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SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONSSolve the Case with Alteryx: How LG Sherlock Cleanses Disparate Data to Improve Reporting Efficiency
Overview of Use Case
LG Sherlock is a data storage and analysis tool introduced across an entire tier of government. It has been developed by the LGAQ to help Queensland councils convert their data into insights they can use to make the best-possible decisions.
The LG Sherlock team was set up to provide better, cost-effective analytics at scale. The team is four strong, three of which use Alteryx day-to-day. We ingest data of all types and sources and provide a safe harbour for councils to find savings, improve services, and benchmark against each other.
LG Sherlock has rolled out its first initial products and continues to build momentum to solve the problems local governments have. We have a very narrow product stack including AWS, Snowflake, Tableau and Alteryx is the glue which brings it all together.
Our first issue to solve is ingestion of data which comes from both the councils and vendors. One of the methods in which we use Alteryx to gather data is to scrape a vendor portal. We also connect to a host of API's including Weather, Fuel, Telematics, and Water IoT devices. Our second solution is to stage the various data sets for blending. We use Alteryx's prep tools for creating like-for-like data sets. Councils use a number of vendors for the same service but the data all come in a variety of formats.
We then blend the various data sets from the various providers into a single uniform data set. By blending these data sets we can create one visualisation for everyone, making the solution very scalable. Once it's been blended together, we utilise predictive models to return an expected value and compare to actual. We then enrich the data by adding weather and geocoded locations.
Local councils are our primary target market. Within councils we work with Environmental & Sustainability Managers, Fleet Managers, Waste Managers, Facilities & Maintenance Managers, Water and Waste Water Treatment Management, Procurement, Business Improvement, and Executive Leadership.
LG Sherlock provides insightful, cost-effective, analytics which scale and provide the ability for councils to benchmark against each other.
The data sources we are using are CSV, xls, xlsx, dat, and json, which are provided from councils, public sources, and council data suppliers (vendors). We use Designer & Server in our build together with a combination of S3 buckets on AWS and Snowflake.
Our dashboards are built on Tableau. We have publicly available reports and reports which require user access.
Alteryx makes us feel productive. Our platform provides several benefits around cost savings. Finding a site a council shouldn't be paying for, billing anomalies, explaining legitimate billing anomalies, benchmarking capabilities, and proactive price modeling to compare if a site would be better off on a different price tariff, or mobile plan. We provide information about how much an asset is being used, or not at all. We have built a market place for waste management allowing councils to collaborate and innovate on how they manage their landfills. When it comes to the future of analytics, we are most excited about the ability to answer better questions, sooner.
