The Erste Group combines data sources & improves understanding


The Erste Group Bank AG is one of the largest financial services providers in Central and Eastern Europe. It supports more than 16.2 million customers in seven countries and employs approximately 46,000 people across its 2,700 branches.

The group's own IT service provider, s IT Solutions was looking for a tool that was easy to learn and would support The Erste Group's end goal—understanding their data.

After introducing Tableau, they found that business users and analysts enjoyed the speed and flexibility of Tableau dashboards. After successfully testing Tableau on a variety of source systems, including SAP HANA and Microsoft OLAP Cubes, s IT Solutions was confident that Tableau was the right tool for the job.

With Tableau, The Erste Group has been able to:

  • Increase understanding across the organization
  • Please internal analysts with a visual, easy-to-use tool
  • Consolidate data from a variety of source systems
  • Achieve the comprehensive provision of the innovative BI solution in all departments and countries

I’ve known the market for about 15 years, and Tableau is the Ferrari among BI tools.

Tableau: Please provide us with your personal details and information about your company.
Richard Reiling, Head of Group Datastore: My name is Richard Reiling. I am the head of Group Datastore and work at s IT Solutions. s IT Solutions is a service provider for Erste Group. Erste Group has about 40,000 employees and around 17 million customers.

Tableau: What is the Tableau solution used for in your company?
Richard:We are currently in the initial phase. We have conducted proof of concepts and will use Tableau mainly for prototyping and larger data-warehousing projects but also in the areas of data quality and project management.

Tableau: What data sources do you use?
Richard: The benefit of Tableau is clearly in the fact that it can be used on all kinds of source systems. We have also tested it on SAP HANA and Microsoft OLAP Cubes. SAS is still pending, but that's the benefit and our reason for using Tableau.

Tableau: How satisfied are your users?
Richard: The customers are very satisfied. The analysts really enjoy working with the tool. It is very visual and easy to use. I'll put it this way: I have known the market for about 15 years, and it's the Ferrari among BI tools.

Tableau: What do users particularly like about Tableau?
Richard: The speed, the easy operation and, above all, the visualizations and dashboard switching.

Tableau: What benefit has the solution brought to your organization?
Richard: The main reason for using Tableau was the fact that we had a large number of document analysts, i.e., business analysts, who mainly created documents. We also have a major data-warehousing project scheduled over the next five to six years, so we urgently needed to train the business analysts in data analysis. Above all, this meant one thing: understanding data. Tableau also makes a very good contribution here. Our hope is that we can also bring the business analysts to the next level in understanding data in the shortest period of time.

Tableau: What is the outlook like for the future?
Richard: In a way, we're building an onion. We are starting small at our Data Warehouse Department. Then, the whole system will be rolled out to the Group Center Functions, which is one departmental level higher. The next layer, of course, is the specialist unit. The layer after that serves to roll out the same thing in Romania, Croatia, Hungary, Czech Republic and so on, as presented by us at a group conference.