“Practically immediate” insight into 200 million lines of data at Pague Menos

Pague Menos is one of the largest pharmacy chains in Brazil—both in revenue and number of stores. In this video, Marcos Antonio Almeida Silva, Systems Manager and Pedro Praxedes, Director of Systems & Logistics, talk about using Tableau to speed insight into Pague Menos’ data.

Video in Portuguese:

Tableau: What do you tell people who ask about your experience with Tableau?

Mr. Pedro Praxedes, Diretor de Sistemas & Logística: Tableau is a tool that I recommend to any organization. It very easy to use, very simple. Most interestingly, it does not depend on the size of the company...I can have a small company, I can have a tool such as Tableau to help me day-to-day—just as I can have a huge organization with Tableau. That's a major advantage.

Tableau: Would you recommend Tableau to others considering it for business intelligence?
Praxedes: The tool covers all the areas in a company, of course, within the complexity of each organization. So I do recommend, with no doubts, saying that Tableau can help any company with analyzing, focusing the data— transforming these data into information and thus helping to make decisions based on that.

Tableau: What was your first impression of Tableau?
Praxedes: When we were introduced to Tableau, we got really excited about it. We thought it was a really interesting tool.

Tableau: Can you describe the decision process?
Praxedes: So it was a joint selection process, IT and the user base.
Marcos Antonio Almeida Silva, Systems Manager: What motivated the acquisition of Tableau was the governance requirements—which we started two years ago, a process of IT governance and the creation of a sector when the company went public.

That increased our response time, as because our demand has increased. (So) we wanted a tool that were more user-oriented and less IT-oriented.

Tableau: Can you describe the experience before Tableau?
Silva: Without Tableau, the access to data, particularly of the sales database—which is huge—would take too long.

The operations area had a delay of about five days to have the information available, mine the data and then clean it, before delivery.

Tableau: And now?
Silva:: Currently, we access in minutes a database with 200 million lines. Today this information is practically immediate, as our database is loaded daily, so during the night Tableau loads the information on the database and from there it will be available the following morning.

Tableau: That’s great! Finally, how has your choice of Tableau changed the use of data at Pague Menos?
Silva: The user owns the demand now. When he has a new requirement, he will develop it.

So this, in a certain way, has changed the game rules.

The user today has the ability to solve some issues that previously were not clear; the user would only have this result when the IT area made the report or a dashboard available according to his/her needs.

So, this analysis he/she can achieve today with a simple access to Tableau, even preparing it at that moment, a direct analysis on the database.

With it (Tableau), it is possible to make faster decisions—this will bring a result to the company.

Tableau: What was the importance of having received consulting from (Tableau Silver Partner) PATH?
Praxedes: The consulting was essential, due to the training part, for the user and for the IT area, and we also took part in the training.

The consulting brought us these shortcuts that could provide us this faster path to reach that result.