Can Analytics Save $300,000?

Bridgei2i is an analytics solutions and platforms company with offices in the United States and Bengaluru. The firms currently helps clients—including some Fortune 1000 companies—monetize value from data.

Bridgei2i helps customers derive meaningful insights hidden within fragmented data sources. It derives these key insights by using behavioural modelling, personalization, and optimization techniques. The company also uses techniques such as embedding decision engines and driving analytics to deliver impact.

Using Tableau, the company claims that its client was able to reduce report development time by ten days per quarter. It was also able to cut market forecasting investment down to 1/10th of the original amount and save an estimated $300,000 on analyst reports.

100MB of data, no single version of the truth

The strategy team of a global technology company approached Bridgei2i to help improve its market forecasting processes. Historically, the client organization relied on a global team to prepare the overall market forecast. This involved multiple, static reports primarily delivered in Excel spreadsheets and CSV files. And since the insights were not region-specific, each regional team developed its own forecasts as well, using local reports. The lack of a unified view of data across the organization created confusion around the true numbers.

“The client asked us to build a solution using 100MB of data that would deliver a single version of truth for its market share/size forecasting. This information would be used by 900 executives working in roles such as strategy, sales planning, marketing strategy, product management from departments including Global Strategy, Marketing and regional country level Marketing. Because all of these executives would have different questions of the data, the solution would need to allow custom drill-downs at each level of the product/region/business unit,” revealed Sandip Saha, Strategic Marketing Manager at Bridgei2i.

Customized insight—built with Tableau

Bridgei2i has been successful in delivering business solutions in 12+ projects using Tableau. It has deep expertise as well as knowledge of visualization within the organization. The team chose Tableau for this project mainly due to the software’s ease of use and ability to customize reports on a regional/product level as required by different business users.

For this project, Bridgei2i suggested creating a master version of the market forecast report that would deliver intuitive, flexible insight into the data. Executives would be able to drill into the data, answering their specific questions and filtering views by parameters such as region or product line.

A team of 30, including consultants from Bridgei2i, worked on the implementation. The implementation was carried out in two phases each spanning about 45 days.

Bridgei2i accesses data from the client’s web portal from where it can be downloaded in an Excel format. The data sources include Google Analytics, MySQL, Flat files, MS Excel as well as MS Access. The reports are developed and maintained within the client firewall with VPN access and the authentication is completed using Active Directory.

Bridge i2i analyzes roughly 100-500M rows of data that using Tableau. Once the analysis is complete, Bridgei2i uploads the final report on SharePoint in the form of a Tableau packaged workbook. Client executives can then access required information using the Tableau reader. The solution is extremely user-friendly, and works on more than 50 devices and across platforms such as iOS and Android.

Bridgei2i is now closely tracking utilization and working on fine-tuning content for its client.

Increased accuracy and exceptional savings

“We were able to use Tableau’s visual analytics capabilities very well to deliver great market forecasting insights to our client,” said Sandip Saha, Strategic Marketing Manager at Bridgei2i.

The client earlier spent approximately $300,000 per year on various analyst reports specific to each region. With the implementation in place, the investment in the entire market forecasting process has been cut down drastically, to 1/10th of the original amount. And the time taken to produce the market forecasting reports has been cut down by ten days per quarter.

Overall, Bridgei2i’s solution using Tableau has been able to show a drastic improvement in the market share process for its client.