GE Global Research sparks innovation, speeding finance & research reporting by weeks


Reducing development efforts, cutting reporting time by weeks

GE Global Research’s business intelligence (BI) team is responsible for processing financials and providing analytics to functional teams, labs, and researchers.

Within the financial sector alone, the BI team analyzes over one terabyte of data. Before Tableau, GE Global Research’s data was stored in Excel spreadsheets siloed across departments, making company analysis both time and labor intensive.

Today with Tableau, GE uses native data connectors to leverage existing data sources —eliminating manual coding efforts and speeding up the reporting cycle by weeks.

“Instead of a monthly report, you are getting weekly reports that are really fresh and all the corrections are reflected,” explains Varsha Kakati, Global ERP & BI Leader.

Reporting is also becoming a more collaborative process. With less time spent on development, the BI team has more time to work with partners, leadership, and internal customers to refine critical dashboards.

Instead of going through the development cycle and then realizing that it doesn't work, we are showing the mock-ups to our partners and our customers and then designing along with them.

“Instead of going through the development cycle and then realizing that it doesn't work, we are showing the mock-ups to our partners and our customers and then designing along with them,” says Varsha.

With Tableau, GE also has the flexibility to adjust dashboards as priorities or needs change, saving time and securing a successful output. This leads to more excitement within the internal Tableau user community along with more creative approaches to analytics.

“Earlier, enhancements were a big no because if we had to touch something, it was a big coding effort,” shares Varsha. “[With Tableau] we are able to turn around enhancements quickly and we are able to roll out fresh new dashboards very quickly. And after seeing them, the user community has a lot of creative juices flowing on their side and they are coming up with ideas.”

Instead of a monthly report, you are getting weekly reports that are really fresh and all the corrections are reflected.

Tableau encourages innovative analytics across GE

On the research side, Varsha expects that Tableau will fill a need for more accurate, advanced reporting, including predictive analytics.

Due to their success with Tableau, the BI team plans to scale analytics across more business areas within GE.

Varsha explains, “We plan to continue scaling analytics to empower teams that are currently underserved. For example, we are seeing that Tableau could help our researchers analyze their testing data and other data, which will make their lives very easy and also speed up their throughput.”