Self-Service Business Intelligence

By Ellie Fields

RBC Wealth Management’s Shawn Spott tells how RBC has improved efficiency through self-service dashboards.

RBC Wealth Management is now using Tableau desktop and server services to deliver KPI and trend information to business lines, sales development, and marketing groups. RBC leverages dashboards, tactical reporting, and direct data access while providing over 80 users, from executives to line managers to field salespeople, with decision support information. The platform spans the entire retail database, integrating multiple data sources with a total reach of about 1.25TB.

"I had spent 15 years in BI and I banged my head against the wall repeatedly trying to convey information to people through sheer volume. I came to the conclusion that providing people with lots of data was pointless. They couldn't consume it, digest it, synthesize it," said Shawn.

Shawn's team partnered with IT to design a pilot program on Tableau. "We created a suite of a dozen reports and took it out to the field. It had an amazingly positive response from the users." Shawn's team was also impressed with the speed of the pilot rollout. "In August we had an idea to implement Tableau Server - by the end of September we were live in production and users were already asking for more."

Efficiency

The workload of Shawn's team to support the field dropped dramatically because Tableau allows users a self-service model to get information.  "The efficiency of my group has gone through the roof. I've got more clients than we've ever had, I've got more reports and we're still doing new development. Because Tableau Server provides us with the self-service model, we're able to continue to keep projects moving through the pipeline. The maintenance impact is so small, we just load and go. We spend three weeks of the month solving new problems and doing new development. It's been off-the-charts successful."

Shawn continues, "After the pilot we realized there was no reason to look beyond Tableau for our distribution portal." What started as a plan to support 40 primary users has already expanded two-fold, with 80 current users. With even more expansion coming, RBC Wealth Management has increased the Tableau platform with the addition of the core license product. "We're serving groups we never thought we would serve."

With the flexibility of the platform, a wide range of specific topics can be bundled in workbooks and projects. This allows multi-dimensional access with the specificity and relevance needed by the users.

Expectations

Shawn believes that Tableau Server will continue to grow in value for RBC Wealth Management. "Given where I see this going, I'd expect we'll be between 200 and 300 users by this time next year. It's a grassroots effort that is putting successful BI in groups where historically BI was not readily available. Everyone who sees it, wants it."

Shawn is also expecting to save real dollars with the Tableau implementation. One area of savings will come from migrating to Tableau for mapping. "We're migrating all our geospatial analysis and mapping to Tableau," he says. "I'm saving in the region of $100k over the next three years by migrating our mapping services."

For RBC Wealth Management, Tableau is a way to deliver business-critical information to users while giving users the ability to slice and dice data to answer their own questions, all with self-service BI.

About the author

Ellie Fields is the Director of Product Marketing at Tableau Software. Prior to working at Tableau, she worked in industry strategy and product management at Microsoft Dynamics. Fields is a graduate of Rice University and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.