Tableau: How are you using Tableau at Shiseido Japan?
Goda: We use Tableau mainly for three purposes. First of all, we’re using it to build dashboards to visualize Key Performance Indicators, such as Watashi Plus sales indices. Secondly, we use it to build dashboards for strategy management. We use dashboards for every sales campaign, to see how successful our strategies are and how close we are to reaching our goals. We publish the information on Tableau Server for members to consult as they wish. And third, we use Tableau for ad-hoc analysis. We use Tableau to deploy data on Treasure Data for a deeper analysis.
Tableau: Which Tableau functions and features do you find most useful?
Goda: Before we installed Tableau, we were using a different reporting tool. But we used it only to send cross-tab reports or for ad-hoc reporting using Excel.
Yoshimoto: I like the fact that we can dig deeper into the data using simple operations, examining it from the perspectives we choose. Before, we mainly used Excel for data analysis, but that took a lot of time. With Tableau’s drag and drop feature, it’s easy to tabulate data, dig deeper into it, and analyze it. Those are great features.
Goda: When sharing reports, users find they can grasp the information very quickly. Thanks to Tableau visualization, they get a good idea of the results of an analysis much faster than by cross-referencing data. I’m hearing that staff are using Tableau-generated reports more effectively than before we had Tableau.
Yoshimoto: Now it’s easy to conduct analysis with our user base. It was a lot harder using the Business Intelligence tools we had previously. For example, Tableau’s Level of Detail expressions make it easy to tabulate the lifetime values of individual users.
Tableau: Tell us about your database environment for Tableau.
Goda: For the Tableau environment, we’ve integrated our in-house primary data with third-party data and site access data, all on the Treasure Data DMP. We connect to the DMP via Tableau to perform data analysis. Tableau installation took a little less than two months. We had a data warehouse before installation, so it was simply a matter of publishing the data from there to Tableau Server. That made the transfer to users relatively smooth. After that, it took a little while to get everything in operation, although getting it functional for use was relatively fast.
Yoshimoto: Treasure Data’s DMP and Tableau have excellent compatibility. We enter a query in Treasure Data, and the result that comes out can be output as is to a Tableau Datasource file. We like the fact that we can tabulate data using Treasure Data and then visualize the results with Tableau, with no hassle at all.