DT One Drives Operational Excellence with Tableau
100% of the business equipped with data skills and using Tableau on a regular basis
Increased efficiency resulting from centralized data platform and self-service analytics
Deeper business intelligence insights have helped DT One respond swiftly to market changes and make more effective business recommendations to customers
DT One (previously TransferTo) is the world’s largest network of non-cash micropayments and digital pre-pay partners, operating across more than 160 countries with more than 1,800 partners in the ecosystem.
The company was founded in 2005 to provide mobile carriers with the infrastructure and services they need to help migrant workers stay in touch with their family and friends back home. Today, DT One provides access to digital communications for more than five billion people across emerging economies, with a mission to leave no one unconnected and enable active participation in the global economy.
Underpinning these goals, DT One is on a journey towards operational excellence that includes transforming how it consumes data. Leveraging Tableau, DT One has retired all legacy analytics tools and created a single source of data and insight.
Single source of truth leads to increased efficiency
DT One has always been data-driven. Its challenge was the inefficiency of extracting insight from its vast amount of data.
“We have a large database of transactional information that previously consumed data from multiple sources, and there were a lot of constraints around the filtering, extracting, and presentation of that data,” said Nidhi Damania, Head of FP&A and BI at DT One.
DT One wanted a better and easier way to analyze data, including network traffic, customer transactions, and financial metrics. Tableau stood out from the competition due to its range of features and ease of implementation. The Tableau team also provided valuable advice on how DT ONE could accelerate its business intelligence capabilities.
The rollout of Tableau started with the creation of a single dashboard for the sales team to monitor business performance. This was followed by training and the introduction of more dashboards as DT ONE set to work building a centralized data platform that allows Tableau to consume data from PostgreSQL, AWS Athena, AWS Redshift, and spreadsheets. This has provided DT One with a single source of truth across its entire operations. It has also significantly increased efficiency, enabling the FP&A and BI team to spend time adding true value to the business rather than just churning out reports.
Tableau has become the go-to and must-have resource for our employees when they need data and insight. This has immensely improved our internal efficiencies and created substantial enterprise value by unlocking real business intelligence.
New performance insights to unlock business potential
DT One decommissioned its legacy analytics tools nearly one year after deploying Tableau. This served as a catalyst to boost adoption and DT One now has over 100 dashboards, ranging from periodic performance reports to specific topic analysis. There are also daily reports sent to over 50% of employees.
These include employees across sales, marketing, and finance and senior management who use Tableau to understand performance and uncover trends in market and customer behavior. For example, the company’s C-level executives— including CFO and CRO — start their day by opening up Tableau to inform priorities and decisions.
Putting these analytics capabilities into the hands of non-technical employees has increased sharing and visibility of business data and led to greater agility and coordination across business groups. In addition, sales reps can see at a glance how their numbers are tracking, with data pulled and blended dynamically from multiple sources.
These outcomes would not be possible if not for the efforts of a very lean and efficient BI team which has layered Tableau and other data-consuming infrastructure on top of the internally built centralized data platform.
Tableau has been instrumental in aligning the commercial and financial view of our performance, and in building a single source of truth for all. It is important for us to track and monitor our business in a timely and accurate manner and we now have easy-to-access dashboards that allow us to do that. It helps us resolve issues faster so we can improve our service and allows us to be sensitive to customer and market needs. We can also combine our data with external marketing data to unlock business potential.