American Heart Association: Replacing Simple ETL

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American Heart Association: Replacing Simple ETL 

Name: Juan Rolon

Title: Business Intelligence Solutions Architect 

Company: American Heart Association

Overview of Use Case

Learn how the Business Intelligence Team at the American Heart Association (AHA) made their member analytics processes healthier. All AHA member data was previously stored across three systems, in a variety of formats. Today, the team is leveraging the Alteryx Platform to compile and manage all member information. By consolidating information into one system, the team is able to achieve quicker speed to insights.

Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve

The American Heart Association manages members data through what they call the “Hub of Life.” This “Hub of Life” is fed member data via three disparate systems; an in-house CRM system (Microsoft Dynamics), a daily subscriber system (LWW), and a web portal (Physican's Hearts website with Oracle back-end).

As the Hub of Life pulls data from three data sources, this results in three types of data: 1) Data stored in SQL Server, 2) Data stored in Oracle and, 3) Flat Files. This makes it extremely time-consuming for the team to compile all data into one source of truth.

Challenges with managing member data:

1. Manual data prep

2. Excel bottlenecks

3. Dirty data used as source

4. Dependence on centralized IT

5. Human error

6. Data access

7. Data silos

Describe your working solution

AHA is using Alteryx to create a set of applications and dashboards for the health status of the “Hub of Life.” The team leverages the Alteryx Platform to create eight work flows that do all member information validation. Two of the eight workflows run every 30 minutes, six of the eight run every four hours.

Alteryx features that appealed to AHA: 

1. Quick time to development

2. Integrated data validation

3. Self-service platform

4. Integrates with Tableau, R, Databases, Big Data, Spatial Data

5. Graphical design interface

 

Describe the benefits you have achieved

The American Heart Association is now able to learn more from their data instead of spending time trying to compile and manage it. Below are a few ways that the AHA can now leverage insights pulled from data: 

1. Better targeting of potential members as well as improved service to existing ones
2. Use Alteryx R base models to better identify donors that will likely continue donating and potential new donors, and target mailing lists for AHA events
3. Third party vendor data integrations
4. Replace widespread use of Excel and Access Databases, with Alteryx workflows that can help produce data outputs for analysis via enterprise reports tools like Tableau

5. Using Crew Macros to establish consecutive runs of workflows as well as events at the end of each run indicating if the flow succeeded or failed and at what point the issue arose

Related Resources

The entire PowerPoint presentation can be found attached below. Additionally, visit this link to watch the entire recorded session.