Analytics software is helping National Grid improve how it collects late payments, a crucial exercise for the utility provider whose customers owe it millions of dollars for gas and electricity. The software helped National Grid escape “Excel hell,” in which analysts manually analyzed data and built ineffective PowerPoint decks to share their findings with business leaders.
The presentations fell flat because they didn’t allow people to look at the data from different angles or perform ad hoc analysis, says Rory Abbazio, National Grid’s director of IT business enablement. Abbazio knew the organization needed a more dynamic tool so he turned to Tableau, a provider of self-service visualization software, for help.
