1. christopher patrick & brandi beals
artisan partners: a data-driven organization
october 1, 2015
2. -2-
ABOUT US
Christopher Patrick
• Data Analytics Lead
• 3 Years Using Tableau
• BI Symposium Viz War Champion
Brandi Beals
• Data Developer
• 5 Years Using Tableau
• Co-Lead of Tableau User Group
3. -3-
ARTISAN PARTNERS
• Founded in 1994
• 7 Investment Teams
• 15 Investment Strategies
• 352 Associates
• Over $100 Billion of Assets
Under Management
• Principal Offices
– Milwaukee
– San Francisco
– Atlanta
– New York
– Kansas City
– London
5. -5-
ROAD MAP
• Departments
– Distribution
– Marketing &
Communications
– Human Capital
• Data Sources
– Sales Data
– Google Analytics
– Web Services
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STRATEGY INTEGRITY
Artisan utilizes Tableau for reporting fund information, reviewing macro trends, and managing
strategy integrity
Pre-Tableau
• 15 sets of Holdings, Performance, and
Financial Characteristics data
• Teams handle process uniquely to them
• Manual data gathering
• Multiple sources of truth
• Disparate data sources
• 125 pages for 1 team
• 500 pages of printed material per quarter
Post-Tableau
• Leverage Data Governance for single
trusted set of data
• Interactive dashboards
• Story Points
• Still designing for print
• 50 pages of printed material per quarter
• Cut out over 2 weeks of analyst time
• Focus on analysis
Chris
Artisan employee 4 years
3x Tableau Conference Attendee
Tableau has given me a level of exposure that most developers & analysts can only dream of. Delivering insights to key business members directly is a unique part of my role due to Tableau
Brandi
Use Tableau
TUG
Career path
Chris
Artisan was founded here in Milwaukee 20 years ago by Andy Ziegler. Since that time the firm has organically grown around the principle of centralized business operations with fully autonomous investment teams. So what does that mean? Each of our investment teams operate fully independently of each other with no shared research or analysts. However, each team leverages the centralized business operations that are here in Milwaukee for everything ranging from IT, to Marketing, to Legal and Compliance. This allows our investment professionals to focus on one thing: investing.
Our data analytics group resides within the Information Technology department and services both the business operations groups and the 7 investment teams.
Chris
We currently have about 75 registered Tableau users across the firm in the departments highlighted.
In the 3 short years that we’ve had Tableau in house, it has propagated to almost every business operations group and a number of investment teams.
Usage ranges from our senior management receiving a daily executive summary, to Compliance associates building ad-hoc dashboards, to our trade operations department tracking commissions, fund valuations, and exceptions.
Artisan is fundamentally a data driven organization, and Tableau has proven itself as a key enabler for us to quickly deliver insights
Chris
However there are still a few key areas across the organization that we intend to work with in the future. This would entail handling new data sources for the distribution and sales team, marketing and communication team, and human capital. With Tableau’s ever growing support for data connectors we have plans to further integrate into our application architecture by leveraging our internal web services directly.
Chris
And now to show what this all means, I’m sure that everyone in this room can relate to this story. A key business group has “The Report.” A report that takes weeks to assemble, lives purely in Excel and PowerPoint, is produced repeatedly, and is integral to business decisions. Raise your hands if you support this process or have that type of report in your organization.
In our case, our report was for a process called “Strategy Integrity” – a quarterly meeting in which an analyst spent multiple weeks, each quarter, preparing over 500 pages of printed materials, for a meeting he couldn’t even attend. Each page in this report had anywhere from 1-5 manually created Excel charts or graphs on it.
The data needs for this project were huge. Over the course of two quarters we worked with the analysts and our data governance group to consolidate the feeds into a single, shareable, data set. We then leveraged Tableau and story points to build a reusable workbook that was interactive and informative.
Brandi will now walk through what this data driven process looks like in Tableau today.
Brandi
Individual strategy
Benchmarks
Replaced pages
Reusable
For an individual strategy we instantly see the trends of various metrics. Additional functionality was added to be able to compare the values to their respective benchmarks. This one dashboard replaced pages of raw data and is quickly getting to the most meaningful data points. It’s also reusable. A user can filter to look at any of our strategies versus any benchmark and for any time period without having to manipulate any data. We built these in such a way that switching between quarterly or monthly reports is as easy and flipping a parameter.
Brandi
Replaced pages
Best practices
Shifts within portfolio
Above/below benchmark
Previous difficulty
This, again, replaced multiple pages while adding value and following visualization best practices. Even without a background in finance, you can see the large shifts within the portfolio and where we were above or below the benchmark. You can imagine how difficult it would be to figure that out with half a dozen charts with independent scales across multiple pages. Sub-industry was added for more detail.
This type of analysis allows decision makers to easily synthesize the data into insight.
Brandi
Allocation
Risk/exposure analysis
Greece and China
In a similar vein, looking at how a strategy is allocated across geographic regions is key to our risk and exposure analysis. The recent events in Greece and China highlight the executive team’s need for this type of analysis.
Brandi
Coordinates
Movement over time
Formatted for business
Wasn’t possible before Tableau
Every month each strategy is given a set of coordinates that represent the investment style and market cap range. This dashboard visualizes those coordinates and the strategies’ movements over time.
Point out the bottom left strategy has remained fairly consistent, having small value oriented holdings, while the middle one has drifted up and to the right, showing a shift to larger growth oriented holdings.
This dashboard puts the data in a format the business already understands while making data-driven decision intuitive and easy. This visualization wasn’t possible before Tableau.
Brandi
Before Tableau
Mitigate risk
Patterns
Dashboards available/PDF
Analyst time
Cut weeks of work
Additionally, this type of visualization is new. Before Tableau this dashboard used to be a multipage cross tab that was printed in landscape with small font and in no meaningful order. Now we’re able to show what companies are held in multiple strategies in order to mitigate risk. One major benefit to this dashboard is that patterns become more apparent.
These dashboards, along with many others, are available to our executive team via Tableau Server and our intranet. We have a batch process that automates the generation of a PDF. Now our analysts can spend their time finding interesting data points and analyzing them instead of compiling data in Excel and manipulating Excel charts. Overall, this has cut weeks of work into hours and truly shows the value of data-drive processes across our organization.
Brandi
Focus on data-driven decision making
Put Tableau Server to work
Users create
Self-service training/support
SharePoint site
Along the way we have built a culture of analytics and focus on data-driven decision making. We put Tableau Server to work with extracts, subscriptions, and interactions through our intranet. Our users create their own workbooks and data sources, as well as use our mastered, governed data sets. Given the self-service nature of our organization we provide trainings on an as-needed basis in addition to having bi-monthly workshops and weekly office hours so people can get the support they need. An Analytics - Community of Practice group has been created on SharePoint to foster a center of excellence.
Chris
We will be available for questions during the panel
Or feel free to contact us
Thank you
