When MALL Group started using Tableau to track product profitability, it was like gaining a sixth sense

• Better monitoring of product profitability based on daily updated reports
• More strategic decision-making after the transition to a data-driven company
• During the year, 550 users adopted a data culture – they have already created over 6,000 reports with over 2,500 views per day
• More room for the analytical department thanks to the introduction of self-service analytics

MALL Group is the largest e-commerce group in Central and Eastern Europe. It operates in nine countries and, with more than four thousand employees, offers its services to 130 million inhabitants of Central and Eastern Europe. MALL Group’s total revenues from the sale of goods in the calendar year 2021, including partner sales, amounted to 20.5 billion CZK. The Group has delivered over 13 million orders to a total of 4.9 million unique customers. MALL Group’s strategy is to create a whole platform of expanding services and functions around the purchase itself in order to become the epitome of a 21^st-century e-commerce group.

To succeed in a highly competitive environment, it needed to transform itself into a fully data-driven organisation. The Tableau visualisation analytics platform helped with this and allowed the Group to gain a perfect overview of not only the entire sales process, but also of the functioning of marketing, purchasing and other departments. The data gives it valuable knowledge that it utilises in the successful management of all these areas.

What the client says

So that we can understand what the data says

MALL Group needed to gain insight into the profitability of products and generally streamline its work with data, as well as democratise it so that it could be used by everyone it could help, and to provide their consumers with useful information that they could use as the basis for decision-making. The aim was therefore to introduce a functioning data culture in the group. It is essential to visualise data in order to ensure that it is accepted without any problems and to obtain valuable information from it. MALL therefore decided to interpret its data through the Tableau analytics platform.

The primary task was to make the profitability analysis of 300,000 individual products accessible and transparent. For this purpose, several dozen basic reports were created in Tableau in cooperation with Revolt BI, which helped individual companies within the MALL Group and their departments to monitor the profitability of products in great detail. This allowed them to obtain regular morning, and sometimes more frequent, reports every day on processed orders from a number of different points of view and in different contexts. These included, for example, margins for trade, campaign cost allocations for marketing, warehouse and operational costs for warehouse, transport or supplier bonuses. At the same time, the entire funnel is now visible in a single report. Performance teams also know exactly what’s going on and can determine the impact of ongoing activities in real time. Overall, Tableau has brought a better understanding of data, where to allocate resources better, and enabled better decisions to be made based on this data. Thanks to the user orientation of Tableau, everyone interested can now easily analyse data without necessarily having to draw on the capacities of the analytical department. This change means more agile management for the MALL Group and, as a result, a ticket to the group of successful data-driven companies.

“Thanks to Tableau, sales teams get the data they need to make better pricing decisions, and marketing teams can create effective and better-targeted campaigns with significant cost reductions. As a result, switching to a data-driven company allows us to make decisions and operate in a way that is more flexible and strategic.”

The MALL Group needed to gain insight into product profitability and overall streamline the way they work with data, democratise it so that it can be used by everyone it can help and provide their consumers with useful information on which to make decisions. The aim was therefore to establish a functioning data culture within the Group. To ensure its smooth adoption and to make it as easy as possible to extract valuable information from the data, it is essential to visualise the data. That’s why MALL decided to interpret its data through the analytics platform Tableau.

Adopting a data culture is the key to success

An important part of any project to help a company successfully use data is change management, or the adoption of a new way of functioning. Without the introduction of a data culture, even the best tool would not bring the desired results. That is why MALL Group has created a comprehensive education programme so that everyone who needs to use data for their work understands its importance and is able to extract information from it. This programme included a series of training sessions and educational videos, and an introduction to the more advanced features of Tableau for those interested. Every department has established the position of data champion, who advises and helps others with teaching, the preparation of analyses and the creation of reports.  Everyone can become their own analyst and prepare their own simple reports. As a result, analysts are not overwhelmed by large amounts of minor user requests and can focus on strategic analytical goals and innovations. The result is a real adoption of data culture. This is confirmed by an increase in the number of users in one year from 200 to 550, over 6,000 reports created and 2,500 data views per day. This change also contributes to the successes MALL Group is now experiencing.