Forecasting with Tableau

Media Impact

Media Impact is the central advertising marketer of Axel Springer SE as well as other clients and is one of the largest cross-media advertising marketers in Germany. The title portfolio includes the Axel Springer brands BILD and WELT as well as high-reach titles such as Hamburger Abendblatt, Berliner Morgenpost and Business Insider. In the area of commercial management, which controls all of the company's forecasting and planning processes, M2 was tasked with optimizing the forecasting process.

Customer situation

  • Error-prone forecasting process due to high manual effort and numerous individual steps
  • Complex advertising revenue forecasts are not flexible
  • Forecasts require manual input from various departments involved, such as marketing and management, each time and are therefore very time-consuming
  • Asynchronous presentation of data

Procedure

  • Development of a web service integrated into Tableau and several dashboards
  • Enabling employees to enter their forecasts directly into a Tableau dashboard
  • Creation of a Redshift database that stores all created forecasts
  • Enablement of commercial management to control processes centrally in the future

Project result

  • Tableau as a planning tool: Submission of forecasts greatly simplified and less time-consuming thanks to direct input into individual dashboards
  • Development and use of the M2 Form Builder, our Tableau Writeback Extension, to integrate certain functions into Tableau dashboards
  • Creation of interactive dashboards with forecasting and commenting functionality will therefore also be possible independently in future
  • Creation of forecasts is thus flexible instead of statically limited to one use case