STRATEGY | CASE STUDY

Enable the Tableau Enterprise

COMPANY OVERVIEW

The largest equipment rental company in North America, with about 11% of the region’s market share, the largest rental fleet in the world, and almost 1,000 locations across the US and Canada.

BUSINESS NEED

The client had recently implemented Tableau to support a move toward more visual, actionable analytics. Their objective was to enable a distributed development approach, however they were struggling with a lack of consistency in the performance, overall quality, and visual design of prototype dashboards built by different teams and needed a way to provide common standards so that successful prototypes could more quickly go through an operationalization process for wider distribution.

SOLUTION

Ironside was engaged in the following phases to assess a sample of the existing prototypes, advise on data modeling, dashboard development, and visual design best practices, and work with the client team to implement a common set of standards for Tableau authors and those supporting them.

Assess Current State

Assess current development practices in order to identify opportunities as well as other standards that should be considered
Conduct an initial analysis of current dashboard design and distribution standards and processes in order to identify risks or complexities when scaling and make recommendations to mitigate those risks, particularly related to design issues and the current use of a Web Portal

Make Recommendations & Standards

Capture and implement recommendations to optimize performance, ensure efficient workbook design, and establish best practices for Tableau Server content distribution
Assess the current styling and visual practices being used and recommend a set of visual and user experience guidelines to use as standards to provide a consistent user experience as Tableau development capabilities scale

Demonstrate Value

Apply newly defined efficiency, data structure, distribution, and visual standards to a set of strategic dashboards and deploy to the stakeholder community

Scale Value

Iteratively introduce the standards to new teams, refine as new scenarios arise, and deploy additional content
Scale out the development standards in conjunction with an Experience Design based discovery and requirements gathering approach to 3 additional dashboard initiatives

KEYS TO SUCCESS

Through the Tableau Enterprise Enablement initiative, the client achieved the following benefits:

Released a set of strategic pilot dashboards enabling rapid, actionable insight
Deployed solutions with high user satisfaction and adoption through a collaborative and iterative discovery and design approach

Ability to scale the success and value of initial prototypes to other solutions
Gained efficiency through aligning data modeling, dashboard development, and visual standards across the organization

About Tableau

Tableau Software helps people see and understand data. Used by more than 19,000 companies and organizations worldwide, Tableau delivers fast analytics, visualization, and rapid-fire business intelligence and helps you drive data discovery with stunning, intuitive visualizations. Tableau has a diverse range of platform types and deployment approaches. Whether you just need a simple, compact desktop app or an enterprise-grade on-prem or cloud environment, Tableau can size itself to fit your organizational goals and needs.

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