Tableau Reveals Key Opportunities in Sales Performance Data

Customer Profile

First American Corporation (FAF:NYSE) is the nation’s leading provider of business information. Founded in 1889, First American continues its service commitment by providing the information businesses need to make timely, accurate decisions. Backed by industry leading technology, First American delivers efficiency to support clients’ information needs. First American Real Estate Solutions is the nation’s largest and most comprehensive source for property and ownership information.

Customer Case Description

The Operations Department is responsible for collecting, shaping, and analyzing sales performance data across all segments, products, and geographies. Excel pivot tables were in use, but they were slow, inflexible, and difficult for people to learn. Also, the graphics being generated from Excel didn’t effectively communicate the critical insights to executive management.

The primary challenge was to find and implement an analysis application that supported First American’s wide-ranging requirements. Specifically, the Operations Department was charged with:

• Reporting monthly sales performance trends to senior managers categorized by channel, market segment, and product mix.
• Analyzing price points by product then recommending pricing strategies that would positively impact revenue and simplify current customer pricing plans.
• Investigating dozens of sources of marketing, customer, and financial data to drive strategic initiatives and uncover trends and themes previously not known.

In order to meet these objectives, the application had to be able to:

• Connect to hundreds of thousands of records every month from 4-5 separate production systems via Excel exports and Access.
• Allow data be "sliced" by many attributes (e.g. regions, products, partners, etc.) and be especially flexible when investigations required multiple time dimensions.
• Deploy easily, enable multiple analysis cycles very quickly, and provide flexible visual displays.

The Solution

First American selected Tableau Professional. Tableau’s visual analysis enables First American’s Operations Department to find important trends, relationships, and outliers in large quantities of data quickly and effectively. This leads to improved insight into product pricing and usage and, ultimately, drives better decision making.

For More Information About This Case

Contact: visualanalysis@tableausoftware.com or call (206) 633-3400x1