Jaguar Land Rover develops a pioneering data culture to accelerate its digital transformation with Tableau 

Jaguar Land Rover will become a more agile creator of the world’s most desirable luxury vehicles and services for the most discerning of customers with a strategy that is designed to create a new benchmark in environmental, societal and community impact for a luxury business.  It is committed to producing a pure electric Jaguar portfolio by 2025, with zero tailgate-emissions for all vehicles by 2035, and zero emissions in the supply chain, products and operations by 2039. No doubt this makes an incredibly impactful sustainability statement. 

We spoke to Clive Benford, Jaguar Land Rover Data Office Director, about how Jaguar Land Rover manages this in the face of global competition and complex supply chains. Clive explains that Jaguar Land Rover does this profitably and globally, while recognising local markets and regulations do not always move at the same pace. 

In some ways it is a perfect storm. Electric is a once-in-a-generation engineering challenge. Cars are  now software products,  computers on wheels. And there is a changing ownership model, with consumers looking to hire or use a car as a service. 

‘Reimagine’ is our strategy to become an electric-first business with a focus on modern luxury by design. The goal is to create new benchmarks in quality and efficiency for the luxury sector. 

Our CEO Thierry Bolloré described it best: “The central nervous system of our new structure will be a radical digital transformation. Data is the backbone of new products, the lifecycle of existing products, the quality of our manufacturing, the oxygen of our supply chain, and the services we can provide to our customers in the future.” 

Put simply, it is to empower all our employees to interrogate their data, find insights and develop valuable use cases themselves. We do this with a robust governance framework, so our employees trust the data, and can share insights freely and securely. This has improved collaboration, which is huge for us. The company’s intelligence is in the brains of its employees, and in a complex business you need all of those different perspectives. The modern world is full of experts in micro-domains. If we are to reimagine the Jaguar Land Rover business, and the automotive sector, we need to create this new data-first mindset. 

We want to use Tableau to democratise data and analytics. Rather than confine data analytics to a central, corporate data analytics team, the goal is to give as many people as possible the skills, tools, and confidence to explore and analyse their own data. Today, Jaguar Land Rover has more than 1,300 employees actively creating dashboards and analyses, and more than 5,000 exploring this data and finding insights for themselves. 

We created an Analytics Centre of Excellence in 2017, and between 2017 and 2020 we delivered more £200 million in value to the business from more data-driven decisions. Tableau was used on all this work as the primary tool for exploring data and sharing insights. 

In 2021 we stepped this up a gear as we formed and grew a digital centre of excellence, called InDigital, by merging and expanding our Intelligent Automation and Data Analytics centres. The new combined team targets £250 million of business value per year from digital and data. 

We were in a cycle where Tableau would increase in popularity, demand and usage would go up, and we would hit server capacity. That was restraining us. Switching to a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model with Tableau Cloud removes that restriction. It provides us with unlimited scale for data analysis, with employees able to explore and analyse their data securely from anywhere. 

Very much so. The numbers of employees exploring data is consistently increasing. What is pleasing is that content is being created across every function of the business. For instance, right now the most active areas of the business interacting with their data include retail business planning, quality management for new part designs, and just-in-time manufacturing. 
 
The impact is being felt across the business. Thanks to our self-service model, data-driven decisions are helping smooth issues in the supply chain and reduce discounts on dealer forecourts. 
 
The beauty of Tableau is its ease of use. The more people we can get using data in their work the better, but for this to happen, to move away from Excel, you need to make data accessible and trusted and the new tools and platforms easy to use. It’s so easy to find and action insights with Tableau. 
 
My role is about making as easy as possible for people to generate value from data and collaborate around data.  As an example of how we do this, we’d found dashboards created in Tableau tended to be shared and used by people the creator knew in their function – HR with HR, engineering with engineering. This is understandable, it isn’t their role to identify every user across Jaguar Land Rover that can benefit from their work. But by creating a new framework and changing the permissions and policies we’ve made it safe and easy for employees to share insights more widely. The impact of a policy driven security model was almost immediate, within a month the server logs showed a significant increase in cross-organisation collaboration, which is so critical to innovation and business performance. 

There are 21,000 laptop users in Jaguar Land Rover; or, 21,000 possible data analysts. The goal is to get them all excited about the potential of a data-driven culture and to get them using Tableau. In fact, I’d like non-connected employees, from production line to logistics, to be included too. Data-driven decisions will enhance all areas of our business. 
 
We have a long way to go, but we have reached a tipping point. Our sponsors are always asking how we can build even more excitement around data and agree that Tableau is now the standard platform that everyone should have access to. 
 
Everyone benefits from being data-driven. It creates momentum, it encourages innovation, and drives continual improvement – both from a personal and business perspective. 
 
Tableau will be a strategic partner to accelerate our Digital transformation. We have recently entered a new agreement that gives us 20,000 Tableau licenses including 5,000 Creators for Jaguar Land Rover employees and an additional 11,000 licenses for our Retailer network. With the right training, support and community activities in place, everyone will be able to be part of our data driven culture.