Past Analytics Excellence Awards
Author: Kunpeng Zhang - Sr Quality Control Analyst & Lam Truong
Company: Southwest Airlines Co.
Awards Category: Best Value Driven with Alteryx
This project aimed to figure out our station level workload and data sampling plan. Our team, Quality Control, conducts monthly audits at a fixed number per month, which varies by station type (heavy station, intermediate station, and line station). Each station handles different types and volumes of work. Assigning the right amount of audit work that aligns with work load capacity provided a better way to collect the work samples we needed to evaluate each stations performance.
To make the audit quantity decision, the analysis involves combining work load, work schedule, staffing, and performance score data. The data required to complete this project exists in totally different environments, which makes it difficult to combine and mix. This is where Alteryx jumped in and helped tremendously to solve the problem. Previously, our analysis was arbitrarily set to review 4, 8, and 12 year histories. However, as time went by, the workload began to vary greatly for each station every month. The workflow we created enabled us to increase data collection without interfering with each stations work capacity.
Prior to Alteryx, this process had been handled by Excel, Access, Oracle PL developer and Python, which altogether made it difficult to implement and manage. After adopting Alteryx, we are able to focus on the algorithm and data analysis, as opposed to manually building connections between disparate data sources.
Describe the problem you needed to solve
Scattered data sources, slow calculation speed, multiple tools and platforms.
Describe the working solution
Alteryx performs three basic jobs for this project:
- Data connector
- Model builder
- Task runner
Alteryx consumes data from a cloud platform, an enterprise data warehouse, and department reports, processes and mixes them via model, then exports the results back to the cloud platform (From: Text files, Quickbase, Teradata, SqlServer, and Excel, TO: QuickBase)
Describe the benefits you have achieved
I can quickly test an idea or a model using Alteryx, which saves me around 70% of the time I would have spent coding calculations on massive amounts of data. It also enables and tolerates different data sources from other departments, which are typically out of my control. This allows me to focus on the analyses rather than spending time connecting to the data.
