Past Analytics Excellence Awards

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Honeywell_logo.pngAuthor: Joseph Majewski - Commercial Finance Director

Team Members: Niki Yang, Larry Scates, Dan Trimble, Richard Haas, Wendy Edsall

Company: Honeywell Aerospace

Business Partner: Sherri Benzelock - VP Business Analytics

 

Awards Category: Best Use of Alteryx Server for Analytics Deployment

 

Alteryx has automated previous manual processes driving over 2000 hrs annual productivity to the Finance community. Alteryx server consolidates quarterly outlook commentary data from over 40 sources every 30 mins daily and publishes to Tableau server as a *.tde data source. Alteryx also loads extracted Essbase files to Tableau server nightly which are joined together for enhanced Tableau analytics providing insight to our quarterly forecast. 

 

Awards Category: Best Value Driven with Alteryx

 

Alteryx helped drive over 2000 annual hours of productivity and enabled over 250 users to migrate to Tableau based self- service analytics. Consumers are now better prepared for weekly Revenue outlook meetings as they have access to the data almost real-time versus waiting for Finance to prepare reports for the weekly forecast meetings. The new analytics developed in Tableau are now being referenced live in weekly meetings with business Presidents. 

 

Describe the problem you needed to solve

Significant manual effort was being done to compile business comments and associate them with the financial data on a management review dashboard in PowerPoint. Meetings were ineffective because only limited static views could be generated. The data presented was information overload and difficult to digest. There was no dynamic selection views so questions typically needed to be captured then answered and communicated after the meeting. Historical versions were saved in separate data sources and were not readily available for the reviews.

 

Alteryx flow to update the Comments which publishes the comments data source to both our Aero-Development and our Aero Certified-Production sitesAlteryx flow to update the Comments which publishes the comments data source to both our Aero-Development and our Aero Certified-Production sites

Describe the working solution

Under the new Alteryx solution, the compilation of weekly commentary files has been automated. Every week over 40 comment files are saved to a shared drive in *.csv format. Since submissions occur from all global regions, files are submitted at different times each week and are now consolidated more frequently (every 30 mins) allowing users across the globe to access the most updated information. The process also manages current week and historical weeks’ comments. We are also using Alteryx to cleanse the data removing all the error values and to correct business team data mapping issues. Alteryx also loads extracted Essbase files to Tableau server nightly which are joined together for enhanced Tableau analytics providing insight to our quarterly forecast.

 

Alteryx flow that brings in the new Essbase data (“SRO_Extract_Current.txt” and updates/appends/replaces the scenarios in the “SRO_Extract_History.txt” Data source file used by TableauAlteryx flow that brings in the new Essbase data (“SRO_Extract_Current.txt” and updates/appends/replaces the scenarios in the “SRO_Extract_History.txt” Data source file used by Tableau

Describe the benefits you have achieved

Utilizing Alteryx has resulted in initial savings of 2000+ hours per year by cleansing, compiling, and blending business commentary with financial data. Analysts are no longer manually compiling, copying, and pasting comments onto quarterly outlook presentations. Weekly review meetings became more effective as over 250 business leaders and analysts are better informed prior to as opposed to seeing the data in the meeting for the first time. This is allowing more efficient business meetings helping HON achieve its revenue growth targets.

The Alteryx dataset allows Honeywell Aerospace to slice and dice all information dynamically using Tableau which was not possible before. Questions are easily answered in the meetings because the data with variance, opportunity, and risk commentary is available prior to the meeting. Ad hoc questions are now researched live in meetings through our enhanced visualizations. Tableau’s dynamic reporting eliminated the need for Excel and PowerPoint reports thus reducing meeting preparation times as well. Business teams are now able to focus more on analytics than the data/presentation preparation. The solution we developed are making our business processes more contemporary, enabling business users quicker access in a format that is easier to consume on desktop and mobile devices ensuring they have the necessary information to make the right business decision.

 

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Visual of Tableau Analytic with associated commentsVisual of Tableau Analytic with associated comments

marketo-logo.pngTeam Members: Amy Jorde, Ambika Suresh, Praneesha Gaddam, Tim Chandler (@TZChandler)

Company: Marketo

Business Partner: Grazitti, Rahul Sachdeva (@rahuls)

 

Awards Category: Icon of Analytics

 

This story is about going from nothing to a corporate wide data pipeline and on-demand data delivery in less than 12 months. During the deployments this grew from 1 to 5 people that control the data of the company. The business impact is in almost all departments powering our Dashboards.

 

Marketo has been a customer of Alteryx since 2015, but it wasn’t until January 2016 that we truly started to use Alteryx throughout the company. In 2016, Alteryx became a mission critical solution that changes the way we work across the company. Organizations include Customer Success, Sales, Partner Programs, Finance, Marketing, Legal, Accounting, and Professional Services.

 

Describe the problem you needed to solve

Deliver company wide trusted data to enable better business decisions. Eliminate or reduce the many manual processes across the company that take too long to accomplish and are prone to errors. 

 

Describe the working solution

This solution is described in three parts.

1. Integration and Automation
2. Business Enablement
3. Scaling and Accelerating Business Intelligence Adoption

 

1. Integrations and Automation

In early 2016, Marketo launched Mavericks, our company data pipeline. A 100% cloud based solution, Mavericks pulls data from many sources, enriches the data using business rules and then published the data where it’s needed. Every week our production system has over 80 scheduled workflows and 30 gallery applications delivering the information that organizations rely on. Marketo uses off-the-shelf and custom API connections to integrate data the business needs.

 

Integrations include:

  • Marketo
  • Salesforce.com
  • Tableau
  • Intacct
  • Coupa
  • Workday
  • Oanda
  • Jobvite
  • Hire Bridge
  • Hire Select
  • Xactly
  • Box
  • Jira
  • Slack
  • Clarizen
  • AWS (S3 and Redshift)
  • High Radius
  • Host Analytics
  • Allocadia
  • Silicon Valley Bank
  • Smartsheets

 

Company Data PipelineMarketo_company data pipeline.png

 

Business Continuity
Workflows are mission critical to our business so we have developed a production process that enables us to identify issues before the business. Workflows are monitored by Tableau performance monitoring dashboards. These dashboards show trend of workflow behavior and highlight issues. We also have integrated Slack to both alert us to issues and allow the business to see when data is refreshed and more.

 

Bidirectional Data Integration
Marketo originally used Alteryx to publish information to our BI environment Tableau, however starting in early 2016 we went further with bidirectional system updates. With each implementation we moved away from manual to automated processes.

 

Here are some same use-cases we have completed in the last year.

  • We have a scalable methodology for obtaining Salesforce.com data, storing in AWS Redshift, publishing to Tableau, and using for other workflows without overwhelming our Salesforce.com instance with API requests.
  • Currency exchange rates from OANDA are fully integrated into Salesforce.com using methodology which matches the exchange rates calculated by our ERP (Intacct).
  • We prevent accounts payable check fraud with a workflow which automatically triggers a positive pay file run in our Intacct with an Intacct partner tool from Wipfli and then sends the resulting file with authorized check numbers, payees, and amount paid directly to the bank. The entire process is monitored by our AP team in Slack.
  • Intacct invoices and invoicing schedules get processed and displayed in a Tableau dashboard for deferred revenue forecasting, a dashboard which ends up more accurate than the forecasting report found directly inside Intacct!
  • Many more!


2. Business Enablement

Using Alteryx Gallery, we provide on-demand solutions to our business partners freeing them from time consuming manual processes.

 

With the use of Marketo Alteryx Gallery, users can update data previously only able to be updated via tedious manual updates or via API only. Example workflows which have been added into our company’s gallery allow users perform the following types of tasks:

  • Attach expense receipt PDFs for billable expenses to the related customer invoices. No more edit, attach, save on automatically created expense invoices - just click a button in the gallery and done!
  • Automatically write off small balances owed by customers on invoice transactions which meet certain fixed criteria.
  • Reactivate employee records in our ERP and expense tool for final expense report processing. A related scheduled workflow then deactivates the employee after the expense report has been reimbursed to that employee. No more Jira tickets to reactivate employees and we maintain clean data!
  • A collection of gallery applications allows insights into monthly professional services revenue being posted to ensure that data is accurate and will post correctly into our general ledger.
  • Excel Replacement! Upload CSV files and export with blended and processed data by combining uploaded file with other system data and returning complete file or analysis. One of our gallery apps used in this manner saves over 40 hours per month of processing time!
  • Process integrations on demand if user needs to have up to date data in another system and cannot wait until the scheduled timing. Data on your schedule.

 

3. Scaling and Accelerating Business Intelligence Adoption

Using Alteryx to prepare information for our BI environment has benefited us in both scaling and accelerating our adoption. Here’s how:

 

Scaling
Traditionally much of the BI data manipulation happens within the BI presentation layer. This includes blending data sources, creating calculated fields and complex level of detail solutions. We take a different approach. We use Alteryx to do the data prep including detailed data modeling. This approach minimizes the load on our BI Server allowing us to have more concurrent users than is typically expected. The costs avoided for 2017 and beyond look substantial.

 

Accelerating Adoption
Driving adoption with the business happens faster when the data is in the right model and has common definitions across the company. 80% of the work is data prep and this is all done in Alteryx. Instead of training the Business to become Tableau experts, we choose to focus on driving adoption. This means that we do not spend time on calculated fields, blending data and LOD with the business. We focus on shifting from manual Excel solutions to more insightful visual dashboards. Several people in the business were able to publish dashboards that changed the way people worked within days. Reconciliation of data has dramatically been reduced. For example Marketo use a single Opportunity data source for all dashboards.

 

Marketo’s Data Pipeline for Opportunity DataMarketo_data pipeline for opportunity data.png

 

Workflow description

Data is pulled from five Salesforce.com tables and blended together in grey boxes. Yellow boxes blend names, adjust times and create calculated fields. Green boxes convert currencies to USD. From the orange to the blue box data is blended with excel spreadsheets owned and updated by the business. The blue box adds a timestamp and the final yellow boxes publish to Tableau.

 

Summary

The combination of powering our company's data pipeline, Mavericks, and providing on demand services with Gallery has allowed us to take control of our business’s data. It’s an awesome tool where the only limits are our time and creativity.

 

Our business partners are incredibly happy with the work we’ve done on our Alteryx server over the last year. Look for more results from us in 2017!

 

Describe the benefits you have achieved

The impacts of Alteryx are wide. Here are some of the highlights.

  1. Time saved as a result of automated integration and data blending using Alteryx is over 250 hours each month, conservatively. This is based on feeback from two departments that state have detailed their timesaving. With each new solutions we save more and more business process time.
  2. Cost avoidance comes in the way of being able to scale Tableau by Alteryx doing the data processing.
  3. Data Quality. Data is trusted across the company allowing people to focus on the busuness rather than ratifying numbers.  

Author: Jim Kunce, SVP & Chief Actuary

Company: MedPro Group

 

Awards Category: Best Use of Server

 

Describe the problem you needed to solve 

MedPro Group, Berkshire Hathaway's dedicated healthcare liability solution, is the nation's highest-rated healthcare liability carrier - according to A.M. Best (A++ as of 5/27/2015). We have been providing professional liability insurance to physicians, dentists and other healthcare providers since 1899. Today, we have insurance operations in all 50 states, the District of Columbia and are growing internationally. With such great size of operations and diversity of insurance products, it is a challenge to connect systems, processes and employees with one another.

 

Regardless of an insurance carrier's size and scale, its long-term success depends on:

 

  • Continued new business growth
  • Consistent pricing and risk-evaluation
  • Unified internal operations

Our challenge was to lay the analytical foundation necessary for an ever-growing insurance company to execute on these three objectives. We identified the following three action items and linked them to the drivers of long-term success.

 

  • Fuel new business growth by:  Centralizing processes & remove system silos, link manual processes together.
  • Drive consistent pricing and risk-evaluation: Remove data supply bottle-necks & empower business analysts to self-serve.
  • Unify internal operations: Accelerate modernization & facilitate enterprise-wide legacy system integration.

 

Describe the working solution

"Fuel new business growth by centralizing processes & remove system silos, link manual processes together."

 

This solution has three parts to it.

  • First, we programmed our pricing algorithm using Alteryx to "learn" the insurability of a prospective customer.
  • Second, we overlaid this system on our CRM data to create sales recommendations nationwide.
  • Third, we deployed this recommender system with our Alteryx private gallery to provide real-time access to our sales teams.

MPG Private Gallery Snapshot.jpeg

 

Today, from anywhere in the country, our sales personnel can request a report for a customer they are prospecting and receive a consistent, reliable recommendation in a matter of seconds with little manual intervention.

 

"Drive consistent pricing and risk-evaluation:  Remove data supply bottle-necks & empower business analysts to self-serve."

 

In an insurance company, actuaries and underwriters are responsible for pricing insurance policies and evaluating insurance risks of applicants. These complex decisions rely on many data inputs - some of which are internally available, but in other cases come from external sources (e.g. government websites, third party resources).

 

Today, we have been able to significantly reduce the data supply bottle-necks by configuring the Alteryx server to be the bridge between the data sources and our actuaries and underwriters. Each person along the pricing and risk evaluation process now gets “analysis-ready” data consistently and timely from the private gallery, a virtual buffet of self-serve apps for all data needs.

 

"Unify internal operations: accelerate modernization -- facilitate enterprise-wide legacy system integration."

 

In 2015, MedPro Group decided to scale up investments in modernizing legacy systems to a new web-based system. The challenge was to move data from our legacy systems into the new web-based system and vice versa. Additionally, the software solution needed to have a short learning curve and be flexible and transparent enough that key business leaders managing this modernization would be able to perform the data migration tasks.

 

Alteryx was a great fit in this case. Not only were business leaders able to program processes in Alteryx in a relatively short timeframe, we scaled up with ease and accelerated modernization by deploying on the private server for analysts to use in a self-serve, reliable environment.

 

Describe the benefits you have achieved

"We have connected systems, processes and employees to one another and made the benefits of that interconnectivity available to every employee."

 

We have been using the private gallery and server since July, 2015. What started as a proof of concept and experiment is now a fully functional production-grade experience. The list of systems that have been connected, processes that have been automated and employees who are finding value out of our private gallery and server is growing rapidly.

 

Here's a view into some of the measurable benefits we have achieved in just nine months -

  • 94: The number of apps published to the private gallery to date.
  • 6951: The number of times an app has run on the gallery. That's 26 runs a day over 9 months!
  • 15: The percentage of employees who are served with this consistent, reliable self-serve platform.

 

And our goal? Move that needle to 100% with Alteryx in the months to come!

Author: Scott Elliott (@scott_elliott) , Senior Consultant

Company: Webranz Ltd

 

Awards Category: Best Use of Alteryx Server

 

We are using the server to store Alteryx Apps that get called by the "service bus" and perform calculations and write the results into a warehouse where growers can log into a web portal and check the results of the sample.

 

Describe the problem you needed to solve 

Agfirst BOP is a agricultural testing laboratory business  that perform scientific measurement on Kiwifruit samples it receives from 2500 growers around New Zealand. In peak season it tests up to 1000 samples of 90 fruit per day. The sample test results trigger picking of the crop, cool storage, shipping and sales to foreign markets. From the test laboratory the grower receives notification of the sample testing being completed. They log into a portal to check the results. Agfirst BOP were looking for a new technology to transform the results from the service bus up to the web portal which gave them agility around modifying or adding tests.

 

Describe the working solution

We take sample measurement results from capture  devices. These get shipped to a landing warehouse. There is a trigger which calls the Alteryx Application residing on the Alteryx server for each sample and test type.  The Alteryx App then performs a series of calculations and publishes the results into the results warehouse. The grower is now able to login to the web portal and check their sample. Each App contains multiple batch macros which allow processing sample by sample. Some of the tests have a requirement for the use of advanced analytics. These tests call R as part of the App.  The use of macros is great as it provide amazing flexibilty and agility to plug in or plug out new tests or calculations. Having it on Alteryx Server allows it to be enterprise class by giving it the ability to be scaled and flexible at the same time. As well as being fully supported by the infrastructure team as it is managed within the data centre rather than on a local desktop.

 

App:

 

Agfirst APP.jpg

 

Batch Macro:

 

Agfirst Batch Macro.jpg

 

Describe the benefits you have acheived

The benefits realised include greater agility around adding/removing sample tests via the use of Macros. We are able to performed advanced analytics by calling R and it futures proofs the business by enabling them to choose any number of vendors and not be limited by the technology because of the ability of Alteryx to blend multiple sources. It gives them amazing flexibility around future technology choices and it is all supported and backed up by the infrastructure team because it sits within the datacentre and they have great comfort in knowing it's not something sitting under someones desk.

Author: Aaron Harter (@aaronharter), Media Ops Manager

Company: Quigley-Simpson

 

Awards Category: Best Use of Alteryx Server

 

We leverage our Alteryx Server to design and implement custom apps that allow for any team member at the Agency to benefit from the power of Alteryx, without the programming knowledge necessary to construct a solution on their own.  Analytic apps allow for all employees at Q-S to leverage the capabilities of Alteryx in a fun and easy to use interface.

 

1- QS Gallery Collections.jpg

 

Describe the problem you needed to solve 

Any company can own, buy or hold data. Finding creative applications to use data to drive informed decision making and find opportunities in a market is what separates the wheat from the chaff, regardless of industry.

 

Quigley-Simpson is an advertising agency in the highly fragmented media industry and the unique problems include managing rapidly changing marketplaces with dozens of disparate data sets and supporting many teams with varying reporting needs. The Media Operations team has been tasked to implement custom solutions to improve efficiency and make sense out of the big data coming in the agency.

 

Media measurement is highly reliant on quality data sourcing, blending and modeling, and we have been able to use Alteryx as a centralized environment for handling and processing all of this data across many formats. We have worked closely with key stakeholders in each department to automate away all of their "pain points" relating to data and reporting and interacting with our media buying system.

 

Describe the working solution

Some of our apps join our media buy, audience delivery history with our client's first party data and the related third party audience measurement data from Nielsen. Other third party data sources we leverage include Digital and Social Media metrics, GfK MRI demographic and psychographic market research, TIVO TRA set-top box data combined with shopper loyalty data, MediaTools authorizations and strategic planning on the brand level, AdTricity digital feedback on pre-, mid-, and post- roll online video campaigns, and comScore digital metrics for website activity.

 

2 - QS App Design.JPG

 

Expediting the processing, summarizing, cross-tabbing and formatting of these data sets has added an element of standardization to our reporting which did not exist previously while improving the speed and accuracy. An app we built for the one of our teams produces over 50 reports, ready for distribution, in less than 3 min, replacing a process that used to take a full day to accomplish.

 

3 - QS Top 20 Data Blending Workflow.JPG

 

Additionally, we are using spatial tools to analyze delivery and performance of pilot Programmatic Television test, which aggregates local market TV inventory to represent a national footprint. Several of our workflows blend and prep data for visualization on our in-house "Data Intelligence Platform" which is powered by Tableau. This is then used by our media planners and buyers to optimize campaigns to meet goals and exceed client expectations.

 

The flexibility to build out apps or dashboards, depending on the needs statement of the end user, has been phenomenal and very well received at the Agency.

 

4 - QS Automaded Reporting Model.JPG

 

Describe the benefits you have achieved

Now that we are an Alteryx organization, we are replacing all of our outdated processes and procedures with gracefully simple workflows that are propelling the Agency to the forefront of technology and automation. Our report generating apps have improved the accuracy, reliability, and transparency of our reporting. The log processing apps have saved thousands of hours of manual data entry. Now that our workforce has been liberated from these time consuming, monotonous tasks, we are wholly focused on growing our clients' business while better understanding marketplace conditions.

 

Streamlining the workflow processes has allowed for drastically reduced on-boarding times while maintaining data integrity and improving accuracy. It has been a primary goal to give all employees the tools to increase their knowledge base and grow their careers by improving the access to data they use for daily decision making, a goal we are achieving thanks in large part to our Alteryx Server.

 

2016 Alteryx Server app totals (as of 4/22/16):

  • Teams using apps = 7
  • Number of apps = 44
  • 2016 app run count = 1,794
  • 2016 time savings = 4,227 hours

K-LOVE_logo.pngAuthor: Bill  Lyons  - Principal Data Scientist

Team Members: Trudy Fuher, Alana Welz, Arlyn Baggot

Company: Educational Media Foundation

 

Awards Category: Best ‘Alteryx For Good’ Story 

The initial project has the potential to save this non-profit organization up to $2.2 million per year in streaming costs when recommendations are fully implemented. Other use cases improve internal efficiencies, communication, and productivity.

 

Awards Category: Best Use of Alteryx Server for Analytics Deployment

Alteryx Server automatically processes daily file downloads, weekly file downloads with decompression, decryption and bulk insertion, and monthly zip code DMA assignments. Other use cases support self-service imports, exports and reporting.

 

Awards Category: Best Use of Alteryx for Spatial Analytics

Alteryx spatial tools combined with Alteryx data is driving optimization of regional streams associated with DMAs.

 

Awards Category: Best Value Driven with Alteryx

Optimizing regional streams has resulted in at least $500,000 in savings since July 2016, with recommendations implemented so far. When all recommendations are fully implemented, savings could be $2.2 million per year or more.

 

Awards Category: From Zero to Hero

Even though we purchased our first Designer license in June 2015, as of early March 2016, we had not created a single workflow with Alteryx. We were considering not renewing our license. At that time, we got a new rep, Nick Glassner, who arranged for a couple of WebEx sessions with Alteryx Solutions Engineer Ali Sayeed to get us started on a real project. Within a few weeks, I recognized many more potential applications for Alteryx, and was off and running. I changed from a skeptic to an enthusiastic user. Analysis for this project began in mid-April and was completed in mid-May. We acquired Alteryx Server in June, and had the first phase of the implementation of this project running on a daily schedule by August. Other phases came online in November and in January 2017.

 

At that point, I was still the only person using Alteryx heavily in analysis and production. So, I began some internal workshops showing how to solve real-world problems with Alteryx. We now have 3 more internal users becoming productive with Alteryx, and are looking to hire another. Some of these users are also taking advantage of the “Enablement Series” offered by our new rep, Tim Cunningham.

 

Describe the problem you needed to solve

Initial business problem: Recent regulatory changes caused our national internet radio streaming costs to more than double, from less than $1 million to over $2 million annually. The goal was to find ways to optimize our streams to move usage from the national stream to our underutilized regional streams, and thus reduce our costs.

 

Other use cases, including their business challenges, solutions, and benefits, follow the solutions and benefits of this initial business problem.

 

Describe the working solution

Alteryx played a major role in analysis of the streaming data. Some of the regional streams were underutilized, while others exceeded their cost effective limits, so the first phase was to analyze the accuracy of IP address geolocation software to see what would be causing this. The website systems and the log analytic systems used different IP geolocation software (the websites used IP2Location, and the analytic systems used Maxmind) so we needed to know if one was better than the other, or if neither was adequate. However, these system are isolated from each other by firewalls, making direct comparisons impossible. Alteryx Designer allowed me to connect to three different SQL Server database systems and compare their data with a .csv file from another vendor being evaluated (NetAcuity).

 

This analysis made extensive use of Alteryx spatial matching and Alteryx spatial data, visualizing results with Tableau. It revealed some disturbing facts, including that the geolocation was very inconsistent between the systems. As an example, we found that less than half of the listeners to the New York City stream were even in the NYC DMA (Figure 1).

 

Figure 1Figure 1

 

Additionally, we learned that only a little more than half of the listeners in the NYC DMA were listening to the NYC stream. (Figure 2)

Figure 2Figure 2

 

 The analysis also compared actual registered listener locations to the location reported by the various services. This showed that IP2Location was clearly inferior. (Figure 3)

 

Figure 3Figure 3

But Maxmind returned a significantly higher number of unknown locations, both within the US, and even identifying the country. (Figure 4)

 

Figure 4Figure 4

 

The analysis concluded with 16 recommended changes to systems, software, programming and contracts.


One of those recommendations was to unify both the websites and the analytics on the same and most consistently accurate IP address geolocation provider: NetAcuity. Alteryx supports the updates to the NetAcuity database by downloading the data from NetAcuity, decompressing, decrypting, and bulk inserting it into SQL Server. It does this on a weekly schedule in Alteryx Server, each time moving roughly 40 million rows of data in about an hour.

 

Primary workflow:KLOVE-5.png

 

Supporting macros:KLOVE-6.png

 

 

An Alteryx Server scheduled app then builds Calgary databases of the IP geolocation data.KLOVE-7.png

 

 

Next, another Alteryx Server scheduled app applies that geocoding to the streaming log data.KLOVE-8.png

 

 KLOVE-9.png

 

 

Alteryx spatial data also supports Server scheduled monthly updates to keep zip to DMA to stream assignments up to date.

 

Describe the benefits you have achieved

4 of the 16 recommendations have been implemented to date, saving over $500,000 since last July, and an estimated $700,000 for 2017. More steps are in development, with a goal of saving $2 million per year.

 

Never before did we have a reliable and up-to-date zip code to DMA assignment process. We previously bought zip code to DMA data from Nielsen, but it was incomplete and quickly out-of-date.

 

Other Significant Alteryx Use-Cases

 

1. Transmitter location identification

  • Business Challenge: Property tax filings must be made with the appropriate jurisdiction for the location of the property. With normal property, the street address easily identifies that jurisdiction. However, radio transmitter sites are frequently in very remote locations where there is no street address, and frequently on tops of mountains, within a few feet of jurisdictional boundaries. Historically, property tax accountants manually used transmitter location geographic coordinates to search maps to identify state and county with which to file property tax forms. This very laborious process took a team of 3 or 4 people up to 8 weeks each year, and was fraught with error.
  • Solution: Alteryx Server scheduled app performs spatial match between transmitter geographic coordinates and Alteryx spatial data, precisely and accurately identifying and coding transmitter location state and county. Run time: about 15 seconds per day, automatically. This simple workflow took only a couple of hours to build and deploy.KLOVE-10.png

     

  • Benefit: Savings of up to 8 man-months of manual labor per year. Reduction in errors (this process identified more than 200 instances where the location was either undocumented or in the wrong jurisdiction; 2 were even in the wrong state).

 

2. Log file FTP download

  • Business Challenge: The system downloading new log files from content delivery network (CDN) daily was very fragile, requiring manual checks and restarts every few days.
  • Solution: Alteryx workflow app, scheduled to run daily, downloads list of available files, compares list to list of previously downloaded files, downloads new files, updates list of files downloaded.K-LOVE-11.png

     

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  • Benefit: Alteryx job has run without error for 8 months. Saves time (about an hour per week) monitoring and maintaining each week, but it is mostly a huge reduction in the "hassle factor." Time to develop was less than a couple months’ worth of manual corrections.

 

3. User import of Excel into SQL Server

  • Business Challenge: Data files from mobile app vendors come each month in Excel files and need to be imported to SQL Server. This import required a DBA to manually import, and was consequently a year behind.
  • Solution: Gallery app allows users to upload files themselves, automatically removes duplicate data, reports duplicates ignored, structure errors, and data imported.KLOVE-13.png

     

     

 

  • Benefit: Self-service of data import relieves workload of DBAs and allows users to have immediate reporting of data in Tableau. This process also revealed that the supplier had duplicate records that overlapped between months. This had created erroneous data of which we had not previously been aware.

 

4. Tealium reporting

  • Business Challenge: Connecting Tableau directly to Redshift was slow.
  • Solution: In-Db tools query Redshift database, filter, aggregate, and download to Tableau Server Data Source Extract. App is scheduled in Alteryx Server. 

     

    KLOVE-14.png
  • Benefit: Faster Tableau reports

 

5. Studio automation logs

 

  • Business Challenge: Log files have been inconsistent and incomplete, with gaps and overlaps, making downstream reports unreliable.
  • Solution: Download tool connects directly to REST API of studio automation software, parses the JSON, and inserts into SQL Server data warehouse. Scheduled in Alteryx Server daily.KLOVE-15.png

     

     

  • Benefit: Reliable data for reporting.

 

6. Record of donor communication

 

  • Business Challenge: Producers call donors to record their stories, logging that call in Google Sheets. Donors call back, talking to communicators in the Listener Services department who have no visibility to the Google Sheets, and there was no record in the donor system. Awkward conversations ensued.
  • Solution: Alteryx Server app scheduled to run every 5 minutes connects to Google Sheet, downloads the call records and insert records into the SQL Server donor system of record.KLOVE-16.png

     

  • Benefit: Listener Services communicators can now intelligently communicate with donors.