The Extrabom chain started in 1978 with the opening of a small grocery store in Cariacica (ES). The retailer is currently among the 35 largest supermarket chains in Brazil. In a fiercely competitive industry, the retailer needed to increase analytics agility for faster decisions. With help from partner, QI ao Cubo, Extrabom deployed Tableau, shaving nearly a full day from analysis timelines. Today, executives and strategists at Extrabom use Tableau to streamline analysis and gain a global view of metrics like profit and losses.
Tableau: How is Tableau particularly useful to your industry? Vitor Ventura, Technology Manager: Our industry is very competitive and works with very tight margins. Therefore, our operation must be highly optimized and we must always be aware of the loss and the profit margin. Tableau: How does Tableau benefit your company specifically? Vitor: With Tableau we have a better global view and a better perspective of the opportunities for improvement. This allowed us to contribute to the profitability of the business. Tableau: What is the impact that Tableau had on the company regarding insights? Have you saved time? Vitor: The main impact was that we improved and optimized the delivery of information. With Tableau, the delivery of reports is almost immediate. In a specific project, in the area of logistics, Tableau has benefited us greatly with the creation of management dashboards. With them, we have been able to improve the process and obtain a gain of 19% in logistics productive performance. Regarding the level of service, in supplying the stores, with Tableau dashboards we have managed to improve the indicator from 83% to 99.7% in ten months. Therefore, it is a tool that is already part of our day-to-day logistics.
The main impact was that we managed to improve and optimize the delivery of information. With Tableau, the delivery of reports is almost immediate.
Tableau: How many people do you have creating and interacting with Tableau dashboards? Vitor: Today, Tableau services the company from end to end—from management to operations. For example, in the case of the logistics department. In terms of consuming information in Tableau, we’re talking about 200 users at the operations level. We have approximately 10 people creating these visual analyses. The level of detail we can reach analyzing data with Tableau is crucial to us today. Basically it would be impossible for us to operate business intelligence without Tableau Server. The volume of data is huge. We have analyses with almost five million rows. Another benefit is that it allows us to share information between areas with ease, providing better accessibility. Tableau: How did you get started with Tableau? Vitor: QI Cubed was critical to us throughout the whole process. They guided us, followed up on the process and assisted in the deployment of the tool and in exploring it more every day. Yes, QI Cubed, a Tableau partner in Espirito Santo, has worked closely with us in everything from the deployment of the tool up to the delivery of the more complex dashboards, visualizations and other projects. Moreover, in partnership with QI Cubed, we also worked to generate data sources so that users may use them. Tableau: Who is using Tableau within Extrabom? Vitor: We started to work with Tableau in the economic department of the company, in order to prepare the company for the economic scenario that was being sketched for 2015/2016. From then on the work evolved, and today we are working with Tableau in two other departments: market intelligence and logistics.