Automate Planning and Budgeting through FP&A Tableau Dashboards

Acquired by Salesforce.com in 2019, Tableau is a market-leading, intuitive visual analytics platform empowering people and organizations by transforming how they use data to achieve better business outcomes.

The Challenge

One of the fastest-growing Global Pharmaceutical companies sought to optimize their executive dashboards for the Financial Planning and Analysis (FP&A) department. With data volumes increasing exponentially, the company needed to accelerate the extraction of critical insights from Oracle Hyperion Planning and Essbase cubes—an On-Line Analytic Processing (OLAP) technology consisting of a Multidimensional Database Management System (MDBMS).

The client engaged Stratos Consulting to deliver enterprise-level dashboards to help streamline budget owners’ financial planning and forecast processes across all departments.

How Stratos Consulting Helped

Stratos consultants immediately prioritized the tasks and executed a three phase plan—data layer, visualization, and post-project support—for optimal results.

  • Built data architecture to seamlessly support Tableau dashboards and provide ad-hoc capabilities
  • Developed MDM application to maintain company’s reporting hierarchies within Financial Data Warehouse based on Essbase data sources, along with new hierarchies specific to the FP&A team’s reporting needs
  • Created rich visualizations within Tableau and the framework for self-service analytical reporting
  • Executed a tailored business enablement plan consisting of maintenance, on-boarding and training, and security support for a smooth company-wide deployment

The Result

By normalizing data across five FP&A financial planning applications for Tableau consumption, data processing time was reduced by over 75% from 5 hours to 40 minutes.

Stratos Consulting provided the client with 4 Tableau data models, 25 dashboards, 230 visualizations, and over 1000 custom measures and calculations – and managed to come in 5% under budget.

Schedule a call with us today to discuss how we can enhance your FP&A analytic reporting and data visualizations leveraging Tableau.