Alter.Nation
Community news, customer stories, and more!
The Story
When I got into Alteryx, I didn't have a background in data and analytics or anything. My background was actually working as a pharmacist.
I was working at a chain pharmacy with about 200 plus stores, and I proposed an idea to the company about starting a position that looks for drug diversion, drug abuse, fraud, and things like that within the pharmacy records. I didn’t really know what I was doing at the time. I just figured that I could figure it out.
The query tools they had were essentially writing a script to export the CSV file and dumping a bunch of records. And they said, “Here, analyze this”—that was frustrating. So I had to learn Microsoft Access, which was a significant level up. Then I learned Power Query using the Excel Add-In.
I just kept hitting limits as far as what I could not do. I was hoping I could find something on Google, and someone actually on a forum said, “You should really check out Alteryx.”
So I did, and all the limitations that I had were suddenly gone!
This allowed me to learn what I was doing. I knew what I was looking for, but using Alteryx helped me learn new ways to find answers, new ways to ask interesting questions, and new ways to mine the data. I didn't have that experience with SQL or anything like that, but with Alteryx, I ended up learning SQL because I realized it would be easier if I could import a single query instead of dropping a whole table in.
And so, at that point, I needed the company to invest in Alteryx. It took a little bit of time to get everyone convinced that we needed to spend this money on licenses. I started offering to help out different areas of the company—letting them know I could save them time in their day by using this tool, which helped me get people to buy into it.
I worked with loss prevention to identify credit card fraud (near real-time) using Alteryx, and I used that project as justification for the company to buy a server.
From there, word got out about some of the things that we had done with Alteryx! And I had other departments contacting me: logistics, warehousing, merchandising, marketing—I was getting questions from all over. Within the first two years or so, I set up about 200 Alteryx users at the company.
Some content we show at my company now to new Alteryx users
The Impact
My curiosity didn't end with learning Alteryx. I saw there were R tools, so I started learning R. And then a Python tool came in, so I started learning Python. And it really leveled up what I was able to achieve. I could not only identify healthcare fraud and drug diversion (which are big things in themselves), but I could predict these with a reasonable amount of accuracy, which was pretty cool.
My curiosity took off from there, so I started learning more programming languages. That eventually got me into consulting. And that was thanks to Alteryx because I was able to show to the company all the skills I had learned and the projects I could do with the software and tools.
I am still in consulting today, and most of my job is actually writing data pipelines in Scala. When making my transition into consulting, I found that a lot of big data problems conceptually are the same if you break them down into their parts, and Alteryx helped me learn these concepts.
How we talk about the use of Alteryx in a big data process flow
I still use Alteryx today, although mostly to teach new users how to analyze data and build sustainable data processes.
