REFERENCES
About Dotykačka:
At Dotykačka, we develop and sell a multifunctional POS system, including hardware. We also offer our own Dotypay payment solution along with it. We currently operate in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland and together we have over 20,000 customers in these markets.
Our main goal is to make doing business simpler for small and medium-sized companies. We have a vision that the POS system should be the brain of small and medium-sized companies. It should be the place where all business-related data is collected. From transactions and payment methods to margin development and price optimization to managing loyalty programs, reservations, accounting documents, etc. Dotykačka can do all this and much more thanks to its dozens of features – we currently offer over 70 of them and the system is constantly evolving.
Another great advantage of Dotykačka is that it is not closed. On the contrary, it allows various integrations with other services. For example, we cooperate with companies in the field of delivery services or loyalty programs, but also with many others. This results in saving our customers time and money. Thanks to us, they have a perfect overview of everything. Reports, dashboards and their important KPIs are clearly available to them in just a few clicks.
But every customer is different and everyone uses our solution a little differently. Even the data from the POS system is not always uniformly structured. That is also why we started using Tableau from INEKON SYSTEMS, which successfully helps us in this area.
What are you currently handling with Tableau?
In Tableau, we are interested in some great new features such as the filter optimizer, relation update, moving columns in View data and Road data security. We will soon try to implement them in our solution.
How do you work with data?
We analyse a lot of data from various sources: internal data from the sales team concerning our own orders, data from technical support resulting from incoming calls, call centre activity and marketing statistics regarding e-shop traffic, customer segmentation or direct mailing.
Naturally, we also analyse how our customers work with our product. If, for example, they struggle to operate and use the POS system. The operation must be as efficient and user-friendly as possible, so we optimize the product based on this feedback.
Five years ago, we found any questions about merchandise, customers or working with the POS very difficult. It took us a long time to process them, even a week. Today – thanks to Tableau – it’s a few hours at most. The time savings here are enormous. The agenda has also grown a lot because of Covid, but paradoxically it has also helped us move forward.
We learned to work with, for example, the development of sales or attendance in the catering industry as a whole on the fly, and thanks to this we continuously obtained information important for further decision-making in the company. We regularly cooperate with large suppliers and provide them with anonymized and aggregated data illustrating the development of gastronomy in the Czech Republic.
For us, having data that cannot be deciphered down to the level of a specific customer is one of the most important building blocks in terms of occupational safety and security. Our customer data is only ever provided in aggregate so that nominal information for specific customers cannot be derived from it.
What does BI data bring?
Big data gives us market insights that, say, five years ago would have cost us weeks of time. Moreover, at that time, many corporations preferred presentations to reports and advanced BI tools. People were not used to working with big data – which was true for us and for the other side. But thanks to the Tableau server, we were able to significantly speed up and optimize our work in this area. We thus serve many more customers, to whom we can offer a wealth of new perspectives on current issues. And we’re also trying to educate and move them forward in this environment.
In the area of strategic data, we also use statistics for PR and to draw broader connections around market developments. We create price maps, monitor price development over time and changes in market behaviour. Nowadays, when the media often informs us about price hikes of, for example, 50%, we can quickly assess that this is not global data, but often just a local price increase based on information from two or three establishments.
Thanks to Tableau, we can also easily see how traders react when a supplier makes goods more expensive. We can see how this price increase affects individual retailers after a week, a month or if there is still someone who hasn’t reacted to the price change after a year. All of this is information that is of particular interest to manufacturers and suppliers who ask us about it. It is also a competitive advantage for our customers, who can check the average price of a product or service in their area, for example. This makes it possible, for example, to see if their soup price is competitive.
The added value for the end customer (in the sense of an establishment that uses our POS system) is always our first priority. We are currently preparing an improvement of data reporting for these customers, because even small business owners are aware that there is a huge value in data, even though not everyone knows how to use it properly.
How do you collect data?
We collect data from our internal CRM system, Google Analytics, our own activities and findings and, of course, the records generated by the POS system. We work on various databases and then centralize the data and create a separate data source for the Tableau server at the database level, where we then set up automatic reporting. Of course, we have advanced database security and restrict access to only selected analysts. Any other outputs are run over anonymized metadata, over which individual dashboards are then run for internal use, our customers or business partners.
Today we have 90% of all outputs handled through Tableau. That is why we also run our own Tableau server, where we direct licensed accesses of individual users interested in data reporting.
The whole set-up of these processes, and especially convincing customers to give the new reporting method a chance, took a bit longer than we anticipated. As late as 2020, we were still getting requests for presentations and excel spreadsheets. Gradually, however, we have convinced even large corporations of the advantages of live online data and the availability of information in a few clicks, as opposed to large static presentations or spreadsheets. It was certainly helped by the Covid era, when everything was speeding up and there was a need for everyone to learn to work remotely. We also had a lot of help from INEKON SYTSEMS, which educates its customers and tries to show them how to work efficiently and make them as clear and efficient as possible.
What's your background?
We currently have our own Tableau server. In addition to that, we use analysts with the desktop version of Tableau to create reports, set up connections, bridges and permissions. For internal management, we use Explorer licences where management can customize their dashboards as needed. And then we use Viewer licences for our clients or regular users. It is important to mention that all of our clients’ data stays with us for security purposes. We set up licenced access for our clients. We considered several options, but this proved to be the best. This is also a great benefit of Tableau. It already has built-in tools for secure data sharing and publishing.
Why did we pick Tableau?
Of course, we looked at multiple systems. In the end, we chose between Tableau and Power BI. Tableau has much better data visualization from our point of view. It also won us over with better connectivity and communication with the server, and ultimately better overall pricing. We also liked the amount of pre-made connectors.
Our requirements were to have just one easy-to-use tool for data cleaning and output automation, with an internal visual editor and secure data storage. Tableau does all of this. It was also important for us that the tool had support in the Czech Republic. Thanks to our authorized partner INEKON SYSTEMS, Tableau was the clear winner here as well.
We are very pleased that Tableau is moving further and further with each new version. This allows us to move from data cleaning to data interpretation. With Tableau we have gained a tool that clearly gives us more time. Problems with large files, long loading times and collapses when opening them have been eliminated. This makes not only us, but also our customers happier.
What have you gained with Tableau?
Our work is much more efficient and fun. Moreover, we can arrange everything ourselves without having to wait for programming additional connectors, preparing specific reports from external databases or CRM. By automated reporting we minimized unnecessary administration and repetitive activities, thanks to which we did not have to increase the number of employees after deploying Tableau. This is another indisputable advantage. The efficiency of the entire solution is very good and has been steadily increasing over the years we have been using Tableau. We believe that new useful functionalities will continue to be added.
What do you plan to do with Tableau in the future?
In the future, we are definitely considering the possibility of embedding Tableau into our solutions and thus more advanced reporting for some customers. We also want to continue to educate our customers on how to work with their own data, perhaps even using BI tools.
Vladimír Sirotek
Director of Product and Service Development Dotykačka ČR s. r. o.
He manages Dotypos Analytics (part of Dotykačka holding), which deals with processes around data processing, preparation, interpretation and communication of data outputs to clients.
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