London, UK
Welcome to the London User Group
Click in the JOIN GROUP button in Home to follow our news and attend our events!
For the 21st London Alteryx User Group we took on board feedback from attendees from the previous session that you all wanted more networking time together, so we added into the agenda 30 minutes of structured networking, which was a big hit (Can you solve the Alteryx Challenge later in this post?)
The event kicked off in familiar style with @grodge13 giving us all a great round up of community updates, with the main one focusing on the announcement of Alteryx Inspire EMEA which will take place at Tobacco Dock between October 14th – 17th.
We had three special announcements from Inspire US that were all very relevant to the London User Group:
- Alteryx announced 6 new Alteryx ACES and we were very lucky to have one of them in the audience as @Samanthaj_hughes who leads the Coventry-Northampton User Group made the trip down to London for the day! Congratulations and thank you for visiting Sam!
- We gave a big shout-out and congratulations to @PhilipMannering a London Alteryx User Group Member who won the 2019 Alteryx Grand Prix
- And finally a huge thank you to every person who has attended, spoken at, hosted a London Alteryx User Group as Paul, Gillian and I have you all to thank for winning the Alteryx 2019 User Group of the Year Award – We couldn’t have done it without you all!!!
I was then personally very excited to hear from @jamessmith of Vantage Data as his talk was very tangable as it focused on how you can utilise weather data in Alteryx to predict the future. A short recap is below, but do check out James’s slide in the attachment and I’m sure James would be happy to answer any questions that you may have.
The talk covered these main points:
- How to optimize retail stock and inventory levels and each store?
- How do use weather to try to understand this?
- Recommendation to Check how it impacts any business process!
James used the Alteryx In-DB tools to connect live to 25 million rows of weather data in Snowflake as this comes included as standard! Of course spatial analytics was then essential to only pull through stations of interest (therefore not 25million rows! James then wanted to understand the dominant condition of the day per store which will be used to predict sales. Using the Smart Tiles tool to split data into buckets (1-10) to do percentiles grouped by store and then using the Linear Regression and Score Tools from the predictive toolset to understand the impact that the weather has on sales of certain products. James’s key takeaways were:
- This can relate to any business process and it’s simple to tackle in Alteryx
- Lots of sources for weather data available:
- Snowflake ships with huge weather data to play with – free to setup and plenty of credits to explore
- Download forecasts for free (up to a limit) from many websites https://openweathermap.org is one example
- Use In-DB tools when data is big - remember the up and down stream tricks
- API’s, JSON and Modelling is not as intimidating as you think it is! Try it and see ☺
We then moved onto some structure network challenges and the first task was for the attendees to organise themselves into groups. Can you solve the challenge?
We then had 3 organised activities:
- Description game – I’ve attached the words that we used, so you can use them for your own fun!
- 60 seconds per person
- Pull out words from the hat and describe them, without saying: Any part of the word, cannon use first letter, etc.
- Keep words, so you know how many you’ve completed.
- Forced Feedback 😊
- We need feedback to continuously improve the user group and the best way to get it is to ‘force’ attendees to give it to us on the day, so we asked groups to discuss their ideas and fill out the forms that we handed out (also attached)
- Alteryx Discussion Points
- We then wanted groups to simply talk Alteryx to eachother, so we had the following prompts, to get things started:
- What is your favourite tool & why?
- What is your biggest Alteryx success?
- Do you have any Alteryx challenges?
- What’s your favourite workflow?
- How do you use Alteryx outside of work?
- What’s your Alteryx commitment for the remainder of the year?
- Anything Alteryx related that you want to discuss…
- We then wanted groups to simply talk Alteryx to eachother, so we had the following prompts, to get things started:
@paul_houghton then closed out the event giving us a brilliant re-cap of Alteryx Inspire 2019. His slides are attached but in summary he covered:
- Roadmap and feature releases, with a great demo of Assisted Modelling which you can all try out yourselves in the public beta: https://betaprogram.alteryx.com/
- A great re-cap of improvements that are coming to the current server products and some idea of what is coming with the next generation in Server Next – Check out the attached deck for some photos of what it looks like!
We then in familiar fashion headed to the local pub to continue our Alteryx conversations over a drink or two!
We’ve just gone live with the registration page for our 22nd MeetUp on Tuesday 3rd September 3rd 2019 @ Slalom UK (right by London Bridge). With the meeting being six weeks before Inspire EMEA (14th - 17th Oct), we wanted to give speakers the chance to practice their talks and wow the User Group crowd. So please get in touch with us if you've submitted to speak at Inspire and would like to do a slimmed down version of your session to a smaller and very friendly LAUG audience. We will be updating the speakers and agenda nearer to the date
https://www.meetup.com/Alteryx-User-Group-London-UK/events/263030030/
- If you want to speaker at a future meetup please contact us directly or register here: http://bit.ly/LAUGspeak
- If you'd like to host a future meetup, please register your interest here: http://bit.ly/LAUGhost
- And finally, if you have any suggestions or ideas on how we can improve to User Group, then please let us know here: http://bit.ly/LAUGideas
Thanks,
