Skanska asks the right questions with help from Tableau

Today, Skanska has common data sets across all operating units, enabling collaboration across the company. With Tableau, Skanska achieved a “bi-directional flow of data” where all levels have access to relevant data—from managers to construction workers in the field. Henrik Fälldin, Digital Engineer calls Tableau “a key enabler” to achieve their goals.

Tableau: Tell us a bit about Skanska. Henrik Fälldin, Digital Engineer: So Skanska is a construction company. Head office is in Sweden. Globally, we've got about 55,000 employees. In the U.K., 5,000. We need to, you know, work with a digital mindset. We want to go from an analog way of working to a digital way of working. So digital work flows is the future. And that's where we want to head. Tableau: What prompted this change? Henrik: So one external factor is a magic number, right? 2025. The year 2025. Nine years away. The U.K. government have set targets for the construction industry, hard targets. One is reduction in carbon emission by 50 percent. Reduce cost by 33 percent, and reduce time by 50 percent. That’s why we're looking at digitizing work flows. We have to do it because of those external factors. Tableau: Tell us about your old workflow. Henrik: Previously, we've worked in silos. We've got eight operating units and each has been pretty much its own company. And we've worked in silos and in Excel, et cetera.

Tableau: How are things changing? Henrik: So what we want to do and what we're doing actively is removing those silos. We're collaborating across Skanska U.K. and actually across Skanska globally as well with all the business units, so that we have common data sets across all operating units. So that we have one version of the truth and we're working from the same data sets. And that's huge. Tableau: How has Tableau impacted those changes? Henrik: So what we're seeing here is a bi-directional flow of data. We're going from a macro level—think of it like macro level within the company. So executives, they would review dashboards and the data with Skanska U.K., with drill-down capability. What we're actually doing is teaching people how to ask the right question and then Tableau will enable them to ask that question. We see Tableau and an enterprise environment as a key enabler for us in order to achieve our goals moving forward in order to reach those 2025 targets set by the U.K. government