Total Economic Impact of Tableau Software

Study cites payback on Tableau of just 13 months; other benefits include increased adoption of BI and reduced report creation time

Tableau Software announced today that an independent study of its customers’ ROI by Forrester Consulting showed a 127% ROI using Tableau’s business intelligence products, an exceptional result.

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Forrester attributes this primarily to a streamlined report publishing process, improved productivity of business intelligence analysts, and reduced report creation times. From their customer interviews Forrester also found, but did not quantify, significant labor productivity improvements, process improvements, and other benefits. Based on its in-depth research, Forrester concluded that “Tableau decreases BI support costs and drives end-user empowerment.” The complete Forrester study, titled “The Total Economic Impact of Tableau Business Intelligence Solution” (November, 2010) is available for download at no cost.

Forrester conducted in-depth interviews with three customers: a national financial-services firm, a major teaching hospital and an online media firm. Forrester documented an ROI of 127% and a 13-month payback period.

Forrester found the following benefits:

• Increased user adoption of business intelligence
• Increased standardized reports by 400%
• Reduced report creation times by 87.5%
• Reduced report distribution, storage and duplication costs and simplified publishing of reports
• Incurred no training costs to adopt Tableau
• Freed up BI analysts to perform higher-value tasks
• Realized process improvements from use of visualization in root-cause analysis

For the other two customers interviewed, Forrester found:

• Reduced report creation time of more than 500%
• Eliminated report maintenance effort
• Avoided $40,000 annual costs of geospatial data feeds by using equivalent Tableau capability
• No incremental effort to distribute reports to more users, resulting in greater user involvement
• A “creative lift” when designing new reports in Tableau
• Stronger alignment between data preparers and consumers

Forrester used its interviews to construct a Total Economic Impact framework to identify the cost, benefit, flexibility and risk factors that affect the investment decision. The study conducted by Forrester Consulting was commissioned by Tableau Software.