FP&A Committed Spend Reporting: From Excel to Tableau

In the business world, time is money which is why time-consuming processes and procedures typically become cost-prohibitive unless they’re able to be streamlined through technology and other methods.

The Challenge

A long-standing Global Pharmaceutical company’s financial planning & analysis (FP&A) department’s process for creating visuals in Microsoft Excel and consolidating committed spend data with actual/forecast scenarios was highly prone to data mapping errors. As the company’s successful Tableau engagement partner for more than a year, Stratos Consulting’s team of integration experts was chosen to spearhead the new project to provide the FP&A team access to the Committed Spend data set via Tableau dashboards.

How Stratos Consulting Helped

Stratos Consulting was engaged to address the ineffective workflow and replace Excel reports for Committed Spend visualizations with Tableau.

  • Created a Committed Spend data source in Tableau
  • Integrated the Committed Spend data with Financial Data Warehouse (FDW)
  • Consolidated data to streamline reporting in Tableau
  • Established documentation and facilitated workshops for building Committed Spend visualizations and dashboards in Tableau

“Stratos provides a level of support and knowledge that has been key to successfully implementing our platform. In addition to providing us with overall guidance, they’ve assisted us with best practice formatting and visual options for our dashboard.” — Manager, FP&A

The Result

The new and improved processes the Pharmaceutical company’s FP&A team has through Tableau saves them hours of manual effort every month, ensures accurate data mapping, and provides enhanced visualizations that make it easier for them to communicate and share information with the rest of the organization.

Learn more about Stratos Consulting’s Data and Analytics expertise and implementation services, or contact us to discuss how you can enhance your FP&A reporting and visualizations with Tableau.