“In my role in finance, especially with tools like Tableau, I can do that far quicker, cheaper, faster, and in so doing, I get a kick. “My favorite part of my job is sitting at the leadership table and bringing insight to the management group and bringing it in real time-proposing something to “A better CFO, for me, is being a true business partner to the business president,” shares Ian. Ian can convey financial information in an easy-to-consume format, helping leaders make informed, data-driven decisions based on current data. Today, in meetings and day-to-day work, Oldcastle’s leadership team uses Tableau to see a 360-degree view of the business in real time. “Very quickly, I could see that that this was a disruptive technology that's going to take time to embrace, but once it becomes a fabric of the company, is going to change the way that we consume data.” When Ian first trialed Tableau, he knew that it would change the way that the company consumed data and he felt compelled to champion it across the business. But the information that they are receiving from that is much more powerful than having rows and columns of information,” says Paul.Īs Oldcastle’s CFO, Ian describes the role of finance as the “heartbeat of a company.” He says, “It’s connected to sales, it’s connected to logistics, procurement, production, marketing.” They might not even be aware they’re looking at a Tableau dashboard. For a sales team, having access to insights from the vast quantities of customer data is empowering. And then he's able to drill down into: What customers are doing well? What are those customers buying? What are my margins on those items?” says Paul.Įveryone from sales managers to individual sales representatives look to Tableau dashboards to track quotas on a daily and monthly basis. “Now a sales rep can come into a dashboard, look to what he sold yesterday, look to how he's doing this month, look how he's doing year to date.
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Now, by pulling ERP and Salesforce data into Tableau, the sales team always has access to the full picture. But empowering a sales force in a scalable way proved difficult. It’s imperative for the team to quickly and easily identify losses, track margins, and seize potential opportunities across their enterprise. The Oldcastle sales team spearheads an inventory of over 78,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs).
“Whether a gentleman builds it in San Diego or a lady builds the same information in Chicago, they'll be getting the same answer, but at the same time, they can manipulate the data to their specific needs.” And it’s one single source of truth,” says Paul. “We can give them a data set with predefined measures and dimensions, and they can build their own intelligence through the web-authoring tool. Using web authoring, people can use these vizzes as a starting point for their own analysis and share their findings. So Paul, with the help of several analysts, created a library of templates containing vetted data. It was clear people wanted to see the data in their own ways. “We started getting phone calls: ‘Can you add this filter?’ ‘I want to see the data in this fashion,” says Paul. Once people realized they could ask their own questions of the data, the response was almost immediate. It also has row-level security, meaning teams only see data they have permission to view. The dashboard is refreshed every night so the data stays fresh. With Tableau, Paul created a dashboard that provides a digestible overview of Oldcastle’s 206 distinct manufacturing facilities and allows employees to ask follow-up questions. But due to the static nature of PDFs, numbers were often outdated soon after publishing. It showed the most recent sales numbers by divisions, by business line, and by facility.
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When Ian first hired Paul Lisborg, Manager of Business Intelligence at Oldcastle, he tasked his new employee to replace the 45-page PDF that arrived in people’s inboxes every morning. Ian Crabtree, Oldcastle’s CFO of Masonry & Hardscapes, once appropriately equated the size of the company’s monthly report as “the size of a paver you’d put in your backyard.”