E-commerce group, MALL Group, drives profitability with Tableau
Improved product profitability tracking based on daily reports
Transition to a data-driven company enabled more strategic decision-making
In a year, 550 users have embraced the data culture - created more than 6,000 reports that score over 2,500 views per day
This story was produced by our partner, Revolt.BI. The original version in Czech can be found here.
MALL Group is the largest e-commerce group in Central and Eastern Europe, which includes dozens of online stores and services. To succeed in a highly competitive environment, it needed to transform itself into a fully data-driven organization. Tableau's visualization analytics platform played an important role in this respect, helping to achieve perfect visibility of the entire sales process and gain insight into the performance of marketing, purchasing, and other departments. MALL Group is able to extract valuable insights from its data to successfully manage all these areas.
Understanding what the data says
MALL Group needed to gain insight into product profitability and generally streamline the way they worked with data, democratizing it so that it could be used by everyone whom it might be helpful, and provide recipients with useful inputs for decision making. The aim was therefore to introduce a functioning data culture within the group. To foster its smooth adoption and to enable the easiest possible extraction of valuable insights from data, it is essential to enable data visualization. MALL Group therefore decided to implement Tableau analytics platform to interpret its data.
The primary task was to make respective profitability analyses of 300,000 products accessible and more transparent. For this, dozens of basic reports were created in Tableau in collaboration with Revolt BI, which enabled MALL Group member companies and their departments to track product profitability in great detail. Every morning - and sometimes more frequently - they receive granular reports on orders processed, with views from different angles and in different contexts. For instance, the sales department is interested in margins, marketing in campaign cost allocation, warehousing and operations in warehouse, transport, and supplier bonus costs. At the same time, the entire funnel is now visible in a single report. Performance teams also know exactly what is happening and can determine the impact of current activities in real time.
“More intensive work with data and analytics has given us a detailed view of the profitability of individual products, which is a key aspect for e-commerce," says Andy Werner, Head of BI, Mall Group. "This allows us to optimize the product mix, manage pricing and streamline marketing activities. Heeding our data to a greater extent enables us to respond to market demands faster and more effectively.”
Overall, Tableau has provided a better understanding of the data, showed where to allocate resources more effectively, and enabled better data-driven decisions. Being user oriented, Tableau is available to anyone to easily analyze data without involving the analytics department. This change means more agile management for the MALL Group and, as a result, a path to becoming one of the most successful data-driven companies.
With Tableau, sales teams get the data they need to make better pricing decisions, and marketing teams can create more effective and better targeted campaigns at significantly lower costs. As a result, the transition to a data-driven company allows us to be more flexible and strategic in our decision-making and operations.
Adopting a data culture is the key to success
Change management, or the adoption of a new way of doing things, constitutes an important part of any project aimed at helping a business leverage its data. Without a data culture in place, even the best tool would not deliver the desired results. That is why MALL Group has created a comprehensive training program to make sure that all employees who are expected to use data for their work understand what the data mean and are able to extract insights. The program included a series of training sessions, educational videos and, for those interested, an introduction to more advanced Tableau features. A so-called data champion was appointed in each department to advise and assist the others with learning, analysis, and report creation. Everyone can become an analyst on their own and prepare simple custom reports. As a result, analysts are not overwhelmed with a multitude of minor requests from users and can focus on strategic analytical goals and innovations instead. The result is a true adoption of a data culture. This has been witnessed by an increase in the number of users from 200 to 550 in a single year, over 6,000 reports created to date, and 2,500 daily views of data. This change has also contributed to the success that the MALL Group is now experiencing.
“With Tableau, sales teams get the data they need to make better pricing decisions, and marketing teams can create more effective and better targeted campaigns at significantly lower costs," says Andy. "As a result, the transition to a data-driven company allows us to be more flexible and strategic in our decision-making and operations.”