Zukunftsmotor is an innovative training institute geared towards preparing employment-seeking individuals for careers in technology. Working closely with the Bundesagentur für Arbeit, they help program participants develop technical and soft skills that are highly sought after in the market. Ultimately, their goal is connecting these individuals with companies to fill their open vacancies. The result is a stronger workforce and a more vibrant society that helps those in need.

The Journey to Becoming a Data-Driven Organization

As a smaller organization, Zukunftsmotor doesn’t have dedicated IT or data staff. Nevertheless, they understand well how important timely insights are to making informed decisions and reaching their goals. The first step on this journey was purchasing Salesforce to better structure their processes and keep better records of customer activity. As their usage of Salesforce increased, so did the demand for more streamlined insights. They were faced with a few decisions, such as how many people do they need in their system, and should they stick with CRM analytics or go with something more robust like Tableau Software?

To assist them in the decision-making process, Zukunftsmotor’s CEO reached out to an old friend at InterWorks, Justus Niemzok. Justus walked the Zukunftsmotor through the pros and cons of several options, giving them a full view of the possibilities. Leveraging InterWorks close partnership with Tableau, Zukunftsmotor decided to go that route and purchased Tableau Cloud and Tableau Desktop. They began exploring the platform for a time on their own, until early 2024 when they held their strategy meeting to outline goals for the year. A top priority was the need to become a more data-driven organization more quickly. So, they reached out to InterWorks again for more hands-on help in accelerating their journey.

Accelerating Progress with an InterWorks Dashboarding Sprint

The InterWorks team got right to work with a three-week Tableau dashboarding sprint. First, the InterWorks team held in-person kickoff meetings with stakeholders from Zukunftsmotor’s Sales and Learning Experience teams to understand what requirements their dashboards needed to meet to be useful. They identified over 30 unique requirements that would be applied to 10 different dashboards.

The Sales team wanted clear and accurate funnels to help them better organize their day-to-day operations. The Learning Experience team wanted to track participant demographics as well as metrics like show-up rates, cancellation rates and success rates for participants who find employment. Though Zukunftsmotor is not paid based on success rates, they have a strong internal drive for quality service and positive outcomes. More than anything, they wanted to be able to back up the impact they make with data.

Making a Difference in a Matter of Weeks

Using extensive dashboarding best practices knowledge, InterWorks was able to build Zukunftsmotor’s Tableau dashboards right on schedule. The impact on their operations was near immediate, with new and improved visibility across all the requirements and metrics Zukunftsmotor identified from the outset. It’s worth mentioning that Zukunftsmotor’s ability to get set up in Tableau Cloud so quickly is previously unheard of. Setting up and hosting a server in the past, even under the best circumstances, was a time-consuming affair. But Zukunftsmotor took full advantage of Tableau Cloud’s rapid setup and ease of use, then brought in expert help to jump start their dashboarding efforts with InterWorks. The result is a vibrant and growing analytics core that came to fruition in the span of one month.

As Zukunftsmotor navigates their future and that of their participants, they will now have reliable data to support their decisions. In fact, Zukunftsmotor is so pleased with the progress that several other departments within the organization are beginning to ask how Tableau and InterWorks can make an impact on their operations.