Whole Foods Market democratizes data across 460 retail stores and 18,000 employees in one year with Tableau
Scaled financial and operational dashboards to 18,000 Tableau users
Developed a data-driven culture with executives, store and team leads, and retail staff across 460 stores
Improved the customer experience in-store with operational efficiencies
Whole Foods Market is a natural foods supermarket chain with 460 stores throughout the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The company has grown rapidly in the last few years and recent acquisitions resulted in disparate systems and data sources. As a result, analysts spent considerable time collecting and preparing data in Excel and other reporting tools—and oftentimes, the resulting data wasn’t always accurate, leading to diminished trust in the data with executives, store leaders, and frontline retail staff.
Whole Foods Market embraced Tableau to create a single source of truth with their financial and operations data, offering a clear view of performance with staff across all nationwide stores. This takes shape through a series of dashboards. Store leaders can track performance against other stores in the surrounding areas with a regional dashboard. A sales dashboard allows store team leaders to drill down into specific departments to understand when they need to increase staffing based on peak hours of the day. And the terminal dashboard shows customer flow through checkout stands to help store leaders understand when they need to open or close a register. It also helps them track team member productivity so they can celebrate wins.
Having a data-driven culture at Whole Foods Market is incredibly important. Knowing that we can use this data to improve our customer experience, drive more customers to our product, and create a better experience for all stakeholders, is the critical value of data for our company.
As Whole Foods Market shifted its analytics approach, the analytics team designated a change management lead to institute best practices and check in with different departments to track adoption. They nurtured and grew a strong internal community centered around data and Tableau, with weekly contests, data doctor sessions, and a weekly video series highlighting Tableau product news and also created a training program for retail staff so they can use data to guide day-to-day stock and staff decisions. Today, Whole Foods Market has over 18,000 active Tableau users, transforming how the company approaches customer experience and operations on a daily basis.