Industrial Gases Producer Migrates From Toucan Toco To StyleBI For Its Data Analysis Dashboards

Limitations Experienced with Toucan Toco

Toucan Toco provided a polished, guided data storytelling experience, which worked well for executive summaries and high level presentations. However, the industrial gases producer needed more than curated stories, it needed a platform that could handle complex operational data, support ad hoc exploration, and integrate tightly with existing systems. Over time, several pain points became clear.

First, the data model behind Toucan Toco dashboards was relatively rigid for the company’s needs. The industrial gases business involves many dimensions, including plant, product, customer segment, contract type, delivery mode, and safety classification. Analysts often needed to combine new data sources, such as telemetry from additional sensors or new logistics partners, and the process to adapt dashboards was slower than desired.

Second, the team struggled with advanced calculations and complex aggregations. For example, they wanted to calculate real time margin per delivery route, taking into account dynamic fuel costs, driver overtime, and cylinder return rates. Implementing these calculations in Toucan Toco required workarounds and external processing, which increased maintenance overhead and reduced agility.

Third, embedding and integration options were limited for the company’s long term vision. The producer wanted to embed analytics into internal operations portals, customer self service sites, and partner collaboration tools. While Toucan Toco offered some embedding capabilities, the organization needed deeper control over security, theming, and interaction patterns.

Why StyleBI Was Selected as the New Platform

When the analytics team evaluated alternatives, StyleBI stood out as a platform that could combine visual dashboards, pixel perfect reporting, and flexible data mashup in one environment. For an industrial gases producer, this combination was particularly attractive, because the business requires both high level performance dashboards and detailed operational reports.

StyleBI’s data mashup capabilities allowed the team to connect to plant control systems, transportation management systems, ERP data, and external market feeds, then blend them without heavy custom ETL. This meant that analysts could create new views of production efficiency, route profitability, and customer consumption trends more quickly. The platform’s support for complex calculations and reusable expressions also made it easier to implement margin analysis, capacity utilization metrics, and safety compliance indicators.

Another key factor was StyleBI’s strength in embedded analytics. The industrial gases producer wanted to give plant managers, logistics coordinators, and sales teams access to dashboards directly within the applications they already used. StyleBI’s embedding options, combined with fine grained security and theming, allowed the company to present analytics as a seamless part of daily workflows, rather than a separate destination.

Designing Dashboards for Industrial Gases Operations

The migration was an opportunity to rethink dashboard design around the realities of industrial gases operations. With StyleBI, the team created a set of core dashboards that served different roles, while sharing a consistent data model and visual language.

For plant managers, the primary dashboard focused on production performance and asset utilization. Key metrics included compressor uptime, liquefaction efficiency, energy consumption per ton of gas produced, and unplanned downtime incidents. StyleBI’s interactive charts allowed managers to drill from a high level view into specific production lines, shifts, or equipment, using filters and drill down paths instead of static views.

For logistics and distribution, the dashboards emphasized route performance, on time delivery, and cylinder inventory. The team built visualizations that showed delivery routes on a map, colored by margin or on time performance, with the ability to filter by product type or customer segment. StyleBI’s ability to handle geospatial data and complex aggregations made these views both responsive and informative.

Sales and account management teams received dashboards that combined contract data, historical consumption, and forecasted demand. They could see which customers were under or over consuming relative to contract terms, which accounts had rising delivery costs, and where cross selling opportunities existed for specialty gases. Because StyleBI shared the same underlying data model, numbers were consistent across departments, reducing disputes and confusion.

Migration Approach from Toucan Toco to StyleBI

The company approached the migration in phases, to minimize disruption and to validate design decisions early. Rather than attempting a one to one recreation of Toucan Toco dashboards, the team identified the most critical use cases and rebuilt them in StyleBI with improvements.

Phase one focused on executive and plant level dashboards. The team replicated the key KPIs that leadership relied on, such as total production, plant utilization, safety incidents, and on time delivery, then enhanced them with additional context and drill down paths. During this phase, they also established StyleBI’s data connections and security model, ensuring that users saw only the plants, regions, or customers relevant to their roles.

Phase two addressed logistics and sales dashboards. Here, the team took advantage of StyleBI’s data mashup features to bring in new data sources that had not been fully integrated in Toucan Toco, such as detailed fuel consumption logs and external traffic data. This allowed them to build more accurate route profitability analyses and to identify patterns in delivery delays.

Phase three focused on embedded analytics. The company integrated StyleBI dashboards into its internal operations portal, so plant supervisors and dispatchers could access analytics without switching applications. They also began piloting customer facing dashboards, where large industrial clients could log in and see their own consumption trends, delivery history, and contract status.

Benefits Realized After Adopting StyleBI

After the migration, the industrial gases producer began to see tangible benefits in both operational performance and decision making speed. One of the most immediate gains was improved visibility into production and logistics bottlenecks. Plant managers could quickly identify which lines were underperforming, and logistics coordinators could see which routes consistently suffered from delays or low margins.

The ability to perform ad hoc analysis within StyleBI, without exporting data to spreadsheets or external tools, reduced the time required to answer new questions. When energy prices fluctuated, analysts could quickly model the impact on production costs and margins, then share updated dashboards with leadership. When a new safety regulation was introduced, the team could add relevant indicators and filters to existing dashboards, rather than building separate reports.

Consistency of metrics improved as well. Because StyleBI allowed the company to define reusable calculations and shared dimensions, everyone from finance to operations used the same definitions for utilization, margin, and on time performance. This reduced the time spent reconciling numbers between departments and increased trust in the dashboards.

Embedded analytics also changed how people interacted with data. Instead of logging into a separate analytics portal, users encountered dashboards in the context of their daily tasks, such as scheduling maintenance, planning routes, or reviewing customer orders. This increased adoption and made data driven decisions feel like a natural part of the workflow.

Lessons Learned from the Transition

The migration from Toucan Toco to StyleBI offered several lessons for the industrial gases producer. First, the team learned that a dashboard migration is an opportunity to simplify and standardize, not just to replicate. By focusing on core use cases and shared metrics, they avoided carrying forward legacy complexity that no longer served the business.

Second, involving end users early was critical. Plant managers, logistics coordinators, and sales leaders participated in design workshops, where they reviewed early prototypes and suggested improvements. This ensured that the new StyleBI dashboards reflected real operational needs and that users felt ownership over the final product.

Third, the team recognized the importance of a robust data foundation. StyleBI’s flexibility made it easier to connect and blend data, but the quality and governance of that data still mattered. The company invested in cleaning key reference data, such as plant codes, route identifiers, and customer hierarchies, which improved the reliability of analytics across the board.

A Stronger Analytics Foundation for Industrial Gases

For this industrial gases producer, moving from Toucan Toco to StyleBI was a strategic decision that aligned analytics with the realities of a complex, asset intensive business. Toucan Toco had provided a useful starting point for data storytelling, however, the company needed deeper flexibility, stronger operational focus, and better embedding options.

StyleBI delivered a unified environment for dashboards, ad hoc analysis, and pixel perfect reporting, supported by powerful data mashup and calculation capabilities. The result was a set of analytics experiences that served plant operations, logistics, sales, and leadership, all built on a consistent data model. As the industrial gases producer continues to expand, StyleBI provides a scalable foundation for new use cases, from predictive maintenance to customer self service analytics, ensuring that data remains a practical tool for daily decisions, not just a presentation layer.