Oldcastle CFO advises his board on strategy

Oldcastle is North America’s leading manufacturer of building products and materials like masonry and hardscapes, also known as “sexy concrete.” With 20 divisions and 206 facilities across Canada and the United States, Oldcastle first found success with Tableau by turning a 500-page monthly report into a governed, enterprise-wide accessible dashboard for their employees. Ian Crabtree, Chief Financial Officer of Oldcastle Masonry & Hardscapes, was initially skeptical of business intelligence solutions. But at Ian’s behest, the company now touts more than 3000 dashboards and 1800 dashboard subscribers, tracking 78,000 SKUs. Oldcastle’s business intelligence team leads the charge by working with IT to adequately provide governance and security and helping enable smart and rapid business decisions in their competitive industry.

Ian Crabtree, Oldcastle’s CFO of Masonry & Hardscapes, once appropriately equated the size of the company’s monthly report as “the size of a paver you’d put in your backyard.”

When Ian first hired Paul Lisborg, Manager of Business Intelligence at Oldcastle, he tasked his new employee to replace the 45-page PDF that arrived in people’s inboxes every morning.

It showed the most recent sales numbers by divisions, by business line, and by facility. But due to the static nature of PDFs, numbers were often outdated soon after publishing.

With Tableau, Paul created a dashboard that provides a digestible overview of Oldcastle’s 206 distinct manufacturing facilities and allows employees to ask follow-up questions. The dashboard is refreshed every night so the data stays fresh. It also has row-level security, meaning teams only see data they have permission to view.

Once people realized they could ask their own questions of the data, the response was almost immediate.

“We started getting phone calls: ‘Can you add this filter?’ ‘I want to see the data in this fashion,” says Paul.

It was clear people wanted to see the data in their own ways. So Paul, with the help of several analysts, created a library of templates containing vetted data. Using web authoring, people can use these vizzes as a starting point for their own analysis and share their findings.

“We can give them a data set with predefined measures and dimensions, and they can build their own intelligence through the web-authoring tool. And it’s one single source of truth,” says Paul. “Whether a gentleman builds it in San Diego or a lady builds the same information in Chicago, they’ll be getting the same answer, but at the same time, they can manipulate the data to their specific needs.”

The Oldcastle sales team spearheads an inventory of over 78,000 stock-keeping units (SKUs). It’s imperative for the team to quickly and easily identify losses, track margins, and seize potential opportunities across their enterprise. But empowering a sales force in a scalable way proved difficult. Now, by pulling ERP and Salesforce data into Tableau, the sales team always has access to the full picture.

“Now a sales rep can come into a dashboard, look to what he sold yesterday, look to how he’s doing this month, look how he’s doing year to date. And then he’s able to drill down into: What customers are doing well? What are those customers buying? What are my margins on those items?” says Paul.

Everyone from sales managers to individual sales representatives look to Tableau dashboards to track quotas on a daily and monthly basis. For a sales team, having access to insights from the vast quantities of customer data is empowering.

“Now, [a salesperson has] Tableau dashboards. They might not even be aware they’re looking at a Tableau dashboard. But the information that they are receiving from that is much more powerful than having rows and columns of information,” says Paul.