Cargill brings data transparency to a global business


Cargill operates globally in markets such as agriculture, energy, farm services, and more. At its core, Cargill is a trading business with a focus on data analytics. With help from Tableau, data drives strategy. For example, Cargill Metals' trading teams can analyze supply and demand data, and the finance team can easily explore cost and expense data. Tableau dashboards allow them to present complex analyses in an easy-to-digest format. Today, Cargill uses Tableau to maintain a single source of truth—increasing transparency. As a result, more business users engage with data on a daily basis.


Tableau: What would you say to someone considering using Tableau? Heng Hau Lee, Strategy Reporting & Execution Advisor, Cargill: I think if you truly want to promote a data-driven culture, this is the right tool for you. And I think what differentiates Tableau from other BI tool is the fact that you can actually very very quickly and easily extract that data, analyze it, and present to the management.

I think Tableau drives a lot of engagement in the business because data is now more interactive and visually appealing for anyone looking at the data.

Tableau: How has Tableau impacted Cargill? Heng Hau Lee: Tableau has been instrumental in leveraging multiple sources of data and presenting to the leadership team in understanding how the strategy is working for Cargill. As a trading business, our core competency is actually data analytics. So it's actually in our interest to check out the latest trend in data analytics. So that's why we selected Tableau. Tableau: Has Tableau influenced your strategic initiatives? Heng Hau Lee: So I think the advantage of Tableau in analyzing our strategy is the ability to integrate multiple sources of data. You know, because in strategy, you actually need to look at in various aspect of the business. For example, the trading teams look at a lot of the supply & demand data on a daily basis using the Tableau dashboard. And for the finance side, we have a lot of the cost analysis using Tableau as well. We look at the T&E expenses on the monthly basis. And then with the Tableau interactive features, we can actually drill down into our T&E expenses just by clicking on the graph. Tableau: What is the overall impact? Heng Hau Lee: So the impact is more transparency, more control. It definitely provides the single source of truth because of this ability to integrate multiple sources of data. And other than that, I think you can also drive a lot of engagement in the business because data is now more interactive and visually appealing for anyone looking at the data. Tableau: Can you give an example of a data source that you analyze in Tableau? Heng Hau Lee: We connect Tableau to Salesforce.com. The benefit of using Tableau is that we are able to integrate that with Salesforce.com and that is a key component of our marketing strategy.