Business Intelligence / Visualization / Data Analytics

Tableau Services

About Tableau Consulting Chicago

Tableau Consulting Chicago is a specialized BI Consulting Company. Our service area is 50 mile radius of

downtown Chicago and covers all suburbs around Chicago. We offer Flat Fee Business IT with 24×7 Coverage

in our Managed IT Service Contracts and Time & Material contracts for customers who prefer that model.

Tableau Consulting Chicago provides Business Intelligence and Data Analytics solutions for clients

nationwide using the leading BI software - Tableau. Tableau Consulting Chicago’s experience with BI

solution development helps us to evaluate your unique business requirement and build the right solution

using Tableau.

Tableau Consulting Chicago - Tableau Services

Among the new generation BI software, Tableau’s data virtualization is way ahead of what traditional BI

vendors offer. Tableau gives business users the ability to perform fairly complex data visualization in a very

intuitive, drag and drop manner. Its data visualization is also impressively interactive. The user can highlight

sections and drilldown into charts without extensive skills or assistance from IT. If you want high powered

data visualization at low cost, Tableau is the solution that Tableau Consulting Chicago recommend.

Tableau Consulting Chicago offers specialized Tableau consulting services for small and medium business

customers. We have helped organizations transform their data (legacy database, flat-files, unstructured,

structured) to information with flexible and interactive visualizations which in turn helps our customers for

faster and effective decision making.

Tableau Consulting Chicago provides the below set of services under Tableau Consulting

Case Study: River Valley Recycling LLC

Our customer River Valley Recycling LLC is a leading metal processing company in Chicago area. As the

materials get processed, they use a suite of legacy applications that capture the load data attributes. The

data is stored in legacy system databases in 5 different business locations. The applications already had

integrated reports using traditional business intelligence solutions which primarily provide them tabular

data reports and static charts. Due to the lack of flexibility to customize these reports, they started tedious

manual process to get the data exported to Microsoft Excel periodically and process them for analysis. This

process was inefficient, often used a week-old data and seldom provided insights into the trends or patterns

to help in strategic decision making.

River Valley Recycling approached Tableau Consulting Chicago for a solution and our analysts studied the

existing system and identified opportunities for automating several processes in their workflow and

TCC

Tableau Consulting

Installation & Configuration

Reports & Interactive Dashboards

Tableau Server Configuration

(online publishing of reports and dashboards)

Active directory integration for

secure user access

Application Integration

Performance Tuning

proposed implementation of data analytics. It then turned in to an approved project and named it as RVR

Automation. This solution had the objectives to enhance company’s operating efficiency and data analytics.

Data Analytics Problem and Solution

Tableau Consulting Chicago’s analysis of existing customer system has uncovered that many of the

processes needs automation. Even more significant finding was about the data analytics – due to the

inefficient reports, they often used to miss forecasts, trends in volume that resulted in inefficient utilization

of their operating capacity; not to mention the costs associated with generation of custom charts.

The reason for this manual generation of custom charts was their existing BI reporting software. It had a set

of static tabular reports and charts. But any customization to those reports needed specialist developer

effort and that was impractical for the customer. Tableau Consulting Chicago concluded that their non-

technical users needed a fast and efficient data analytics solution which is intuitive and lets them generate

data visualizations that are interactive to analyze trends and forecasts. There were no better choices than

Tableau as the replacement for the existing BI software. The proposed solution consisted of components to

achieve the following goals:-

System Consolidation: - Upgrade all the systems and infrastructure that reaches end of life with

latest technology.

Low Cost Business Intelligence Dashboards & Analytics: - It was important to analyze performance,

trends and generate forecasts and Tableau based BI solution is proposed to help viewing dozens of

helpful statistics and sales performance data to aid planning and decision making. The proposed

system created services to import the data from legacy RVR database to de-normalized SQL server

database schema suitable for reporting.

Client Application Interface (Performance + Ease of Use): - Design included client apps for users to

maintain data and view the integrated Tableau BI dashboards running in Tableau server. These client

applications (web and mobile applications) will use RVR WCF service hosted in server for data

transactions and at the same time will have embedded Tableau Dashboard views from server at one

place.

Weather Service:- Track historical and current weather, which is useful for forecasting because

inbound lbs are highly correlated to temperature seasonality throughout the year.

System Architecture

Transaction Database (Legacy)

SQL Server

Database

River Valley Recycling LLC : Process Automation (High Level Architecture)

Import Services

XML

Files

Data Export

Trans

Hosted Environment: IIS on

Windows Server

Presentation Layer

..

SOAP

WCF Service

REST

HTTP / TCP / Net pipe

Tableau Server

Data Analytics/Interactive Dashboards

WCF expose multiple end points with different protocols. In that way, we can use both TCP and HTTP.

Mobile applications use the REST service interface.

Tableau dashboards running in Tableau server are embedded in the client applications.

Desktop App

Web App

(Intranet/Internet)

Mobile/Tablet app

(iOS/Android/

Windows)

Legacy Apps

User Interface:

The client automation application makes use of hosted WCF services for transactions. This make possible for

office personnel to perform transactions and access the Tableau dashboards and data from anywhere. The

client application suite consisted of Desktop, Web and Mobile applications.

Tableau - Business Intelligence Reports

The graphs below are interactive (For example, you can change a location or year or month in the graph and

it redraw to show that updated statistics)

Conclusion

This project implementation for River Valley Recycling LLC was completed by delivering the initial versions

of the working solution as early as second month in to development (using agile development model). The

application features were matured over subsequent sprints. The customer was benefited immensely from

the solution that Tableau Consulting Chicago provided. Tableau based data analysis provided metrics and

key performance indicators (KPIs) aligned with the company strategy and enabled easier decision making –

as they are data-driven and informed decisions.

For more information and similar success stories of Tableau Consulting Chicago’s Business Intelligence

solutions, please contact us at:

Tableau Consulting Chicago TOLL FREE 888 519 4699 projects@tableau-consulting-chicago.com Chicago: 79 West Monroe, Suite 1100 Inverness: 1627 Colonial Parkway, Suite 303