Alteryx workflow - average time expected for workflows?

Question

Hi All :)

I am putting together a cost benefit analysis to determine roughly how much money and time Alteryx will save us.

We currently are doing manual excel methods of pulling data together, data cleaning, merging data, adding lookups, refreshing pivots, then publishing / emailing results.

What I was hoping was if people could provide me with some rough ideas of how long it took them to learn to pull together their inital workflows?

We have some tech smart people, so they are quick to learn new software.

Also, with the above process we follow, what sort of time frames would one expect Alteryx to carry out the automated workflow once created?

Once I have some info around this, I can then say "We are spending N hours at X rate to do what we do now. If we purchase Alteryx, it would take Y time to set it up, and then Z would then be the time saved. In the end, we are $XX better off with Alteryx"

Hoping to get a few people to share their rough ideas on how they went so I can use it as a benchmark.

Thanks in advance, look forward to hearing your stories :)

Ladarthure · Answer

Hi @Baz123,

I will share you a few things and thoughts about your question.

First, if you have a team of tech smart people, you will quickly gain time, I would say from day one, just using a few tools, between the transpose and cross tab, it allows to pivot table easily and is something needed by many users but more complex to setup sometimes.

You can also have a great point around having an auditable process and a repeatable process which is a lot better than excel and macros.

If you just use and show those tools you can do great stuff and gain many time :

* Cross Tab
* Transpose
* Join
* multi field formula (to apply the same formula to multiple fields)
* data cleansing
* filter

If you wish to onboard your users, I would advise you to use the community as much as you can, it's a great place to learn and to improve your skill set, the academy contains many videos/tutorials to make you more confident and go deeper. If you can also, using a partner for training or as a booster to develop quickly a process is a great way to gain time.

To finish and from my experience, the first workflow I had to build was a process used for risk management. The process consisted of multiple extracts using Business Objects and then copying and pasting many excel files into one to have a final database which was used for a reporting. The process took 5 full days to a person to produce this report. It took me between a week or a week and a half with no knowledge about the process (I was kind of internal consultant in my company and knew Alteryx for a week or so). The process ended up running in less than 10 minutes but still needed a few specific extracts on business objects to work.In the end, the full process took less than half a day, which means many savings in less than a year :)

I hope it helps.