Silvaris Corporation was founded in 2000 by a team of forest industry professionals to provide technological advancement in the lumber and building material sector. Silvaris is the first e-commerce...

Silvaris Corporation was founded in 2000 by a team of forest industry professionals to provide technological advancement in the lumber and building material sector. Silvaris is the first e-commerce platform in the United States specifically for forest products and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It is a leading wholesale provider of industrial wood products and surplus building materials. Silvaris sells its products and provides international logistics services to more than 3,500 customers. To manage various processes that are involved in a transaction, they created a proprietary online trading platform to track information flow related to transactions between traders, accounting, credit, and logistics. This allowed Silvaris to share its real-time information with its customers and partners. But due to the rapidly changing prices of materials, it became necessary for Silvaris to get a real-time view of data without moving data into a separate reporting format. Silvaris started using Tableau because of its ability to connect with and visualize live data. Due to dashboards created by Tableau that are easy to understand and explain, Silvaris started using Tableau for reporting purposes. This helped Silvaris in pulling out information quickly from the data and identifying issues that impact their business. Silvaris succeeded in managing online versus offline orders with the help of reports generated by Tableau. Now, Silvaris keeps track of online orders placed by customers and knows when to send renew pushes to which customers to keep them purchasing online. Also, analysts of Silvaris can save time by generating dashboards instead of writing hundreds of pages of reports by using Tableau.

Questions for Discussion

1. What was the challenge faced by Silvaris?

2. How did Silvaris solve its problem using data visualization with Tableau?

 What We Can Learn from This Application Case Many industries need to analyze data in real time. Real-time analysis enables the analysts to identify issues that impact their business. Visualization is sometimes the best way to begin analyzing the live data streams. Tableau is one such data visualization tool that has the capability to analyze live data without bringing live data into a separate reporting format.