Reasons behind Big Industries Automate Reporting with Tableau
Automation is the future, there’s no doubt about it. After all, who doesn’t want to save time and money. Tableau helps companies and government organizations automate reporting with a drag and drop style that doesn’t require coding, but welcomes it all the same.
Automation is a hot topic in almost every industry including healthcare, agriculture, retail and production. Many of the best algorithmic programming wizards can be found in the world of finance, but even financial institutions want help automating analytics and reporting. Tableau recently partnered with Broadridge Financial Solutions, a fintech leader added to the S&P 500 last year. Broadridge’s head of asset management solutions Eric Bernstein says,
“Actionable data is at the forefront of everything today. Data aggregation and normalization is a constant pain point for the industry and getting it right for our buy-side clients is one of Broadridge’s competitive advantages. Tableau’s visual analytics platform, combined with our best-in-suite software, will provide insights and analytics into trading, portfolio and operations data at the speed of thought.”
So why are companies like Broadridge Financial turning to Tableau for solutions if they already have the best programming brains? One reason is that Tableau can run programmatic automation processes in Python, R, C, C++ and Java. The commonality of these programs helps to smooth the learning curve involved with integrating the systems. Another reason is the ease of use resulting from Tableau’s drag and drop style, which allows people to contribute who may have good insights, but don’t have experience coding. Lastly, the supported platform provided by Tableau has huge added value. Tableau claims to save time and pain; let’s explore how this is done.
Rest API (Application Programming Interface). Think of this like a language or set of rules for systems to communicate and give instructions to each other. Tableau’s Rest API automates tedious tasks like managing sites and users, updating workbooks and integrating with a custom app.
JavaScript API — JavaScript API lets you take your existing web applications and integrate Tableau Visualizations. Take dashboards from Tableau Public, Tableau Server and Tableau Online and put them on your web page. You can even use HTML controls to manipulate and filter them.
Extract API — Extract API let’s you pull data into extracts that allow offline access and improve performance. Data sources that are not currently supported by Tableau can be pulled into Tableau with the Extract API, which basically means they are fully supported. Custom scripts can be created in Java, C, C++, Python, R and run on Mac, Windows and Linux.
Document API — Document API lets you programmatically modify Tableau files, create templates and migrate workbooks from test to production.
Tableau provides a heavily supported platform to automate these tasks. Large and small companies alike can take comfort in knowing that Tableau is constantly working to make things easier and faster. Maybe you aren’t moving around billions of dollars, like the finance giants or managing a constant barrage of patient data like hospitals, but reporting might just be the most important thing you do. When it comes to making intelligent business decisions, no matter how large your company, data analysis and reporting are royalty.
So, take a tip from the finance giants and move towards automation.
