Honeywell saves 10,000+ hours, scaling to thousands of users across 14 business units
10,000-20,000 man hours saved
Thousands of Tableau users across departments
Leadership insight into company spending
Honeywell’s Global Finance Center is the global analytics hub for the entire $40 billion company. Since March of 2016, Honeywell scaled to 9,000 Tableau users companywide. With Tableau and Alteryx, the team analyzes data in hours instead of months—helping the business make crucial decisions around liquidations and sales. Since adopting Tableau, Preetham Shanbhag, Senior Director, FP&A Operations and Transformation, estimates that Honeywell saved 10,000-20,000 man hours. When it comes to business value, Preetham said, “You cannot really put a price on it.”
I can tell you that easily it runs into 10,000-20,000 man hours in terms of productivity generated because of the automation and standardization you get out of Tableau. But more than that, to me it’s the business value—and you cannot really put a price on it.
10,000-20,000 man hours saved, scaling to 9,000 users
Honeywell’s Global Finance Center supports analytics for 14 strategic business units and product lines across 100+ countries. Their internal customer group spans across general management, sales, marketing, procurement, IT, human resources, and more.
Powered by Tableau and Alteryx, the team analyzes data from over 150 ERP systems, including SAP, Oracle, Navision, and JD Edwards, to name a few. Since March of 2016, Honeywell scaled from zero to 9,000 Tableau users across the company.
Preetham Shanbhag, Senior Director, FP&A Operations and Transformation, explained, “In the finance domain, you analyze tons and tons of data. I mean, you have your P&Ls (profit and losses), your sales, orders backlog, working capital, cash flow. There's a ton of transactional data to analyze.”
The Global Finance Center previously analyzed data with Excel and a combination of other tools, which could take months of extraction, manipulation, and transformation. For example, standard sales reporting used to take up to three or four months to produce. When the team adopted Tableau, they created the same reports in hours or less.
“I can tell you that easily it runs into 10,000-20,000 man hours in terms of productivity generated because of the automation, standardization you get out of Tableau.”
“But more than that, it’s the business value, and you cannot really put a price on it,” said Preetham. “Earlier we spent 70% of the time on data extraction and all the drudge-work, 30% on analytics. Now that's just the opposite, which means it’s a direct P&L impact in terms of the business decisions that you can drive.”
Since our most recent purchase, we have grown from 0 to 9000 users in the company. We have been very rapidly deploying Tableau.
Holistic view of financial data drives liquidation decisions
Inventory reports built in Tableau help the business make more informed decisions around “when [they] should liquidate versus fire sale” explained Preetham. When it comes to business value, he says, “you cannot really put a price on it.”
The team also leads project around working capital analytics and reducing indirect spend, travel and expense costs, and freight costs—providing a holistic view of company spending. Additionally, Tableau dashboards focused on revenue by segments and product clients help leadership make decisions around where to deploy their sales force.
Preetham continues, “You can take all of that data, translate it into good business insights, and then work with your internal customer group to enable them make good decisions based on those insights. That’s how I see Tableau enabling that value chain.”
“It’s the ease of use; it’s the intuitiveness that will make a difference, and how customers perceive your product. So for us as a financial planning and analysis organization it's about how our reports can be made easier to read, how quickly the internal customer can make a decision out of it.”