Tableau > Case Studies > Vertex Services Improves Global Understanding with Tableau

Vertex Services Improves Global Understanding with Tableau

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

America
Asia
Europe
Africa
Pacific

Country

United States
Hong Kong
China
Malaysia
United Kingdom

Product

Tableau Desktop
Tableau Server

Tech Stack

Microsoft Excel
SharePoint

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Productivity Improvements
Customer Satisfaction

Technology Category

Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Visualization

Applicable Industries

Consumer Goods
Retail

Applicable Functions

Sales & Marketing
Business Operation

Use Cases

Supply Chain Visibility
Predictive Quality Analytics

Services

Data Science Services

About The Customer

Vertex Services (Vertex) is a worldwide distributor of flooring products with headquarters in Norwalk, CT. The company has key regional offices in Hong Kong, Shanghai, Kuala Lumpur, Seoul, Sao Paulo, Montreal, and London. Vertex manufactures its high-quality flooring products in Asia and distributes its wares throughout North America, Europe, Asia, and South America, Africa, and Australia. The company is using Tableau to improve internal communication, speed time-to-insight and enable more data-driven decision-making across its company. One of its top customers is The Home Depot.

The Challenge

Vertex Services, a global distributor of flooring products, faced challenges in accessing and sharing data stored in disparate sources due to its worldwide operations. The company did not have a centralized data warehouse, but rather diverse, discrete applications located across the globe. Many systems, including accounting and order processing, were duplicated or split between the US and Hong Kong offices. Vertex also operates a number of different portals through which partners share data; data from this partner portal was maintained in its own discrete database. This added time to the decision-making process. Another challenge was that the primary analytics and reporting tool for the company was Microsoft Excel, which did not lend itself to the iterative questioning process that leads to true insight. As a result, often decisions were made based on assumptions or educated guesses.

The Solution

Vertex began its search for a BI solution by looking at the traditional enterprise players. However, they found these solutions to be too complex and expensive. Vertex next considered Microsoft, but quickly realized it would be too difficult to use for most of the Vertex users. Vertex’s IT contractor in Hong Kong suggested that they take a look at Tableau. Lai and his team quickly realized they found their BI solution. Vertex purchased its first Tableau Desktop licenses in June of 2012. Lai’s team is now working to create a data queue for its wholesale order processing system. Today, the Asian offices of Vertex have two consistent Tableau authors; in the U.S., Smith is the primary Tableau author. All authors create packaged workbooks for Vertex leadership, who consume the visualizations using the free Tableau Reader application. They are also beginning to share analytics with some customers, including The Home Depot.

Operational Impact

Vertex is now able to make more data-driven decisions.
Users can focus on their particular areas while also gaining insight into other parts of the business.
The company is now able to have more productive discussions with interactive Tableau dashboards and visualizations.
The ability to drill down to the underlying data allows Vertex to get to the root cause of issues easier and quicker.

Quantitative Benefit

Users are getting answers from days to two weeks faster, depending on the question.
Smith was able to prepare for the yearly manager’s meeting with Home Depot in a fraction of the time it would have taken with Excel.