ALDI’s Tableau Journey: From Producing Reports to Producing Dynamic Information

Customer Story

ALDI is the common brand of two German family-owned discount supermarket chains with over 10,000 stores in 20 countries. As of 2020, ALDI is on track to be the third largest U.S. grocery retailer with over 2,100 stores.

• Founders: Karl and Theo Albrecht, 1946
• US Headquarters: Batavia, IL
• First US-based Store: Iowa, 1976
• Locations: 11,235

The Business Challenge

ALDI’s reporting processes were outdated and they set out to improve and modernize them. With over 800 reports (several with duplicate information and KPIs) they sought to identify, create, and distribute the most relevant KPIs and eliminate redundant and unused reports. They also wanted to establish exception-based reporting and improve business supervision.

“ALDI is about simplicity, but when it came to reporting there was nothing simple about it,” said Derek Russo, Director Finance Administration at ALDI.

ALDI spent significant time collecting data from various sources and many of these data collection efforts were duplicated. This process caused confusion and information overload across the company. Leaders across the company received too many reports from various sources that required careful attention. This was the result of significant amounts of time repeating the same tasks on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis with little consistency on timing of reports.    ​

Why CoEnterprise & Tableau?

ALDI decided to go with CoEnterprise due to their comprehensive experience and the overall vision and plan they brought to the table.

“It was because of CoEnterprise’s end-to-end vision and expertise that we were able to transform reporting into an enterprise solution,” said Russo.

Tableau enabled ALDI to get off Excel and empowered their analysts with the agility, security, and blended data sources they needed to perform their job at the highest level. It also ensured the right user was given the appropriate access with Row Level Security and Entitlements. Tableau also enabled adoption visualization and helped them consolidate KPIs and dashboarding through its native functionality. 

Measurable Results

With a new reporting solution for both their warehouse and in-store operations, ALDI is able to focus on the KPIs that matter most to their business. For their warehouse team, CoEnterprise implemented a landing page that showcases the most critical metrics on a monthly basis that can be used by C-suite executives and warehousing and logistics management to supervise and improve performance. 

Additionally, they’ve also implemented Slack integration with Tableau that allows store managers to be alerted when there are runaway queries to save money and minimize costs. 

• $3.2M annually WMRT
• $15M operations dashboards
• 4500 licenses
• 2100 stores using Tableau

With the help of CoEnterprise and Tableau, ALDI now has over 4,500 employees using Tableau today–empowering them to tackle the most important problems in the most important areas. Tableau has also enabled them to develop a data-driven culture, improve supervision of performance, and celebrate their accomplishments while identifying  areas of improvement.