Challenge
“The scale of the data was too much to handle.”
Gaylord Chemical Company is the world’s preeminent producer of dimethyl sulfide, dimethyl sulfoxide, medical-grade Procipient®, and AgXalt™. The company’s history dates back to 1962 when, under the ownership of Crown Zellerbach, it began an aggressive and comprehensive research program into the manufacture of the chemicals it now produces. The results of this extensive work would later give Gaylord an astounding depth of knowledge about these products.
What Gaylord didn’t have in 2022 was a low-effort way to present and analyze data. The company used Tableau, but not as extensively as they could have been.
Artie McKim, Gaylord’s vice president of technology, heads up a new business development group charged with developing and managing an opportunity pipeline. Essentially, he is responsible for placing a value on the opportunities that the team develops. He needed an effective reporting tool, so he relied on Tableau.
“I started working with Tableau as sort of a hobby about ten years ago,” said Artie. “With that knowledge, I developed a Tableau dashboard built with data sourced from an Excel file containing opportunities. Fortunately, the team was pretty successful and built out a pipeline of several hundred opportunities. Unfortunately, the scale of that data was too much for me to handle.”
Managing the opportunity data was too much for Artie. He had to pull data from Salesforce, clean it, import it into Tableau, then pull reports to present to leadership and investors—and every task had to be done manually.
“I knew we weren’t using Tableau to its fullest extent nor in the most straightforward way,” said Artie. “But one day, there was a breaking point, and I knew I had to get out of the data-cleaning and dashboard-building business.” That breaking point came when a staff member who helped Artie process the data to create the necessary dashboards left the company. Artie would have to take on extra work, and he simply did not have the time.
“We all realized we needed an automated way for the business development group to collect information in Salesforce and create reports in Tableau,” said Artie. “Furthermore, all this had to be doable without the need for the sort of manual interactions I was increasingly getting involved in.”
