7,736 Hours Saved with Alteryx

[DanielleR]

Author:

Jack Morgan

Role:

Project Management and; Business Intelligence

Company:

N/A

7,736 Hours Saved with Alteryx

Originally Published: 2016 Excellence Awards Entry 

Use Case Overview: 

After adding up the time savings for our largest projects we came up with an annual savings of 7,736 hours per year! In that time, you could run 1,700 marathons, fill 309,000 gas tanks or watch 3,868 movies!! Whaaaaaaaaaaaaat! In said time savings, we have not done any of the previously listed events. Instead, we've leveraged this time to take advantage of our otherwise unrealized potential for more diverse projects and support of departments in need of more efficiency. Other users that were previously responsible for running these processes now work on optimizing other items that are long overdue and adding value in other places by acting as project managers for other requests.

Describe the problem you needed to solve:

The old saying goes, Time is of the essence, and there are no exceptions here! More holistically, we brought Alteryx into our group to better navigate disparate data and build one-time workflows to create processes that are sustainable and provide a heightened level of accuracy. In a constraint driven environment my team is continuously looking for how to do things better. Whether that is faster, more accurately or with less needed oversight is up to our team. The bottom line is that Alteryx provides speed, accuracy, and agility that we never thought would be possible. Cost and the most expensive resource of all, human, has been a massive driver for us through our Alteryx journey and I'd expect that these drivers will continue as time passes us by.

Describe the working solution:

Our processes vary from workflow to workflow, however overall we use a lot of SQL, Oracle, Teradata and SharePoint. In some workflows we blend 2 sources; in others we blend all of them. It depends on the need of the business that we are working with on any given day. Once the blending is done we do a variety of things with it, sometimes is goes to apps for self-service consumption and other times we push it into a data warehouse. However one thing that is consistent in our process is final data visualization in Tableau! Today, upwards of 95% of our workflows end up in Tableau allowing us to empower our users with self-service and analytics reporting. When using databases like SQL and Oracle we see MASSIVE gains in the use of In-Database tools. The ability for our Alteryx users to leverage such a strong no code solution creates an advantage for us in the customer service and analytics space because they already understand the data but now they have a means to get to it.

Audit Automation:

Billing:

File Generator:

Market Generator:

Parse:

Describe the benefits you have achieved:

The 7,736 hours mentioned above is cumulative of 7 different processes that we rely on, on a regular basis.

1. One prior process took about 9 days/month to run - we've dropped that to 30s/month!
2. Another process required 4 days/quarter that our team was able to cut to 3 min/quarter.
3. The third and largest workflow would have taken at estimate 5200 hours to complete and our team took 10.4 hours to do the same work!
4. The next project was a massive one, we needed to create a tool to parse XML data into a standardized excel format. This process once took 40 hrs/month (non-standard pdf to excel) that we can run in less than 5s/month!
5. Less impressive but still a great deal of time was when our systems and qa team contracted us to rebuild their daily reporting for Production Support Metrics. This process took them about 10 hours/month that we got to less than 15 sec/day.
6. One of our internal QA teams asked us to assist them in speeding up their pre-work time for their weekly audit process. We automated their process that took them upwards of 65 hours/month to a process that now takes us 10 sec/week!
7. The last of the 7 processes that have been mentioned in that our above write-up would be a process for survey data that took a team 2 hours/week to process. That same process takes our team about 20 sec/week to process.

We hope you've found our write-up compelling and win-worthy!

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