Key-Findings for Dashboards at Brill

Dashboards with impact at Brill

Brill Publishers wanted to improve its reporting landscape. She opted for a visual impact on the management information. The new reporting tool also provides insight into trends via dashboards. Visual impact and insight into trends save time and quickly bring various details together. 

Scalable, controllable and secure dashboards

Brill wanted to change the reporting landscape because they were not satisfied with the design and infrastructure of the old landscape. The old process took much effort and was prone to error. In particular, around the semi-annual report and annual report. Besides that, creating internal and external reports took too much time and effort. The external reporting and consolidation needed to become more scalable, controllable, and more secure. On top of that, management information required to become more flexible. 

They choose Tableau because of the fast processing and ability to combine information. It also delivered as an off-the-shelf cloud solution, which allowed to speed up on the project.  

Financial and non-financial dashboards 

Brill’s first wish was to create robust finance-related dashboards, such as the dashboard around economic value creation. This report answers questions about the financial drivers within Brill and which operational KPIs support economic value. This provided insight into key figures such as invested capital, turnover, and financial KPIs. Users can also click through to the desired abstraction level. In this way, you can see where the climbers and descenders are, after which you set out the necessary actions. 

 Also, Brill wanted an improvement in their non-financial dashboards. That is why we also created a dashboard for the publishing department. Previously, they made an excel-report for 270 academic journals per magazine. 

The trend is your friend

Because of the simplicity in Tableau, users can do a lot themself within a Self-Service BI solution like Tableau. That fits well with a “co-build” approach, in which Brill divides the project effort, and the key users immediately start using the tool. “You do not buy a solution, but a competence, “claimed the CFO. 

At the moment, recognizing trends is vital in the publishing industry. The publishing industry is in the process of migrating to digital. For our planning and strategy, it is crucial to recognize how fast this migration is going. There is an entirely different profit-structure with digital, but the investment is also different. On the one hand, less working capital is needed; on the other, more money is required to produce the content. In other words: the trend is your friend. 

Finally, Brill was pleased with the result. The new solution saves time, is vital for monitoring trends, brings information from different places together, and looks a lot better.