Brazil's largest telecom, Oi, speeds decision-making with big data


When we took the first dashboard done in Tableau to the first meeting with the executives, some were so surprised, that the reaction was mostly silence. One of the executives said, 'I always asked for that in the BI area and finally they managed to do it.'

Tableau: What was the reaction when you introduced Tableau?
Raphael Stein, Oi’s Director of Business Intelligence:
When we took the dashboard, the first dashboard done in Tableau to the first meeting with the executives, some were so surprised, that the reaction was more silence. One of the executives said 'I always asked for that in the BI area and finally they managed to do it.'

Tableau: Oi is a huge company. Can we assume you have a lot of data?
Raphael: Oi is the biggest telecommunications company in Brazil, it works with cell phones, landlines, Internet and TV. We have more than 75 million customers.

If we were to put in all the types of transactions and all of the events that we can have with our customers, we would have more than two hundred billion records.

Tableau: And all of your various records—billing, complaints, service requests, marketing promotions—are those stored centrally?
Raphael: That information is totally separate. We have several systems and it’s exactly where the secret is, where Tableau comes in, trying to help us to resolve that merging of information for you to have a really single vision.

Tableau: How does that single view benefit Oi?
Raphael: We began to create that database to have a single view of sales, of shares, net ads, all the behavior in the sales area—and that ended up attracting our executives a lot. Because some meetings we had were only numbers, and they ended up spending more than two hours. Now, with the visual part of Tableau, we have been spending fifteen minutes to go over all of the numbers and we get right to the point where we have problems or opportunities.

Tableau: It sounds like, in addition to gaining a single view of the data, you’re also saving time.
Raphael: Some of the answers, that before took days or weeks to be answered, ended up being answered at the same moment, just clicking, doing a drill-down, doing anything within the tool itself, and our quantity of answers during the meeting increased a lot and then, with that, they went away with the actions to work on until the next meeting.

Tableau: Can you describe the overall benefit of Tableau to Oi?
Stein: I think what Tableau brought to us was a great change in our way of thinking.

Everyone can look at the same results, so that the conflicts within the company diminish. And you publishing the data source within Tableau, you give freedom to people to have self-service BI, but they continue always looking for the same results. So, they can explore— always guaranteeing that the information is always going to be there—with the same results, and the publication of the data source for me is the great secret that Tableau brings to us.

I have been in the market of Business Intelligence for more than thirteen years, and, for me, it’s very satisfying, to now have a team working, motivated, and trying to produce something more, not simply deliver that which was requested.