Sumitomo Rubber SA’s BI enablement programme pays off

Derive maximum benefits from your BI investments.

---

The mere implementation of modern BI tools is insufficient to ensure success. It is vital to embed these technologies within the organisation, gain buy-in and ensure users are empowered to ask their own questions of the data. This enablement process allows businesses to derive maximum benefit from their BI investments.

This strategy drove the success of a recent BI tool migration project at KZN-based Sumitomo Rubber South Africa (SRSA). During and following the upgrade of the BI platform, Keyrus carried out a comprehensive employee enablement programme. Benefits included a motivated user group excited about the new platform, a surge of interest in the value of data and rapid adoption.

Keyrus, which positions itself as a leading data and digital consultancy, was awarded the tender to migrate SRSA’s BI platform to Tableau Server, the industry leader in visual analytics.

During the project, Keyrus, together with the SRSA IS team, rolled out a customised change management process to ensure buy-in for the new platform. It offered various educational ‘roadshow' sessions for business users, aimed at creating excitement and preparing them for change.

Once the migration was complete and user acceptance testing (UAT) signed off, Keyrus delivered carefully designed online training sessions to ensure business users could easily tackle Tableau’s high-level features and navigation. This was intended to showcase the ease of creating more compelling visuals to answer business questions. This online training was followed by several smaller, in-person training sessions at the Keyrus offices in Durban. More than 30 employees, mostly middle to senior management from the Corporate Planning and Sales Departments, have been in attendance.

“All sessions were custom designed to include hands-on exercises using SRSA data,” notes Craig Andrew, Head of Data Analytics at Keyrus, and certified trainer.

The training material included step-by-step guides, screenshots and detailed explanations of how to achieve certain concepts in Tableau.

The training guides were supplemented by videos that covered key basic Tableau features using the SRSA Tableau Server environment. These were published onto the SRSA learning portal for easy access and to ensure any new joiner has a jumpstart to their learning.

Feedback about the training was unanimous: users found it excellent, detailed, easy to follow and useful.

Praise was also heaped on the facilitator: “Craig Andrew is well-suited for training, knowledgeable and patient,” noted one delegate. “He creates an atmosphere where learning becomes exciting, interactive and beneficial.”

“One of our key priorities is skills transfer,” explains Andrew. “Sumitomo is to be celebrated for their recognition of the importance of extensive enablement,” he concludes.

“What made the training so valuable was the use of real data from the different business groups that delegates could relate to,” notes Brett Clark, Director: Operations & Services at SRSA. “This created excitement and business users were really motivated to start using the tool to ensure data-driven decisions.

“The enablement programme served to drive a mindset shift about the true value of data and how to use it to gain maximum competitive advantage,” Clark concludes.

Keyrus is renowned for its strong expertise in business intelligence and data management. It boasts Tableau Premier Partner status, vast practical experience and global reach, ensuring it is ideally positioned to assist companies through the entire BI migration and enablement process.