Publicis Media: 2,880X Faster Reports with Alteryx

[AlteryxAdvocacy]

Author:

Aazim Haque

Role:

Manager of Analytics

Company:

Publicis Media

Overview of Use Case

Publicis Groupe is one of the largest communications groups in the world. The French company serves customers globally offering a various range of media activities, marketing and human resources. Learn in this use case how they adopted Alteryx and went from manual cumbersome work to automated reports, a process that with Alteryx is now 2,880x faster!  

Describe the business challenge or problem you needed to solve

Aazim Haque is a manager of analytics within data science. He works with all agencies across the group, which involves many clients across different verticals (consumer packaged goods, automotive, pay TV, government, etc.).  After having a call with Alteryx alongside his manager to go through the platform, they left the call feeling very impressed. Obviously senior management needed more than that to sign off on the license costs, so they decided to move one of their most time intensive projects (preparing and cleaning the data) to Alteryx to see if it could simplify things.

Pre-Alteryx Process

Download and extract files	1 hour
Load into database	1 hour
Run multiple queries to transform data into usable format	5 hours/query	7 hours
Save output of query	10 minutes
Copy to local machine and load into R	1 hour
Run R scripts and save output into CSV files	1 hour
Build on data and prepare report	2 hours
	11 hours / query

Describe your working solution

Their main goal wasn’t really to save time, it was just the fact that they could run all steps in one place and not have to copy and paste files across machines that was enough of a plus point for them. They built their first Alteryx workflow in six days. Now, everything happens in one workflow from start to finish, and the data comes out ready for analysis. They also managed to save a significant amount of time in the process, which was a bonus!

Post-Alteryx Workflow

Download and extract files	1 hour
Load into database	1 hour
Run Alteryx	30 minutes
Build on data and prepare report	2 hours
	4.5 hours / query

After the success of their first use case, they started the contract with Alteryx and looked at new projects they could kick off across the company:

PHASE 1

• Followed the Pareto Principle – 80% of the efficiencies could come from 20% of the tools
• Biggest time sink across all agencies was reporting – different formats, cadences, sources, etc.
• Solve reporting using basic tools but save hundreds of hours across the company that can be spent in tasks that are more productive
• Reporting is not super complex – just difficult and time-consuming to do in Excel manually

Campaign Data

They had 86 Excel files to merge, obviously all different schemas. Before Alteryx, it took 3 days to merge and 3 hours to analyze. “I love Excel, I write macros and VBA, but we have more and more data that needs to be analyzed, and Excel starts to struggle. Joining is very difficult and complicated formulas cause errors,” said Aazim. They built their Alteryx workflow in 4 days and it now runs in 30 seconds.

PHASE 2

• Will focus on the remaining 20% to elevate product offerings
• Look at predictive tools, spatial data, basket analysis and propensity modelling/clustering
• Introducing Server – develop apps to be used across the agency to allow even more time savings and move load off the central team

Describe the benefits you have achieved

“What we did not anticipate was the speed gain, even though the transformations were the same, using the same data and machine,” said Aazim. In the first use case they build to convince management to adopt Alteryx, they tracked that the process with Alteryx was 14X faster! In their second use case, to create reports of campaign data, they registered that the process with Alteryx was 2,880x faster!

Alteryx allowed them to have faster decisions and better results. “One of the biggest benefits of Alteryx is accuracy. Working with large scale data in Excel can easily introduce errors. If you use Excel you won’t excel,” he concluded.