Dun & Bradstreet Helps Clients Discover Nuggets of Insight
It is fun. It is totally something new. You end up really digging out the gold nuggets; and the gold nuggets are the data!
Dun & Bradstreet is a company that operates globally with more than 6,000 employees, a turnover of $1.4 billion and more than 4 million customers. For over 100 years, they have had offices in Switzerland and they now employ over 110 workers at its headquarters in Urdorf and its branches in Lausanne and Lugano. Thomas Trostmann, a business intelligence consultant from D&B Switzerland, spoke with us at the 2012 Tableau European Customer Conference about how Tableau is helping the company create new offerings by analyzing client and company data to unearth new-found insight that has customers excited for more.
| Tableau: | How did your company discover Tableau? |
| Thomas: | Tableau was first recommended to me by a BI colleague. When I tried it, I taught it to myself with the support of Tableau and had no problems. It was easy to get going once we started experimenting with what it could do. |
| Tableau: | Was there a business problem you were trying to solve? |
| Thomas: | Well, we first used it to acquire a major client who wished to visualize their data. But then we discovered, since we have our own data in addition to client data, we were able to visualize both using Tableau. It was simply a match made in heaven. |
| Tableau: | Does analyzing data with Tableau help you mine more insight? |
| Thomas: | You end up really digging out the gold nuggets. And the gold nuggets are the data! If one is with a client, you can see how their eyes light up when they see for the first time that they too can find the golden insight. |
| Tableau: | Has using Tableau impacted your work? |
| Thomas: | Well, first off, it is fun. It is totally something new. It is not just looking at Excel files with a little bit of data inside. Instead, one can actually analyze something, go deeper, and consider something further. |
| Tableau: | What do you see next for your company and Tableau? |
| Thomas: | At our sales kickoff this year, Tableau was announced as a strategic tool. We still have to develop our products a little bit for it. We have to try out what we can do moving forward. Our clients can now really receive an added value—the three-way constellation of Tableau, Dun & Bradstreet, and their client-specific data.
We’ll continue to develop other products and views with Tableau, as well as improve them. We are also asking ourselves what is it we want to achieve through enhanced BI. There is so much possible with BI that is exciting, I feel that there is a lot more discovery coming our way. |