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.”