Manufacturer, Eveready Industries achieves over 500% ROI in six months with Tableau

Eveready Industries India, Ltd (EIIL) is the flagship company of the B.M. Khaitan Group and India’s largest selling brand of dry cell batteries and flashlights, with dominant market shares of about 46% and 85% respectively. It is also the world’s third largest producer of carbon zinc batteries, selling more than a billion units a year. With Tableau, Eveready centralized reporting across departments, including sales, supply chain management, finance, and operations—achieving 526% return on investment within six months of use. Championed by CIO Arup Choudhury, the company makes faster, more informed decisions on a daily basis with Tableau.

Eveready had considerable amounts of data stored in disparate systems, including three terabytes of data stored in an Oracle database, supply chain management and Salesforce systems, and Excel spreadsheets.

To drive more informed decision making, the company was keen to use its existing data to gain valuable insights. With this in mind, Eveready's IT team adopted Tableau to help the entire organization leverage data from its existing systems.

Eveready's 52 salespeople use Tableau to track sales data such as planned versus actual sales, year over year (YoY) growth rates, sales trends, profitability of each line of business, geographical distribution of sales, etc. Additionally, the team leverages Tableau to discover trends related to customer buying patterns, cash-credit ratios, and more.

After success in the sales department, Eveready rolled out Tableau to the supply chain team. With Tableau, the supply chain management team could get a real-time view into inventory trends, ensure adherence to stocking norms in storage areas, and track materials in transit. The team could also track distribution plans. For example, they could see and understand planned versus actual shipments.

The company intends to leverage Tableau for operations and financial reporting. With Tableau, operations teams will have more insight into machine downtime data, production data, breakdown maintenance, etc. The finance team will also benefit from understanding trends in cash flows and product profitability.

With Tableau, Eveready achieved faster decision making and increased collaboration. With Tableau Server, departments can share dashboards securely and the IT team can ensure timely, more accurate analyses across the whole company.

“If you look at data in a tabular form, it’s tough to understand it quickly, let alone get insights from the data. But using a visual tool, you can immediately see what action needs to be taken,” said Mr. Arup Choudhury, CIO, Eveready Industries India Ltd.

Eveready has already seen a considerable jump in sales with a return on investment of about 526 percent within the first six months of its initial Tableau implementation.

“Tableau is highly recommended since it helps companies derive very helpful visual insights from existing data,” said Mr. Choudhury. “If not for Tableau, we would’ve been forced to stick with creating complex warehouses and churning data to produce reports and tabular spreadsheets. This would have hampered our ability to make quick decisions using real-time insights.”