Time Spent on Reporting Drops from 30% to 5% for Pearson

Martin Keiser and the Human Resources department at Pearson, one of the world’s leading education companies, use Tableau to make sure their workforce is meeting or exceeding industry standards. “We train over 30,000 people via e-learning” on critical subjects like plant safety and data security, said Keiser. On a recommendation, he tried Tableau. Now they use Tableau Server to monitor, measure and share training metrics.

As the world's largest educational publisher, Pearson prints textbooks, workbooks, and other materials for the K-12, higher education, and professional markets. Martin’s People Development team in HR is responsible for keeping track of corporate training programs. For example, Pearson uses Tableau to monitor what percent of people have taken the mandatory training by business area and location.

Easy to use; easy to see trends

Martin used Tableau Desktop first and was immediately impressed with its ease of use. “It's very easy to create reports." Before Tableau, he used Access and would distribute Excel tables. It wasn’t easy for Martin and his colleagues to see trends and outliers in that format. The switch from crude Access and Excel reports to Tableau visualizations was well-received by Martin’s colleagues.

Pearson gained important insights from their switch to Tableau by seeing the trend toward usage of online classes, as well as by observing how much training people are getting on average versus industry standards.

Saves time in creating and distributing reports

Pearson HR bought Tableau Server so they could share the reports Martin was creating in Tableau Desktop. "The reason was the amount of time it took to prepare reports and distribute them around the company. It was taking quite a bit of my time- close to 30% at one point. It’s closer to 5% now."

Colleagues can ask their own questions

Now Pearson HR uses Tableau Server with a MySQL database. Through Tableau Server, colleagues at Pearson go look at the reports and can interact with the data to answer specific questions."The fact that they can filter and drill down, they appreciate that,“ said Martin. At Pearson a dozen HR managers or more are on Tableau Server regularly, making sure that Pearson’s workforce is well-trained.

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