Coca-Cola Reduces 60% Cost Using Alteryx to Build a Store Dashboard

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Author:

Jay Caplan

Role:

Senior Business Analytics Manager

Company:

Coca-Cola

Overview of Use Case

Everyone in this world knows who Coca-Cola is. The word “Coca-Cola” itself is the second most widely recognized word in the world (the 1^st word is OK, by the way). The company was founded in 1886 and we have over 500 beverage brands which are served in more than 200 countries around the world. We have hundreds of production facilities, thousands of products. We distribute to millions of locations around the world. Can you imagine the massive amount of data we collect every day?

I have been using Alteryx for four years now. I support one of the largest global fountain customers from 95 countries around the world throughout the Coca-Cola’s system. The tools I used to use in couldn't cut it. Excel just couldn’t handle all the things I needed to do. That's why I started using Alteryx. What I wanted to achieve using Alteryx was to help the operational team to get the enormous amount of data from all over the US together, update the data and build a store dashboard which could help the team see the data visualization more easily. Ultimately, I did just that, I provided a more effective visual than reading columns and rows from an Excel spreadsheet. I was also able to cut 60% of our costs using Alteryx.

Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve

As a Alteryx user-group leader for Coca-Cola, I interviewed the leaders of each individual user-group I have been working with. I discovered they used to have a tool that allowed them to look at the activity of every location in the United States however they didn’t know who created the tool, who owned or managed it and that it hadn’t been updated in over 2 years. Later on, I found out that the data collection and tool design was handled by a third-party consulting firm. It was an Excel-based tool, and that was the only application they could have open on their laptop. If they opened their email, the entire laptop would freeze because this tool required so much ram. This tool was inhibiting their progress and keeping them from completing their tasks.

If they were speaking with an owner who had multiple locations, and they needed to pivot from one store to another store, it took minutes. It would just cycle and cycle before they got any new data to load. I personally have been using Tableau for the past couple of years. I knew how I wanted things to look in Tableau, but I needed the data positioned a certain way. The only way for me to get the data positioned and compiled was to leverage Alteryx.

Describe your working solution

With the help of the customer success manager I was able to start with one workflow, which has now evolved into a group of four workflows. Four databases on my side, two databases on the customer's, blending, prepping and cleansing and understanding what fell out of my join, all to ensure the complete data set was there. I then created a set of calculations, and additional fields.

I ended up with one Tableau Data Extract, which made Tableau lightening much faster when I tried to update something. The data set was now 28 columns and four and a half million rows. Not a bad database, not too big, but not small either. It's nothing that Access or Excel can handle when I wanted to do it that way. So, I put it together, and I built it in Tableau, and this is what it looks like.

So, this is what my team uses on a regular basis. And now this tool is used by our finance team, operations team, and our marketing team. Pretty much every single team in the US is using this to get information on individual locations because this is consumer data to them.

Describe the benefits you have achieved

Before Alteryx	After Alteryx
Data collection and tool design managed by an external consultant	In-house data collection, data management, dashboard design & distribution
Data updated semi-annually requiring 6 weeks lead time	Dashboard updated quarterly within 3 days of month-end close
No changes to format or content without months of lead time	More flexibility to revise dashboard with input from account team
Excel-based tool that locked up users’ computers	Moved account team to Tableau with no issues
Store by store details took several minutes to upload and print	One Tableau database refreshes in seconds

For the finance perspective, after using Alteryx, I could perform 60% savings just on this one use case.

 

Related Resources

The entire PowerPoint presentation can be found here.