Big Data technologies are now mature enough to provide case studies of real-life time and cost savings. Here are two of them, which highlight Tableau capabilities and benefits.
Tableau Saves Teacher Time and Attention at Charter Schools
Aspire Public Schools manages a network of 30 charter schools in Oakland, California. Network teachers and administrators focus on providing excellent education opportunities for 10,000 students in traditionally underserved neighborhoods.
Many Aspire students come into the network years behind in school. The problem: teachers had more work than time to do it. Responsibilities that distracted teachers from providing students with instruction and guidance was the main culprit. Aspire’s senior manager wanted to provide teachers with better data that would make the most of their hard work and experience.
More Time for Instruction and Guidance
The Tableau Server user base included about 1,200 Aspire employees. About 600 of them were teachers, and another 120 were administrators. The network data assessment team wanted to use Tableau to get new insights into student achievement and network operations. Their goals:
- Spend less time discovering, preparing and analyzing data.
- Improve reporting from the network’s 20 operational groups.
- Actively integrate data from 20 groups.
- Create visualizations around student achievement and attendance data.
Setting up Tableau Server with a single-point data repository and visualization capabilities for 20 reporting groups created few if any deployment problems. Because Aspire employees were experienced users of IT tools, the transition was smooth. When users started working with Tableau, they didn’t get intimidated or frustrated. The Tableau platform provided the Aspire network with:
- Faster results. Data requests are answered in 48-hours instead of two, three or four weeks.
- More time to help students succeed. Teachers drastically reduced the 0.5 to 3.0 hours each spent each week analyzing data. Now they spend more time gaining insights on what they should do in the classroom.
- Flexible IT tools that work with existing technology. Users combined Tableau with relational SQL databases and cubes, some of which were several million row in size.
That’s how Aspire’s new Tableau system transferred teacher time from analysis to teaching duties, where it belongs.
Stepping Up to the Plate: More Efficient Operations with the Texas Rangers
Major League Baseball’s Texas Rangers are based outside Dallas, where the southern prairie of the American West begins. Long a fixture of the American League, the team’s baseball players and the club’s support teams work hard to help the team prosper.
The back-office ladies and gents started using Tableau to meet these goals and optimize their business results. But they had a serious problem: badly siloed information.
The staff’s fragmented data made it impossible to make better decisions because they didn’t have a complete view of their fans. And outdated tools made analysis—a constant story of dueling spreadsheets—a painful, drawn-out process. Business users in each department took data from their own archive and their made own version of what they wanted to see.
The team formed an analytics task force, which transformed specialized, hard-to-access data into an asset that their business users can interact with. Their goal: make all their data resources easy to discover and use
Previously, the team had many data sources. But after task force members started using data from Tableau’s centralized data repository, they could find and use data more easily. Dueling spreadsheets were a thing of the past. And Tableau visualizations provided more insightful, actionable information much more quickly than was possible with their old tool set.
With real-time analytics, cost control opportunities came from unexpected places. For example, same-day ticket sales information on customized Tableau dashboards made it plain that a severe rain delay put a serious dent in walk-up ticket sales—not a ticket sold in 15 minutes. When the team decided to close 75 percent of their ticket windows, they put a serious dent in that day’s operating costs.
The result: Tableau’s centralized data, interactive dashboards and advanced visualization helped task force members discover ways to run the team more efficiently.
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