Tableau Dashboards: Can I write back to the database? Now you can!

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Tableau Dashboards

It has become clear that Tableau is a valuable tool for every company. A tool that lets you analyse your data and build beautiful dashboards that can be shared with colleagues throughout your company. By providing great autonomy to end-users across departments the impact is enormous, as everyone is able to analyse their own data. Nevertheless, sometimes you come across actionable processes where end-users are required to input data or provide feedback. Being able to provide and store information straight from the dashboard is a necessary key if you want to reach all your end-users. As important as that is allowing anyone building a dashboard to be able to use this feature, even without any technical knowledge.

This may sound hard to achieve, but it is not hard when you are using Write-Back.

The product is a Tableau extension that empowers users to easily input new data and work with it immediately.

The agility it gives to anyone using Tableau will definitely improve the efficiency of your company processes and provide new ways of executing them. It is a whole new world where you can design and think differently from how you do today. Dashboards become part of business processes, not just supporting decisions with visualisations but also implementing actual steps along the way. So, when you question: can I write back to the database? Well, now you can.

Want to see some examples? Here they are:

With Write-back you give end-users the power to amend data. Human error is common, so wrong inputs can always happen. Say that on a given day someone inputs the price of a product and days later the price changes, which then needs to be reflected in the Tableau dashboard. This is an example where Write-back is a great solution because by connecting the data set created in this tool with your original data you can easily amend it and make it immediately available to everyone. This process is so smooth that it feels like updating the original data but it is way faster and more agile.

Imagine that your company produces car parts. Last month, 1,000,000 pieces were produced and delivered to your distributors. 10,000 of them came back but only 6,000 were linked to a comment in the dashboard with the reason why. So, you want to understand what happened and now you need to make some calls asking for details that will be, in all probability, physical or not uploaded to your database. Imagine the effort you would need to get everything organised and finally understand what happened! We developed Write-back so that you can easily create a form where you can explain the external factors at the root cause of any problem, such as the reason why a piece was returned and its state, and even note the impact it had so that you can make an approximation as to what the end result should be. This process not only makes input more flexible but also makes data instantly available, and you can see what happened or is happening in real-time.

Forecasting with Write-back is not only possible but can be more efficient too. If you already have a process that imports the budget to your database, you can create a dataset on Write-back for your end-users to input forecast data and quickly compare it against the budget data that is already uploaded. This means you can create columns for every scenario you want in the table, and while the forecast team is making their analysis and filling the table in order to compare against the budget, you are on the other side knowing what can happen, for example, as a result of either an optimistic or a pessimistic scenario. You can basically build your forecast as you want and use the scenarios you may find most useful for your decisions. The same applies if you don’t have a process that imports your budget, and the only difference is that you’ll have a budget column in your Write-back table which will be filled together with forecasts. This is one of the examples where you see the impact of Write-Back.

One of Tableau’s functionalities is to comment dashboards, but only the entire dashboard. What if you want to leave a comment for a specific mark or value? There’s not much you can do about it unless you have Write-back. When creating the Write-back dataset you just have to select the values you want to be able to comment on and create a “Comment” column. This will give you the ability to comment on every specific value and determine the reasons why you may have had an outlier, a decrease or increase in sales, etc.

Final Thoughts

What we’ve shown are some of good examples of why Write-back is a must-have for any company. With it you can improve your company operations, making analytics processes more agile and actionable.

The best thing about it is that Write-Back is an enterprise-grade product with security at its core and this is why it is installed on your company infrastructure and the data is stored on your database; no Internet access is required at all.

Another important aspect is how easy it is to set up and configure with Write-Back Manager, which quickly lets you do a production configuration or simply run a trial. Besides this, we are constantly working on updates and bringing new features to the product, and we have reliable documentation and great support, meaning you will always have someone at hand to help.

Write-back can really help streamline and potentiate your business and therefore we invite you to visit our website and give it a try. This way, you get hands-on experience with this product, on which we work hard every day to fulfil the needs of every company that needs to input data on a dashboard or write back to the database. If this is your need too, then the answer is Write-Back!

To know more about Write-Back, you can download a trial here.

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