Gammon Construction Limited

Gammon Construction creates a single source of truth powered by real-time analytics


800 active users across departments

120-page reports converted to one live dashboard

Improved efficiency with customized data for teams

Gammon Construction Limited is a leading construction and engineering contractor from Hong Kong, with a reputation for delivering innovative solutions and services to customers throughout China and Southeast Asia. In 2016, Gammon Construction adopted Tableau as a reporting and data analytics tool, starting with their finance department. Senior Finance Manager Tim Mak shares his company’s journey with Tableau and how they created a single source of truth to improve productivity and decision-making.

We selected Tableau because of its flexible adoption, as well as the community that is available to us.

Flexible adoption with a supportive community

The key factor that made Tableau stand out among other Business Intelligence (BI) tools was its user-friendliness. With no programming involved and intuitive drag-and-drop features, general business users were able to get up to speed with Tableau without a substantial amount of training. Starting with the finance team, Gammon Construction scaled Tableau quickly across multiple departments. Within the first two years of adoption, there are now 800 active users across all major functions within the company, which Tim sees as “a proud achievement” for them.

On top of the software’s ease of use and cost savings on training, Tim also cites Tableau’s supportive community as a reason for choosing it over other BI tools. “If you have any questions, you can post in the community, and they usually respond quickly,” he shared.

Security was an extremely important factor when we implemented Tableau. We wanted to create a single source of data for the whole organization, but at the same time ensure different levels of access.

Single source of data with effective governance

Working with more than 200 data sources, Gammon Construction wanted to create a single source of data which all teams could refer to. However, due to the sensitive nature of certain information, an important concern for them was the ability to customize different levels of dashboard access for different users. On top of safeguarding information, such permission controls also improved productivity by ensuring the right information gets delivered to the right users. Tableau’s data governance capabilities allowed the business to achieve a single source of truth without compromising security.

The value that Tableau has brought to our business is more qualitative than quantitative. Tableau gave our users the focus to make the right decisions – you cannot put a number to that.

Faster speed to insight encourages data-driven decision-making

Speeding up the process of getting information to users was one of the business challenges that Gammon Construction wanted to solve, shared Tim. Before Tableau, month-end reports were the main source of information, and they went up to 120 pages. With these static reports, it was difficult to ensure that the relevant information would reach the intended recipients. Monthly reporting was also slow and inefficient, not to mention the cost and environmental impact of printing at least 2,000 pages of paper per month for every report.

In response to these challenges, the adoption of Tableau helped Gammon Construction do real-time reporting and analytics on a daily basis. Users have quick access to information, helping them make data-driven decisions. For Tim, this business impact is more valuable than any quantitative metric.

“Tableau gave our users the focus to make the right decisions – you cannot put a number to that.”