The Story
When I got into Alteryx, I didn't have a background in data and analytics or anything. My background was actually working as a pharmacist.
I was working at a chain pharmacy with about 200 plus stores, and I proposed an idea to the company about starting a position that looks for drug diversion, drug abuse, fraud, and things like that within the pharmacy records. I didn’t really know what I was doing at the time. I just figured that I could figure it out.
The query tools they had were essentially writing a script to export the CSV file and dumping a bunch of records. And they said, “Here, analyze this”—that was frustrating. So I had to learn Microsoft Access, which was a significant level up. Then I learned Power Query using the Excel Add-In.
I just kept hitting limits as far as what I could not do. I was hoping I could find something on Google, and someone actually on a forum said, “You should really check out Alteryx.”
So I did, and all the limitations that I had were suddenly gone!
This allowed me to learn what I was doing. I knew what I was looking for, but using Alteryx helped me learn new ways to find answers, new ways to ask interesting questions, and new ways to mine the data. I didn't have that experience with SQL or anything like that, but with Alteryx, I ended up learning SQL because I realized it would be easier if I could import a single query instead of dropping a whole table in.
And so, at that point, I needed the company to invest in Alteryx. It took a little bit of time to get everyone convinced that we needed to spend this money on licenses. I started offering to help out different areas of the company—letting them know I could save them time in their day by using this tool, which helped me get people to buy into it.
I worked with loss prevention to identify credit card fraud (near real-time) using Alteryx, and I used that project as justification for the company to buy a server.
From there, word got out about some of the things that we had done with Alteryx! And I had other departments contacting me: logistics, warehousing, merchandising, marketing—I was getting questions from all over. Within the first two years or so, I set up about 200 Alteryx users at the company.
![LagWindowWorkflow.png LagWindowWorkflow.png](https://community.alteryx.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/302179iB9D674CFF865B7BC/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999)
Some content we show at my company now to new Alteryx users
The Impact
My curiosity didn't end with learning Alteryx. I saw there were R tools, so I started learning R. And then a Python tool came in, so I started learning Python. And it really leveled up what I was able to achieve. I could not only identify healthcare fraud and drug diversion (which are big things in themselves), but I could predict these with a reasonable amount of accuracy, which was pretty cool.
My curiosity took off from there, so I started learning more programming languages. That eventually got me into consulting. And that was thanks to Alteryx because I was able to show to the company all the skills I had learned and the projects I could do with the software and tools.
I am still in consulting today, and most of my job is actually writing data pipelines in Scala. When making my transition into consulting, I found that a lot of big data problems conceptually are the same if you break them down into their parts, and Alteryx helped me learn these concepts.
![AlteryxInProcessFlow.png AlteryxInProcessFlow.png](https://community.alteryx.com/t5/image/serverpage/image-id/302180i7E5BEAC86244A6D8/image-size/large?v=v2&px=999)
How we talk about the use of Alteryx in a big data process flow
I still use Alteryx today, although mostly to teach new users how to analyze data and build sustainable data processes.