Endeavour Group consolidates dashboards

Endeavour Group has reduced roughly 650 dashboards into around six reports, after kicking off a business support report rationalisation program.

The retail drinks and hospitality business broke away from Woolworths last year, and owns around 1630 retail liquor stores under the Dan Murphy's and BWS brands.

Speaking at a recent Gartner Data & Analytics Summit, Endeavour Group senior manager of business intelligence Ivan Dennis said from the 650 removed reports, 118 were “Tableau dashboards that once deleted, no one actually spoke a word about or missed them at all”.

“We wanted to go with a single source of truth," he said.

"We wanted story-driven, actionable outcomes, and a single definition of the metrics and measures across the business.”

Part of the challenge, Dennis explained, was dismantling a “fixed lens” view of performance reports that were hard to deviate from.

Dennis added dashboards only create “speed to action, not speed to insights”, and ultimately “clutter and confusion.”

He said the group's former approach was “leading the BI team to be more of a training organisation to help train finance users” and “didn't allow us to accelerate from laggard to leader”.

“The other thing was, it was the risk of producing incorrect results, particularly if they're building out and curating their own kind of code, which leads to a greater number of problems.”

Endeavour Group selected business intelligence analytics search software, ThoughtSpot, to help create a “one stop shop for data”, leading to “search results in seconds, no code to self-serve [and] billions of rows of data that are underlying the decision.”

“Whilst I think we're moving from laggard to leader, dashboards still have a place in our organisation at the moment and we like to think of those as the performance base camp.

“Then ThoughtSpot is the key that unlocks the journey to get to the pinnacle of trying to understand performance.”

Endeavour Group onboarded its users in segments of around "20 to 30 people” and was live within nine weeks.

Since inception, there has been “a seismic shift to speed insights” as well as high user satisfaction, identifying changing online trends and faster response enquiry times. 

“Augmented analytics is about taking that friction out of the transaction, and really pushing the business users to be influencers ... really starting to influence the outcome to the business to get a better result and better outcome for our customers,” Dennis said.