Lixil

LIXIL’s journey into analytics: Bringing Data Together For Informed Decision Making


70% reduction in data generation times

Increased data interactivity for improved business decisions

Greater collaborations across departments

Founded in 2011 by five of Japan’s most successful building materials and housing companies, LIXIL Group is a global leader in water and housing products with a stellar line-up of brands that include Grohe, American Standard. INAX and Tostem.

LIXIL International, which is the Asia Pacific regional headquarter of LIXIL Group started their Tableau journey in 2018.

With the powerful features of Tableau, LIXIL International is able to streamline the data preparation process, optimise sales data and foster inter-department collaborations.

The data can be made readily available to the management team for faster business decision-making.

70% reduction in data preparation times

When it comes to making critical business decisions, knowledge is power.

Analyzing business data allows a company to forecast market trends, anticipate consumer demand and outwit competitors. And the faster a company accesses its data, the more efficient it becomes in mapping out its future.

Tableau helps to reduce the data preparation time. Tedious data preparation has become a thing of the past, with the time taken to churn sales data cut from 10 days to 3 days. And cleaning up data, which previously took almost 2 hours, can now be completed in only 30 minutes.

“The data can be made readily available to the management team for faster business decision-making,” said Meow Leng.

Increased data interactivity for improved business decisions

The medium is, indeed, the message when it comes to presenting data.

Despite collecting large amounts of critical data, LIXIL International faced the challenge of presenting it clearly to essential stakeholders. Previously, they would generate the data sets on Excel sheets, create pivot tables and present their findings using PowerPoint slides.

But this format proved to be both uninspiring and unimaginative. The lack of data interactivity meant that the team often found themselves unable to drill down to the granular level when queried about the information. By tapping on Tableau, LIXIL International is now able to present data in a more insightful manner, helping the company to formulate strategic plans and take bold new steps towards the future.

The improved data visualisation allows key stakeholders to analyze the individual product categories, distribution channels, customers and product codes. It also enables users to view sales and profit margins according to the most exceptional granular level of product codes.

“The senior executives who had seen the dashboards are pleased with the level of details in Tableau that was not provided in Excel Pivot Tables,” said Meow Leng. “With Tableau, we are now able to build interactive dashboards to present to our management team for them to make better-informed decisions.”

The senior executives who had seen the dashboards are pleased with the level of details in Tableau that were not provided in Excel Pivot Tables. With Tableau, we are now able to build interactive dashboards to present to our management team for them to make better informed decisions.

Greater collaborations across departments

By making key data accessible across the finance and product management team, LIXIL International is now able to share a single source of truth when it comes to sales performance analysis.

Tableau’s user-friendly database means that different departments can use key data more effectively and combine their efforts with greater drive. So far, Tableau has played a key role in several collaborations between the information technology, finance and product management teams.

Meow Leng shared there are plans underway to include the sales team in these collaborations as well.

“The deployment of Tableau is still ongoing in LIXIL International We plan to work with other departments to help them improve their efficiency in their reporting and gain business insights in their functions,” he said.

The deployment of Tableau is still ongoing in LWT Asia. We plan to work with other departments to help them improve their efficiency in their reporting and gain business insights in their functions.