says that a 15 second glance at a Tableau dashboard in the morning replaces 90 minutes of printing reports, making phone calls, etc.

Finally and perhaps most importantly is the role our partner Teknion played in the Cowboys story. The Teknion team brought the Tableau solution to the Cowboys and then led the Cowboys to rapid success.

Tableau and Teknion together provided real-time reporting and dashboard capabilities that exceeded the Cowboys’ requirements. Systematically and methodically the Teknion team worked side by side with data owners and data users within the Dallas Cowboys to deliver all required functionality, on time and under budget. “Early in the process, we were able to get a clear understanding of what it would take to run a more profitable operation for the Cowboys,” said Teknion Vice President Bill Luisi. “This process step is a key step in Teknion’s approach with any client, and it always pays huge dividends as the implementation plan progresses.”

Check out the case study here.