Use Tableau for your operations? You may want to reconsider!

Times have changed, and we have emerged from a decade marked by the development of dynamic, user-friendly, and responsive applications across marketing, sales, productivity and many more. This has resulted in a paradigm shift in how we look at software products. They are now regarded as an essential part of our lives, something we cannot live without, in the same way, that smartphones are.

But what if we told you that this revolution hasn’t reached today’s Ops teams?

Rethinking operations in today’s landscape

Every day something breaks in operations and no two days in this chaotic world are the same. The business teams responsible for making operations work have to constantly firefight and often end up feeling completely out of control.

No wonder everyone is searching for ways to make this complex interconnected network of users, fleet on the ground and partners run smoothly. Given that this complex network gets stressed or even breaks every other day, it is important to not just have a tool that can give you insight, but also preempt what could possibly go wrong.

The platform should be a holistic and intuitive interface, that can tell you:

• What happened and where did it happen?
• Why did it happen and what actions need to be taken?
• What is likely to happen at what time and where?
• How to make decisions based on different trends and patterns?

A world with massive operational volatility necessitates continuous course corrections. Does a platform like that exist?

Well, more on that in a moment, but first, let’s take a look at what’s currently in use. A lot of different tools, from Looker to Power BI to other tools have been hacked together by the internal teams. But today we will focus on Tableau!

We are big fans of Tableau at Locale!

Yes, you read that right. One of the most common tools used by today’s Ops teams is Tableau. It makes sense right? It is the best data viz tool out there, and if you need insights then using Tableau might just be your best bet. As a general-purpose data visualisation and analytics, no tool comes close to what Tableau offers.

But that’s where we get it wrong. As mentioned earlier, Ops is a very complex puzzle with many moving parts. And analysis and visualisations are just one part of it.

Tableau was NOT built to handle the requirements of running an Ops team and all its moving parts, let alone excel with the execution of them. It has some of the functions, but it is siloed and bolted down.

And getting insights is not even half the battle won, the real win of the analysis is to arrive at tangible conclusions, involve different members of the teams (collaborate), make a decision and measure their impact.

Tableau doesn’t have the answers to these questions today. So the Ops teams ended up relying on a number of other tools and an army of engineers and analysts to help them painstakingly finish the jigsaw puzzle of Ops. Therefore, in order to hit their goals in long term and put off fires in the short term, ops teams need a system like Locale.ai where they can get answers in one go without any effort or dependencies

Still not convinced? Well here are 5 reasons you should reconsider

Data processing capabilities and geospatial visualisation

While Tableau provides geospatial visualisation, its capabilities are strictly limited and it provides no actionable insights. In addition to that, in order to get started with Tableau, requires an extra step involving Tableau data prep to combine, shape and clean the data.

Hence, leveraging a built-for-purpose platform that pulls all this data together and gives succinct and actionable results to focus on makes the lives of Ops teams a lot easier. On Locale, we model these insights in an interactive way such that users can proactively act on their problematic areas while seamlessly collaborating across different teams.

We achieve this by:

• Providing unique features like metric templates (create metrics without any code by connecting to many (unstructured) internal and external data sources), actionable visualisations consoles, alerts (setting triggers and taking actions) and cohorts.
• Deploying custom transformations while setting up data pipelines for cleaning and faster processing of data on the tool. Since the data pipelines feed data directly into Locale, the geospatial visualisations are super fast.
• Scaling our data processing capabilities as your organization grows and the ability to hand TBs of data points.

This makes Locale superior in terms of geo-spatial visualisations and data processing capabilities any day hence it comes in handy for operations users without any dependency on analysts or engineers!

RCA on Tableau can be extremely tedious and time-intensive as it involves a series of actions. In order to figure out “why something went wrong”, we need additional dashboards which means additional metrics which means additional analyst bandwidth each time we need to do the root cause analysis. Every single question that you need to answer requires additional dashboards, metrics and time.

Operations teams are constantly trying to fix supply-demand gaps on the ground. Use cases like rebalancing, utilisation, analysing trip patterns, sending the right incentives, capacity planning, analysing fleet performance and so on are very complex to solve. It is very important to go granular and analyse all your operations through different lenses of demand and supply to determine why a particular failure or problem exists and where in order to take corrective measures.

On Locale, you have the ability to detailed RCAs using advanced map-based visualizations. One can drill down across:

• Granularity: City level, hex level, route level
• Time: Days of the week and time of day, compare different time periods
• User/ Driver / Order Level: Get into the behaviour of a single user, driver or an order

In an industry where it pays to be quick and proactive, this can be a true game-changer for your business. And this is just one use case, Locale solves for pretty much any Ops use including performing lane analysis (unique to Locale, courtesy of our routes analysis console), creating cohorts of your most valuable customers, creating clusters of hotspots for unfulfilled demand, and so on.

Issue Tracking

Getting different teams from different geographies to agree on a decision can be a monumental task. With Tableau, one must request a report from data teams via Slack, Teams, or any other internal communication tool. The data teams then use SQL to obtain the necessary data in order to create reports and dashboards on Tableau.

But in reality, the decision-making process must be a collaborative one. We’ve found that when you get the right people at the table, everyone has an opportunity to share data and insights, ask questions and understand the context of others.

This is where Locale’s advanced collaboration capabilities allow sharing of contextual information to different teams with great ease.

You can:

• Have the ability to create issues for team members and track their resolution time
• Ability to tag the right person on different consoles
• Ability to collaborate and understand the issues different teams are working on

Over time, we believe that this will grow into a knowledge base for the Ops teams. This entire process of unifying operations can be a game-changer!

Predictive Capabilities and Actionability

On Tableau, after you get insights, you will have to relay these to a different team which then has to take action. For example, giving discounts to a set of power users or sending incentives to drivers and so on. There is no real understanding of how these metrics are changing or how to deal with anomalies on the fly and the Ops teams are left to deal with the problems that spring up.

But on Locale, once the users are notified about an anomaly on Slack or any other internal communication tool, they can take immediate action by:

• Sending screenshots to ground teams
• Downloading data via CSVs, or APIs
• Triggering external messaging tools like Clever tap and many more all on one platform

In addition to that, Locale uses advanced AI and ML models behind the scenes to forecast the future range of values and alert the user whenever the actual metric values deviate significantly from the forecasted range of values without any additional steps.

Ease of use and Customer-first philosophy

One of the best parts about Locale is how easy it is to use! You needn’t spend a lot of time on courses and resources to get a hang of the tool.

In addition to that, we provide:

• 24/7 Slack support and a dedicated account manager for all your Ops related needs
• Customised training sessions along with weekly cadences to fit your use cases and requirements

Seamless customer experience has been a fundamental priority for us since we started building Locale. We collaborate with our clients to create a vision document that will allow them to successfully solve their use cases. Furthermore, our CS team can serve as a consultant to clients, assisting them in resolving operational issues.

About Locale

Locale is not just a new tool, it’s an entirely new concept of how to run an Ops team. It is designed to handle all the moving parts of the puzzle and to actually help you solve them all at once. And most importantly, in collaboration with the rest of the team.

Locale is a no-code control tower with central oversight and localised decisions. We built it from the ground up working closely with our Ops teams and using the problems they faced on a daily basis as our reference and validation points.

If you resonated with the piece and want to try it out?

Book a demo with one of our specialists to discuss use cases unique to your business.

Ready to explore the insights hidden in your geospatial data? Go granular with Locale.ai today.

Originally published at https://blog.locale.ai on April 26, 2022.