Author:
Sintyadi Thong, Karen Kamira, Harry Yusuf
Role:
Pre-Sales Consultant
Company:
Lightstream Analytics PTE Ltd.
Transitioning From Qlik to Alteryx for Advanced ETL
Originally Published: 2016 Excellence Awards Entry
Use Case Overview:
LightStream Analytics focuses on performance management, big data, advanced analytics, and innovative visualization through cloud SaaS applications, mobile, and traditional on-site systems. LightStream Analytics is well-positioned to deliver the most advanced products and services by capitalizing on its significant regional presence in Singapore and Indonesia. The combined offices have over 60 employees with deep technical and senior business experience. The company leverages our existing technical support and Rand;D centers in Indonesia and China to develop solutions which disrupt customary methods of data analysis and give clients access to revolutionary tools for understanding their data. LightStream Analytics has partnered with more than 100 multinational and local clients to integrate, structure, analyze, and visualize information to measure their business performance and drive enterprise value growth.
Describe the problem you needed to solve:
One of our clients tried to implement a Business Intelligence solution to help them grow their business through another company (we can pretty much say our competitor). However, there is one thing which hinders their development of the BI. When usually most companies want to see the date of sales (on which date their agents perform sales), this company would like to see the other way around, they would like to see ‘on which dates their agents do not perform sales activity’. For them this is very important. The BI developers hit a dead-end on this thing, and therefore I came with Alteryx.
Describe the working solution:
The BI I previously mentioned is: QlikView. Qlik can do the analysis, this I can guarantee, but it involves heavy scripting and logic. With heavy scripting, it will also require heavy resources to perform the run (will only be visible when running with low RAM). Alteryx, on the other hand, can do this easily using drag-and-drop and repeatable workflow, so I feed Alteryx with the actual sales data, perform several left joins, filter, and unique. Alteryx requires no scripting, and to be honest I am not even an IT guy, I know nothing about SQL and programming, but I can create this workflow easily. So we proposed to have Alteryx prepare and blend the data before feeding it to QlikView, therefore it will help to make the data visible before feeding it to QlikView and lessens the burden on QlikView. While the client has not yet confirmed whether they will get Alteryx or not, it is really satisfying and rewarding to solve this problem easily while others had hardships in getting this result.
Describe the benefits you have achieved:
While I created the workflow in only an hour vs their 2 weeks development for this one case (and in which they failed after 2 weeks), this shows how much of a time savings the client would get if they developed QlikView alongside with Alteryx. Alteryx will help the customers to get results faster and perform an advanced ETL which might be hard to do in traditional SQL language.
