PepsiCo cuts analysis time by 90% with Tableau + Trifacta
Consumers enjoy PepsiCo products one billion times a day in more than 200 countries and regions throughout the world. To understand data from retail customers, PepsiCo adopted Tableau and reduced report production time by 90%. Using Trifacta, the CPFR team disputed the different data, pulling it to Tableau for estimates and analysis - reducing the time to end of the PepsiCo analysis process by 70% and reporting production time by 90%. With faster, more accurate reporting, PepsiCo has a competitive advantage in the retail space and provides customers with best-in-class service.Searching for a single source of truth
PepsiCo customers give them reports that include warehouse inventory, store inventory, and point of sale inventory. PepsiCo reconciles this data with their own shipping history, production figures, and forecast data. Each customer has their own data standards, which are not interconnected (let alone the PepsiCo system). For example, PepsiCo relies on UPC codes to identify each product, while customers create their own internal numbers.Dealing with this data problem is a challenge and the report can take months to produce. Analysts know that their ability to quickly standardize data at all retailers - and speak the same language as their customers - is very important to prepare data faster for their estimation and planning efforts.
Poking around the sales forecast is fast enough for management to direct the course of the sale is another challenge. Each new report requires CPFR team analysts to create a tool in Microsoft Access that combines retailer sales data and PepsiCo inventory data; a process that can take up to six months.
The team mainly relied on Excel for analysis, making large amounts of messy data. And the team does not have an efficient way to find errors, which leads to potentially expensive results. For example, products missing from a report can lead to inaccurate estimates and lost revenue.
The CPFR team needs a way to handle large amounts of different data. At the same time, the team needs a visual analysis tool that can help them maximize PepsiCo data.
Find the right solution for better data
To bring coherence to the data, PepsiCo turned to Tableau partner, Trifacta.For greater efficiency and scale, PepsiCo applies Hortonworks Hadoop as a landing and staging environment for this diverse data. Now the report runs directly on Hadoop, without involving a few steps with the Access and PepsiCo servers. This process allows the analyst to directly manipulate data using Trifacta.
Tableau gives PepsiCo the final step: powerful analysis and visualization, helping businesses understand the volume of data. PepsiCo analysts share Tableau workbooks that are relevant to management on Tableau Server.
Strong results with Trifacta + Tableau
The combined use of Tableau and Trifacta helps the CPFR team advance the business, increasing visibility into customer orders. The ability of Trifacta's visual profile and Tableau's advanced visual analysis allow the team to easily identify gaps and overcome larger problems.Trifacta integrates natively with Tableau Data Extracts (TDE), allowing PepsiCo analysts to transition seamlessly between the two technologies. PepsiCo brings Tableau data extracts to Tableau Desktop, enabling them to maintain performance on big data.
The combination of the strength of the Trifacta data dispute and the analytical depth of Tableau enables PepsiCo to streamline the process. This dramatically reduces the time spent on data preparation and improves overall data quality. Normalized data in Trifacta helps capture errors and deficiencies in the data. And with Tableau, PepsiCo can easily find outlaws and take action. If problems arise, they can correct errors before causing bigger problems downstream.
Conducting data analysis with Tableau using Trifacta normalized data has reduced the run-to-end time of PepsiCo analysis by as much as 70%. The ability to reproduce patterns makes building CPFR tools a more efficient and automatic process.
PepsiCo now spends less time preparing data, and more time finding insights. Mike Riegling, Supply Chain Data Analyst at PepsiCo, said, "Now we don't take the time to combine data; we spend time analyzing data, telling stories, and finding problems."
Building these reports in Tableau reduced production time by 90%, and the visualization used up to six months to build is now ready in one day.
Analysts refine data to answer questions, see trends, and plan for future demand - saving the company money. The IT department publishes TDE to Tableau Server, encourages collaboration between teams - and enables self-service analytics on a large scale.
Gaining insight from customer data faster than ever before has improved the PepsiCo process to offer its customers best-in-class service. This also gives PepsiCo a huge competitive advantage compared to other CPG businesses.
PepsiCo can now predict trends, adjust sales, and ultimately sell more of the right products to increase their profits. Riegling commented, "We can change customer data and present it to our entire company, in a way that everyone can understand, faster than our competitors." Sources: https://www.tableau.com/