IDBS empowers R&D organisations around the world with self-service embedded analytics from Tableau

IDBS creates powerful digital solutions for biopharma and other industries, helping over 50,000 researchers in 25 countries achieve faster breakthroughs, accelerate innovation, and bring new products to market. The company’s diverse customer list includes 22 of the world’s top 25 global pharmaceutical companies, along with research and development (R&D) driven organisations from sectors including biotechnology, chemicals, and healthcare.

A key part of IDBS’s innovative solutions is Tableau embedded analytics, which empowers scientists and researchers to explore data, interrogate their key findings and uncover hidden insights, all within the same intuitive platform. Here, Alberto Pascual, Director of Data Science and Analytics at IDBS, discusses why the company chose Tableau to power its analytics strategy and the powerful impact it’s having on customers around the world.

R&D plays a pivotal role in nearly every industry around the world, but many organisations continually face the same recurring data challenges, caused by outdated processes and infrastructure, that hamper overall research efficiency.

“A lot of organisations still store research findings in local spreadsheets or disparate data silos, while error prone manual integration and poorly contextualised data creates barriers that significantly slow down time to insight,” says Alberto. “As a result, up to 40 percent of researchers’ time is spent on admin, leaving little time to extract insights. Worse than that, only four percent of data is typically used in most organisations, meaning important findings are almost certainly being missed every day.”

IDBS’s solutions, such as its market leading E-Workbook and new Polar platform, are designed to solve these endemic data challenges. Built on the company’s three core pillars of Workflow, Integration, and Insights, they streamline data collection and R&D processes, helping to bring life-changing new pharmaceuticals to market much faster than previously possible. 

“Solutions like E-WorkBook empower R&D organisations by replacing old processes and disparate spreadsheets with much more efficient ways of working, collaborating and sharing,” adds Alberto. “Not only does it simplify digital data collection in a safe and compliant manner, but it also gives researchers the tools needed to immediately start interrogating their findings, collaborate with others and share key insights for further review.”

Central to this process is Tableau embedded analytics, which IDBS uses to underpin the ‘insights’ pillar of its solution, putting intuitive self-service analytics directly into the hands of researchers.

“A lot of self-service analytics solutions are too complicated to use for people who aren’t data experts themselves, which usually results in low uptake amongst target users,” says Alberto. “We believe that anyone, regardless of expertise, should be able to do advanced analytics, which requires hiding the technology’s complexities and presenting users with a tool that’s simple to use, but also powerful enough to perform complex analysis. Tableau embedded analytics allows us to do just that, facilitating data access, reporting, visualisation, exploration, searches and advanced data interrogation, all in real-time via the same intuitive interface.” 

Tableau’s highly visual nature further enhances its appeal amongst customers, offering a huge variety of dashboards and graphical options to help researchers quickly spot small data anomalies and molecular outliers that could lead to a major scientific breakthrough.

“The business impact is huge, both for us and our customers,” continues Alberto. “Together with Tableau, we can unleash the power of scientific data and create tools which make a direct positive impact on all laboratories using IDBS solutions around the world.”

Another major challenge faced by many research organisations is a lack of data democratisation. Too often, the tools needed to access, view, and interrogate data are restricted to just a handful of individuals within the organisation, making R&D processes long winded and unnecessarily complex.

“Data democratisation is a problem we encounter regularly amongst customers,” comments Alberto. “Access, usage, and the ability to easily share data needs to be as easy and fair as possible, but this is rarely the case.” 

“Fortunately, Tableau can connect to a huge range of different sources, creating a single, unified data platform that the whole organisation can consistently work from,” says Alberto. “Furthermore, the self-service functionality it offers means researchers are no longer reliant on specialist IT teams or data experts to uncover/share meaningful insights. Instead, they can easily do it all themselves.”

When considering which embedded analytics provider to partner with, IDBS evaluated several leading market solutions. However, Tableau quickly emerged as the clear winner for a number of reasons. These included the strength of the platform overall, its emphasis on rich visuals, and the support available from Tableau’s incredible global community.

“We wanted an analytics partner with a great out of the box embedded offering, a large user community and a long-term vision. Tableau ticked all those boxes and more,” notes Alberto. “Tableau embedded analytics significantly simplifies our offering and accelerates our development cycles. Once conceptualised, it took just three months to take the solution to market.

“The global developer community that supports Tableau is also hugely beneficial,” adds Alberto. “Scientific visualisations are complex, but the Tableau community and partner ecosystem provides an extensive support network that IDBS is constantly benefitting from.”

“With the power of Tableau supporting our data science engine, we can bring a new wave of data intelligence to our customers, as well as R&D as a whole, which has been hugely valuable to everyone involved.”