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Analytics

News, events, thought leadership and more.
BethN
Alteryx Alumni (Retired)

Erik Miller - Western UnionMuch of today’s business success is measured by ROI (Return on Investment), but often that ROI can extend beyond dollars and cents. Such is the case for Erik Miller, Senior Systems Engineer of Cyber Security Analytics at Western Union, who embraced self-service data analytics to help take back control of his career and his life.

 

For Erik, this ROI has translated into:

 

  1. Time saved – a 100 hours a month process was reduced to just 5.5 minutes, and it’s repeatable
  2. A job promotion
  3. The ability to spend more time with his family

 

Improving processes

Western Union is the undisputed leader in moving money worldwide, with 2.4M terminals in over 200 countries. To put their business into perspective, in 2015 alone, they transferred $150 billion dollars for clients, and executed 31 transactions every second.

 

Data analyst Erik Miller was asked to build a process to detect fraud from transactional information captured across millions of terminals. The resulting data totaled well over 4 million records from 5 different systems and 36 input files – 63 GB of new data every month!

 

Erik started using Excel and Access to analyze the data and create risk profiles, but the process took over 100 hours every month, which was virtually unsustainable, and caused him to miss a lot of nights and weekends with his family. Sound familiar to anyone?

 

He went to an analytics event and heard a lot of people talking about Alteryx, so he decided to download a free trial. After investing 30 minutes with tutorials on the website, he was able to develop a workflow in 2½ hours. Erik reduced a 100-hour process into a workflow that ran in 5½ minutes. This is recurring savings every month. Plus, since the Alteryx workflow can connect directly to his source data versus the Excel extracts he relied on previously, he is more confident in his results, because he’s always working with the most recent information. Less time, more confidence in results - sounds good, and there’s more.

 

Western Union ROIGetting promoted

Erik’s work earned him a promotion to lead a team of analysts. Together, the team is taking the project forward, developing a strategic security analytics program that will assess the risks posed to Western Union by malicious insiders, hackers, and uninformed users. With Alteryx, they are scouring data to find anomalies and behavioral patterns that are indicative of malicious behavior. Then, they will push the results to Tableau to share findings with senior management so internal changes can be made.

 

Improving his quality of life

The efficiencies Erik has seen from implementing Alteryx and self-service data analytics has translated into ROI in his personal life as well. According to Erik, Alteryx “did give me my life back, that’s for sure. With it, it freed up those nights and those weekends I was spending with the data…and now I’m spending it with my family and it makes us all a lot happier.” Placing ROI on spending more time with his daughter seems to us to be one of those intangible values.

 

To learn more about Erik and his experience with Alteryx, check out his slides or watch his presentation recording from our Inspire conference.

 

Want to be more like Erik? Experience Alteryx for yourself. Download a 14-day trial and see how you can save time in your work day and your personal day. We promise you’ll see both professional and personal impact.

 

Be Like Erik. Try Alteryx Now.