“The team will be able to perform their calculations in real-time and without multiple dependencies on an ensemble of workbooks.”

Situation

Recently a very data-driven healthcare client met with us looking for a solution involving some complex analysis of their data. The specific team at this client had three voluminous Excel workbooks with thousands of parameters and fields constantly running calculations. After an extensive discovery process, the selected Tableau to be the framework for that solution and we agreed that Tableau would provide many advantages. We at CSG had both the business intelligence and Tableau-certified real-world expertise to provide what we believed would be an excellent final tool for them.

Solution

Tableau out-of-the-box would not provide the manifold “what-if” type of analytics across many thousands of values that their business case would require. The user would need to be able to modify the data in the Tableau dashboard to produce visibility into outcomes not yet realized in their data. 

This is where another component of CSG’s strong technical skill base – web application development – would become a part of the solution. In late 2018, Tableau released their dashboard extensions library, allowing for the development of mini web applications that could be added into a Tableau dashboard. These web applications enable the addition of features that are not already native to Tableau. 

For our client’s solution we created a custom ‘Write-Back’ extension that allows the user to input data into the dashboard and for the dashboard to react to that data with updated analytics. This application processes around 15,000 parameters, thus preventing Tableau from timing-out and crashing each time a calculation was performed.