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SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONSSainsbury’s Tackles Integration with Alteryx
Overview of Use Case
Sainsbury’s is one of the UK leading grocers. Their Alteryx journey began with blending data, building databases, applications and reporting to the wider business. Since then, they have evolved their Alteryx use cases to demystify Argos sales; connect into and plot sales data on a map; share data across the business (we were up and running in weeks, reporting on two sides of the business within property), and produce wider insights.
New Acquisition Integration
When Sainsbury's acquired Home Retail Group, the owner of Argos and Habitat, Sainsbury's operation grew to over 600 supermarkets and more than 800 local convenience stores, as well as over 800 Argos locations. We had an integration challenge to meet, not all Argos stores could continue trading in their current locations for various reasons, but we had to keep trading and providing our services to our customers.
Changes in Organizational Regions
Each region has a Sainsbury's regional manager who oversees the stores within that patch. However, when going through periods of growth, the regions can quickly become too large and need to be redesigned. And of course, many stakeholders are involved with this and there are many iterations until the final set of stores are decided.
Output Files in Excel
A lot of our Alteryx Applications and scheduled workflows require pre-formatted Excel templates, in which our applications push data into a back sheet of the Excel template, for our users to interact. We needed a way to upload our Excel templates as part of the App or workflow when we publish to the Gallery.
New Acquisition Integration
We used Alteryx to build the tools required to meet the business challenge of integrating our two businesses together and incorporating the right Argos stores within our Sainsbury’s network. One of our first challenges was acquiring the data required for the tools. We had to merge our property assets into one database. We were stuck with our Salesforce instance and we used Alteryx to clean and merge our datasets together seamlessly.
We had to understand the change in customer behavior before and after the store relocated, so we needed access to sales data with postcodes that sat on Azure – so we dealt with a flat file process until IT sorted our direct link to that dataset. It took a few months but the process was already set up and used in Alteryx so it was just a matter of updating the input tool. Note the delay here was not Alteryx but the direct access to the data within the group organization.
Another win we had was setting up reporting on new store openings and information on investments for both sides of the business. Once we understood the requirements from the Argos reports we were able to set up, test, automate reports which are now scheduled to run every week without fail, directly emailed to their end users.
Changes in Organizational Regions
Before Alteryx, we would typically receive a list of stores that the management teams wanted assigned to each region, and then would start to re-create the regions with our mapping system, manually combining some existing shapes to create a single polygon around each set of stores. Then we would produce some maps for review by the stakeholders. After that, more discussions would take place, and the assignments would be changed, repeating the whole process again. Overall, this process would often take weeks. Now it takes 27.8 seconds to run!
Instead, we use Alteryx to automate the design of the regions – taking the store list, drawing non-overlapping polygons around each store that could be combined into a series of regions and sub regions.
Output Files in Excel
Our solution was to use the Blob input to copy the original Excel template, then use the Blob output to save the Excel template to the results location on the Gallery. The text input feeds in the file path of the Excel template. The formula tool creates a new field with the output location built into the string with today’s date to become our entire filepath for the Blob Output.
When testing you need to have a way to delete the outputted report before creating it again otherwise it will fail. Like in this example if you were trying to run this twice on a single day. Therefore, we use a .bat file to delete before we copy and paste a new version.The blob Input utilizes the file path of the excel template from the text input at the beginning of the workflow and then the Blob Output use the field from the formula tool which has output file path.
The last thing in this workflow is the Email tool which is always last to execute so it can always have an attachment. The results of all of this is your original template is used and is fed the data from Alteyrx giving your user a nice formatted Excel.
Alteryx and the use of Alteryx Server's Scheduler, allows us to be able to build the tools we needed quickly and share them across the group. In 2 years, we have built and delivered more than 250 Argos stores within our Sainsbury’s network. It’s mind blowing!
- Within a week we had Argos estate data within our Salesforce database, alongside our Sainsbury’s store information
- Within a month we had sales data and were forecasting and understanding our new customers and where they come from
- Within 6 weeks we were reporting on both sides of the business, our investments to the wider group business
