In this episode of Alter Everything, we talk with Nicola Woodhouse, a data administrator at NHS Supply Chain and Alteryx Ace! They discuss the upcoming Alteryx’s Inspire 2025 conference in Las Vegas, Nicola's career journey, and how her team uses Alteryx to automate procurement processes and tackle data challenges. Nicola shares insights about managing an internal Alteryx user group, streamlining reporting during COVID-19, and the impact of Alteryx on their workflows. Make sure to tune in for tips on starting an internal user group and overcoming legacy system challenges.
Panelists
- Nicola Woodhouse, Category Performance Manager @ NHS Supply chain - @PuffinPanic, LinkedIn
- Megan Bowers, Sr. Content Manager @ Alteryx - @MeganBowers, LinkedIn
Topics
Transcript
Ep 180 Final MixdownUsing Alteryx for Supply Chain Optimization
Introduction and Event Announcement
[00:00:00] Megan Bowers: Hey, Alter Everything. Listeners, we wanted to let you know that you can join fellow data lovers, analysts and innovators at the Alteryx Inspire 2025 conference. It's the analytics event of the year, happening May 12th through the 15th in Las Vegas. Head over to alteryx.com/inspire to register now. We would love to see you there.
Meet Nicola Woodhouse
[00:00:27] Megan Bowers: Welcome to Alter Everything, a podcast about data science and analytics culture. I'm Megan Bowers, and today I am talking with Nicola Woodhouse, a data administrator at NHS Supply Chain and Alteryx Ace. In this episode, we chat about how her team uses Alteryx to increase automation for procurement processes, the data challenges she faces, how she runs an internal Alteryx user group and more.
Let's get started.
Hi, Nicola. It's great to have you on our show today. Thanks so much for joining. Could you give a quick introduction to yourself for our listeners?
[00:01:07] Nicole Woodhouse: Um, I'm Nicola Woodhouse. I work for NHS Supply Chain in the uk, so that's the National Health Service. I have been at Alteryx Ace since March, 2024 and have been using Alteryx for five years now.
[00:01:22] Megan Bowers: Awesome. Yeah.
Nicola's Journey into Data
[00:01:23] Megan Bowers: I'd love to just start off with a little bit more about your background in data and how you got into your current role at NHS.
[00:01:32] Nicole Woodhouse: I've had a wide and varied career. So I started off doing a computer science master's, so this was a one year master's way back when, and then promptly left the IT industry and eventually started working in a school.
So I worked with children between ages of three and 11, 4, 10 years. So during that, I ended up doing a lot of work with data for assessments and so on with the children. 'cause for the most part, I worked with the three and four year olds, very youngest. So we assessed constantly. It wasn't like doing exams once a year or anything like that.
And I loved working with the data and I thought, do you know what? I need to get back into that. That's what I want to be doing. So I managed to get out of the education system, which took a while and into being a data administrator, and basically the career grew from there. I worked with an on online retail company for about 18 months.
Before joining NHS supply chain in June, 2019 as their data administrator or as a data administrator for one part of NHS supply chain. It's a big company now. I was working for a very small part of that.
[00:02:45] Megan Bowers: Oh, that's a super cool journey. I love hearing just the really varied ways that our users get into working with data.
You really can come from any path and . Glad you found your way back into the data field.
Using Alteryx at NHS Supply Chain
[00:02:59] Megan Bowers: Could you share a little bit about how you're using Alteryx now in your daily work at NHS Supply chain?
[00:03:07] Nicole Woodhouse: So I work with, mainly with one part of the company who do. Procurement. So the most part of what our procure company does is procurement.
And I work with the diagnostics category in procurement, and I work with those category managers basically to make their lives easier. So I've spent the last five years improving processes, doing automation. Reducing the amount of manual work that those category managers have to do. Producing reporting, and I have a a team now who are.
Also doing this for me, 'cause uh, not enough hours for me to do it all myself. So we work at providing data democratization, basically self-service data facilities, many of which are based on an Alteryx background that pulls the data in from various different sources around the company. Because we're not blessed with a single source of the truth.
So we spent quite a bit of time doing data manipulation, standardization, analysis, as much as anything else.
[00:04:16] Megan Bowers: And could you share a little bit more about this use case you mentioned to me earlier around equipment reporting that you guys are working on with Alteryx?
[00:04:26] Nicole Woodhouse: So during Covid of Health Service, does what it says on the tin.
We were doing an awful lot of dealing with products, making sure there were enough products available for all of the different hospitals and health service providers around the country. I. Which led us to the understanding that we needed to improve how we were managing our product, how we were managing the availability of the products, because obviously during Covid, a very high demand.
We have since then built a. Process based on Alteryx, which takes in data about the demand, all of the sales for various products that come into our catalog measures that against what we know is the supply of those products. Checks to see if anybody's holding excess stock basically in, in the hospitals, and then assigning products to hospitals based on their need.
On what they would like to hold, so they've got it in the background. So we started building that obviously during a very difficult time. It was difficult for everybody. There's no doubt there, and we continue to work on improving that process. It's built to a bigger process now. There's a, a whole project team working on in the next stage of that so that we can, where necessary and.
If necessary, monitor, demand and make sure that it is being fairly allocated around the country so that everybody gets what they need as far as possible. So that is all based on an Alteryx backend, pulling in all of the data from the different data sources, producing the reports. That go out to the appropriate stakeholders and it's just quite exciting actually seeing how it's grown from, oh my goodness.
We need to be able to make sure that everybody's getting fair run at the stock to do, you know what? We can do that now. So a lot's changed in a few years. It's been a lot.
[00:06:30] Megan Bowers: That's really awesome. It sounds like quite the transformation that you've gone through with that process and Yeah.
[00:06:36] Nicole Woodhouse: Yeah. I'm, I'm in no way claiming responsibility for doing it.
I've been involved, of course, in that process, and it's been very exciting, very interesting. As I say, it's still ongoing, and we're at next stage. But it was quite exciting to be involved in that and making sure that we can play our part as NHS supply chain to provide what the public need. 'cause that's what it comes down to at the end, if you want.
The nutshell version of what we do is we make people better. We provide that service for people, we save lives. It's what the NHS does its best, and we're a very small part of that big machine.
[00:07:15] Megan Bowers: I love that use case. Super interesting to work on. For sure.
Impact of Alteryx on Procurement
[00:07:20] Megan Bowers: So if we kind of like zoom out and think about what the impact of Alteryx has been for your team, for your organization, what impacts have you seen over your time there?
[00:07:32] Nicole Woodhouse: I. When I joined the company back in 2019, everything was being done manually, so spreadsheets ruled and any analysis was being done manually in spreadsheets, was taking a lot of time. We do a lot of procurement exercises, so we. Provide almost a broker service. So we sit at NHS supply chain. We sit between the suppliers and the trusts, the hospitals and so on that use our services.
We provide what is classed as a compliant route to market. So we do the legal exercise that allows the trust to buy off a catalog of products that are available by the suppliers. So it has to go through legal process, public procurement, it has to follow the legal process. So we provide that, that intermediary.
So a lot of what we do is a tendering process. So we'll go out to tender. We're saying, okay, anybody who provides products for list of different products on, I don't know, pathology or renal dental, could be anybody, orthopedics, whichever area it is, we go out to the market and say, these are the product we are looking to have on available on our catalog.
The suppliers provide a lot of data about the products that they, they put on the catalog. I was working quite early on in my career with the pathology team, which is why I mentioned pathology in particular, and they had 140 suppliers tendering for the pathology framework. They were going to manage all of that manually.
And I said, why are we doing this manually? Because I had barely recently started with the company. Why are we still doing this manually? There's better ways, and it grew from there. So that was five years or so ago. Now, last year we repeated that same tendering exercise for pathology. They had 170 suppliers and managed the tendering process, especially if there's one part of the process where they have to go back to the suppliers and say, these are all the inconsistencies we found in your data, or these are questions we have about what data you've provided us or the information you've provided us.
That would take their whole team of six people, two weeks solid of checking through the data line by line, and they managed to do that in half an hour because of Alteryx. It's a big difference. A big change in thinking. I spent quite a lot of time with the teams that I was working with quite closely when I first started.
Spent quite a lot of time saying to them things like, if you are doing something over and over again. Come to me and ask me if this is something we can automate and that learning it embedded. And so they started coming to me and saying, Nicola, is this something that Alteryx can do? Or, I'm so frustrated with this spreadsheet, it keeps on hanging.
I can't get any work done. Can Alteryx do it? And I love just going and sitting next to somebody and they'd say, okay, here's my spreadsheet. And I'd take the spreadsheet, drop it into Alteryx for them, and then say, okay, what are you trying to do? As they're telling me what they're trying to do, I'd be dropping tools onto the canvas and building it, and by the time we'd finished having a conversation about what they wanted to do, they'd have their answer.
And that is the difference. , you know, it's a big difference. It makes a huge amount of difference. I've been recently doing some work on actually quantifying that benefit, and I'm not going to share numbers now, but I am absolutely chuffed with the numbers that I've managed to come up with for one year's work.
On processes using Alteryx. The reason why I'm doing this, by the way, is because in the last two years we had a process where the small companies who were contracted to do the work for NHS Supply chain have all been insourced into a single company, so eight companies coming together as a single company.
Of those companies. There were two parts of the company, two companies who were using Alteryx, and we both said, no, we can't do without Alteryx. We are bringing it with us when we're insourced. So the companies, it is as a whole now is working to quantify and analyze the benefits that diff all of the different systems are bringing to the company.
And I've been working on the Alteryx element of that and it's fascinating. It's given me some really good information about how much benefit the company is gaining through the use of Alteryx.
[00:12:14] Megan Bowers: They, we'll have you back on once you shared broadly and widely about all the awesome things you guys are doing all the time.
You're saving just from that one use case alone, you were talking about earlier. I can imagine you expand that to other departments. Other suppliers, it's just like exponential, the amount of value that you can start to get in an organization like that, so that's really great.
Data Challenges and Solutions
[00:12:38] Megan Bowers: You've touched on this a little bit, but it sounds like there's some kind of unique data challenges that you and your team face that Alteryx helps you solve.
You know, working with public services systems across different hospitals. What are some of those data challenges that you find yourself having?
[00:12:57] Nicole Woodhouse: Possibly one of the biggest challenges we have is that because we are a public service, we still run on a lot of legacy systems, so it's a lot more difficult, I would imagine, to modernize when you're in it as such a big public organization, and it takes a lot of time.
So things have been gradually improving as expected, but it does mean that we have different systems. Around the company, around the whole system, not just within NHS supply chain, but around the whole of the NHS, where actually we need to pull that data together into a single source. It's challenging because some of the data has very specific requirements, so some of the systems that we're using are still
1980s systems, so, oh boy. We are limited to ASCI characters, for example, in some situations. So we have to do a lot of data cleansing, removing things like copyright marks and trademarks and all sorts of other non ASCI characters that are used so freely these days. So we do quite a bit of that from processing data that has to go into those systems.
We do quite a bit of. Standardization of data because data coming out of different systems, for example, has the same supplier, but with the supplier name written slightly differently.
[00:14:23] Megan Bowers: Yeah, I feel like that's come up in supply chain a lot. It's like we can't agree on these suppliers. What do we call them?
Yeah,
[00:14:30] Nicole Woodhouse: what Alteryx? So standardization of supplier names of trust, names, even hospital names, all of these sorts of things. Product names. Actually doing a lot of work, standardizing all of those things. And of course, in some cases we're dealing with data that's coming in from. 200 or so different sources who may all have different systems to hold the same data because each trust or each hospital has grown up and evolved and chosen their own systems to use.
So the data may be same data. in different formats. Some of it comes in maybe in PDFs, some comes in spreadsheets, some comes in Word document. Some of it, thankfully, not very much these days, comes in as the body of an email. You know, all of these sorts of things. So we've got to then merge all of this data from different sources in different formats that basically the same, just different.
We do a lot of work on that as well, so it's quite a challenge.
[00:15:33] Megan Bowers: Definitely. That's awesome that Alteryx can handle all those different formats and hopefully as you standardize and automate more, it becomes just easier and easier to manage. But I'm sure our listeners who are at . Whether it's large companies that just have a long history, so they've acquired, they have different systems or public sector, having older systems, you know, not upgrading as quickly, legacy, things like that.
I think it's a relatable struggle for sure, unfortunately in the data analytics space. But it sounds like you guys are definitely tackling that .
[00:16:11] Nicole Woodhouse: We're working very hard to try and make things better for the general public, for the hospitals, for the people who are using them. We're trying our best to improve those systems to make their life easier.
[00:16:23] Megan Bowers: And since your team you mentioned had been using Excel before, how has Alteryx been better for tackling some of these challenges?
[00:16:33] Nicole Woodhouse: Some of the Excel spreadsheets are so big and the data sources are so big that actually working within Excel was, as I said earlier, Excel would just hang. It would crash. It would be extremely slow.
So being able to just use Excel as a data source, which we quite often still do, it's probably going to be like that for a long time. Having spreadsheets coming in from various sources, but actually being able to just use that as a base of data. Rather than having to do analysis within Excel has made life a lot easier because Alteryx just sucks in the data, does the analysis in a matter of seconds, and can then produce an output, a report in whatever format the user needs.
We can provide them just the data they need at different levels. I love being able to actually have those regular reports where we're doing this all of the time. I run the Alteryx workflow. My team runs the Alteryx workflow, and it just automatically emails the report out to the people who need it. So we don't even go out of Alteryx to deliver those results.
We do it within Alteryx for a lot of cases, not everything, but for a lot of cases we do that.
[00:17:46] Megan Bowers: And we can definitely put some resources in the show notes for any listeners who are curious about that emailing functionality and some of the reporting and automation that Alteryx can help unlock. But yeah, that's a great use case that I hear about.
I do
[00:18:01] Nicole Woodhouse: love my reporting tools. ? Yeah, I'm going to say this. I do love my reporting tools and I, the email tool is just one of my favorites. Makes my life so much easier.
[00:18:12] Megan Bowers: Definitely.
Running an Internal Alteryx User Group
[00:18:13] Megan Bowers: So shifting gears a bit, we had you do an ACE Spotlight blog, which was great, and we'll definitely link that in the show notes too.
And in that, you mentioned that you run an internal Alteryx user group. So what has that experience been like for you at your company?
[00:18:32] Nicole Woodhouse: It's been interesting. It's been fun. It's been challenging. I started the, or proposed even having an internal user group because we were bringing together so many different companies, as I mentioned previously, where we had scattered users.
Once we've got Alteryx internally. It was shared with members of the team in different areas of the business, and I wanted to create a community of users who could share that experience. Some of us more experienced, some of us were just starting out, and I wanted to actually make sure that we had a centralized resource where those newer users or the more experienced users who just wanted to share experiences could meet.
Share and learn. It's been fun. I now work on a cadence. We have a training session one month, and then a user group session. A more discussion session, feedback. Share your challenges, share your successes type of session or. Feedback about anything that's been going on, and we do it alternating. So every month we have a session and it's either a training session or a user group session.
The thing I finding I find most challenging is how busy everybody is. So of course, it's then very difficult to get everybody together or as many people as possible together. It's been absolutely fantastic having a core. Number of users who are regular, they're reliable, they're always there, and I am encouraging them to go out and share with the other users who are not attending for whatever reasons, and accept that with very busy people, but sharing those experiences with those other users to encourage them to come along as well.
So that is the biggest challenge. Is having everybody or as many people as possible attend, I would say, and finding ways to encourage those people who are not attending regularly to attend is a challenge that I'm still working on. It's interesting because we were separate companies, but doing the same processes, different people have already got processes in place, Alteryx workflows in place, so we are not having to reinvent the wheel.
We can share things across the community and somebody will say, oh, I was creating workflow to do this, and somebody else will pipe up and say, do you know what? I've already got something that does almost that let's share. So bringing them together, sharing the experience, helping people learn, sharing my passion about Alteryx is just.
Great having the user group there to do that.
[00:21:02] Megan Bowers: Yeah, I think that's a huge benefit that you touched on there of having an internal user group, the Interdepartment, . Sharing and like reusing use cases like that can really save so much time and all it takes is that half hour or one hour meeting and then all of a sudden it's, oh, that process is unlocked, or that I have a much better starting place for that task that I've been assigned.
So I think that's really powerful and a great reason for other companies to investigate starting up internal user groups and . I guess I was curious on what your advice would be from your experience, from what's worked well, what your advice would be for people looking to start up a similar internal user group.
[00:21:47] Nicole Woodhouse: Firstly, advice for starting it. You need to have somebody senior on board, somebody who can say, yes, this is a good thing to do. Somebody who will say to the other senior people. It would be great if you could get your Alteryx users to, or on whatever system it is, get them involved in this user group.
It's gonna be a great resource. I think it's really important and a great starting point. If you can find a couple of other people who are also similarly passionate about whatever your subject is, then that is very helpful. Sharing the load. Generating is easier when there's more than just one of you trying to do this, and I've got some great support out there.
Getting everybody else in and that will, getting everybody else in will depend on the company and the culture within that company as to how you go about doing that. And it's a case of finding what works for you, I think. But having somebody senior on board to start with is essential. I think
[00:22:50] Megan Bowers: that makes sense.
Cool.
Conclusion and Resources
[00:22:52] Megan Bowers: I really appreciate you joining us for this episode today. It's great to hear about what you guys are doing and. Thanks so much for sharing your insights and tips as well for internal user groups.
[00:23:03] Nicole Woodhouse: You're very welcome. Thank you for inviting me.
[00:23:07] Megan Bowers: Thanks for listening. To learn more about how to start an internal user group or join an existing Alteryx user group, head over to our show notes on alteryx.com/podcast.
And if you like this episode, leave us a review. See you next time.
This episode was produced by Megan Bowers (@MeganBowers), Mike Cusic (@mikecusic), and Matt Rotundo (@AlteryxMatt). Special thanks to @andyuttley for the theme music track, and @mikecusic for our album artwork.
