The market for data visualization tools is increasingly competitive and dynamic. With a wide array of attractive and evolving options, many of our clients are seeking guidance in identifying and adopting the right tool for them. We assisted Imperial Brands in such an evaluation, focusing on a number of use cases to select a product that empowers business users to leverage data insights for effective decision making.
The Vision
Analysts in different teams within Imperial Brands were trialling a variety of tools to help them analyze and gain insight into their business. Their vision was to roll out an advanced data visualization capability for use by all of their analysts. Imperial Brands was keen to get a full and independent view of the options and their potential value to the business.
Realizing the Vision
Thorogood designed and facilitated a workshop with a number of business analysts from across the business to compare the capabilities of three shortlisted products: Tableau, Microsoft Power BI and SAP Lumira. Thorogood prepared demonstrations focused on realistic use cases that enabled the business users to assess the merits of each technology.
Criteria were defined to guide the evaluation of the tools, including: ease of use, data source connectivity, visualization capability and “attractiveness”, forecasting, collaboration, deployment methodology, scalability and licensing.
Next Steps
The workshop provided some extremely interesting insights. As a result, Imperial Brands decided to run a pilot in collaboration with Thorogood to measure the cost benefits of introducing an additional tool.
