Fabuwood doubles analytics adoption by switching to ThoughtSpot from Power BI

As the company grows, the amount of data requests grows. But, it’s not just that. In the modern day, people are relying more on data. In the past, it used to be more of a gut feeling. Whereas now, everything is a data request… It’s exponential growth—not a one-to-one.

Sendy SternSVP - Talent & TechnologyFabuwood

In 2020, Fabuwood Director of Technology, David Samet, was leading a team of two. As the company grew, so did demand on his data team, which has since expanded to 15 full-time data professionals.

Challenge

Fabuwood’s Azure SQL database and legacy BI tool, Power BI, didn’t allow the data team to keep up with the growing demand for business insights. Executives needed instant access to sales data in order to make data-driven decisions about product line profitability, supply chain logistics, and manufacturing workflows. David knew that in order to scale, the team would need a modern BI platform.

Power BI is not telling a story. It’s a KPI monitoring tool, and that’s what you’re given to monitor. It’s not something that you can drill into or go from one question to another. Sure, there are some scenarios where Power BI can do what we need, like a calendar with a number of different metrics, but the other 80% of instances take a lot of unnecessary time.

David SametDirector of TechnologyFabuwood

Solution

David began scoping features with internal stakeholders. At the top of their priority list:

• A BI tool that would empower users to quickly and easily access real-time sales revenue by product type, location, customer, and salesperson

• The ability to drill down into the data in order to reduce the need for ad-hoc reporting and increase visibility into profitability

• A clean interface with user-friendly features like natural language search and interactive data visualizations

In his search for a self-service analytics solution, David found ThoughtSpot. This marked his introduction to the modern data stack. Over the next few weeks, David attended Beyond 2022 and connected with other partners, including Fivetran, dbt, and Databricks, in order to build out Fabuwood’s new modern data stack.

With ThoughtSpot, I appreciated that drill down was readily available. It could take up to a week to build each additional, ad-hoc report. So, the fact that drill down works with live data, and goes from the most aggregate level all the way down to the most detailed level—that was definitely an ah-ha moment for me… And there’s an ah-ha moment each time a new user gets it.

David SametDirector of TechnologyFabuwood

In a matter of months, the data team worked with ThoughtSpot and partners to completely transform Fabuwood’s data infrastructure. David started by setting up their Databricks warehouse—a centralized location for all of the company’s data including two custom CRMs, ERP, MRP, WMS, and data around marketing and logistics. By Q4 of that same year, Fabuwood was ready to launch its first ThoughtSpot use case.

Fabuwood’s initial objective was to roll out ThoughtSpot’s self-service, AI-Powered Analytics to the upper-management team. The data team started by recreating their most-used Power BI reports in a Thoughtspot Liveboard. This gave executives the ability to easily access and interact with live sales data from their Databricks warehouse, without having to wait a month to generate a new Power BI report. ThoughtSpot also allowed the data team to set up governance for confidential sales data.

Knowing that was only the tip of what they could self-serve, Fabuwood pulled in JIRA data to create an Analyst Liveboard, which empowered the data team to see their open data requests, understand their response time, and measure the impact of their modern data stack investment. Then, the data team got to work on building workflow analytics for the entire manufacturing floor which would replace a few hundred reports that were being created manually.

Impact

Today, Fabuwood has 50 employees actively using ThoughtSpot to make data-driven decisions in their day-to-day workflow—a significant increase from the initial user base of 10 people. Some of their most popular ThoughtSpot features include the Sales Liveboard, Search for answers, Liveboards for new product launches, and the Analyst Liveboard.

By no means an easy task, the Sales Liveboard has created a single source of truth across the entire Fabuwood organization. With ThoughtSpot, everyone has access to real-time sales data. This has empowered management to proactively address potential issues, accurately forecast SKUs and validate metrics, and overall, have more visibility into Fabuwood’s profitability.

When working with a team member on validating a sales forecast, I was easily able to drill into each item from month to month—down to the door style and the color. Two days after seeing me do it, that same team member came back to me and told me that he was able to do it himself. That’s really the best feedback I can receive.

David SametDirector of TechnologyFabuwood

ThoughtSpot has empowered the data team to meet the growing demand of data requests with speed and ease. Instead of taking a month to build a report in Power BI, the data team is now able to answer stakeholder questions in one day, or less. This has resulted in a 300% increase in queries. And, they can see the underlying data behind each answer using ThoughtSpot’s SQL view. This has significantly reduced data-fueled frustrations across the entire organization.

As Fabuwood looks forward to rolling out their Manufacturing Liveboard, they’re creating a culture that allows data to be incorporated into every user’s workflow, building data trust and fluency. The Fabuwood team is no longer making decisions based on siloed, outdated data. Now, the company has a single source of truth that empowers data-driven decision making and improves Fabuwood’s overall efficiency and profitability.

Before, people would make decisions and then use data to back it up. Today, with ThoughtSpot, people are relying on data to make decisions because they actually have access to the data. Trust and access play a huge role here.

David SametDirector of TechnologyFabuwood

What's next

The data team plans to roll out additional use cases for supply and demand, finance, and marketing. They are also looking for opportunities to embed analytics into users’ workflows. Now that they have self-service, AI-Powered Analytics in their corner, Fabuwood realizes that their opportunities for growth are just getting started.