Biotechnology company, Novozymes empowers sales teams with mobile dashboards & cuts reporting time by 90%

Novozymes is a leading global biotechnology company headquartered in Bagsværd, just outside of Copenhagen, Denmark. The company applies industrial biological solutions to challenge and complement traditional thinking in manufacturing processes and applications.

Tableau has revolutionized Novozymes’ approach to data analysis and collaboration. In addition to cutting reporting times by more than 90%, adopting Tableau has led to faster, more strategic decision making within departments like sales, global planning, and finance. With Tableau Mobile, Novozymes’ sales force share key insights with customers, building relationships and driving revenue.

Before Tableau, Novozymes’ analysis occurred in Excel spreadsheets, extracting data out of their SAP BW environment. This static reporting led to long development times—from one month, up to a full year—for new business reports.

“By the time the reports were rolled out to the organization, many employees didn’t trust the data they were looking at,” says Henrik Ferdinand, Head of Novozymes’ Business Intelligence Competence Center.

With Tableau, Novozymes democratized the data. Today, business users and developers all create dashboards in Tableau instead of IT developing reports for the entire organization—reducing reporting times by up to 11 months. Now, IT can focus on more strategic tasks, while users are empowered to dig into their own data.

Within six months, Novozymes rolled out Tableau Server access to 600 users within 6 months—about 10 percent of the company. Departments like global planning, customer service and logistics, finance, and commercial support use Tableau to track key performance indicators. Even the business intelligence teams use Tableau to measure Tableau Server performance and usage metrics.

“We chose Tableau because we could see a new market for visualizing data and Tableau allowed us to do this in much more intuitive ways,” says Henrik. “Now we can reach out to our end users with information much faster and they can even create and share dashboards of their own.”

To empower the sales team, the business intelligence team created opportunity dashboards—an entirely new resource for the organization. They pull data directly from SAP BW and their CRM system into Tableau for analysis. With dashboards shared over Tableau Server, account managers can see how their accounts compare to others and discover new opportunities. They can also identify previously lost opportunities to reengage customers—resulting in potential revenue that would have been lost using the old BI processes.

Novozymes’ sales team uses Tableau Mobile to share data directly to customers when out on the road. This has opened up new avenues of dialogue with key customers and helped build stronger customer relationships.

“Tableau Mobile makes sharing information so much more flexible and our customers love it,” says Henrik. “Now our account managers can use tablets to provide key insights there and then, instead of having to huddle around a desktop back in the office.”

Tableau Mobile also allows account managers to access data directly from the field via a smartphone or tablet, improving business agility and cutting down on time wasted in between customer meetings.

“As a sales tool, Tableau Mobile provides greater flexibility than ever before,” explains Henrik. “Access to advanced analytics, no matter where you are, means you’ve always got the answer when a customer needs it.”

Over the next two years, Henrik and his team plan to expand the Tableau user base to over 2,000 users, consisting of both employees and Novozymes customers.

“Tableau has given us a new energy for reporting and analyzing information,” says Henrik. “It’s given us a more united, better user community in Novozymes.”

“Now we can be much more dynamic as a company,” concludes Henrik. “We can react quickly to new business trends and ensure we always stay one step ahead.”