The Alteryx Customer Excellence Awards are an annual celebration of the incredible feats Alteryx users have achieved with the help of our platform.
As always, winners are peer-nominated, and you can help celebrate anyone’s outstanding achievements by nominating a colleague (or yourself).
Winners are recognized in one of four categories — Catalyzer, Performer, For Good, or Disruptor — each representing a different area of analytics excellence. Awards were presented at the 2022 Inspire EMEA conference in Amsterdam. Without further ado, here are this year’s winners!
Four Categories of Analytics Excellence
Catalyzer Award Winner: Christian Martinez, Finance Automation Manager, Kraft Heinz
Best Democratization of Data
Challenge: Kraft Heinz, a multinational food company, faced data challenges similar to many large organizations: it had tons of data sources and no single source of truth. Finance and operations data didn’t always match, and there were different ERP systems throughout the organization generating incongruent data.
On top of that, calculations for KPIs and key metrics constantly varied across factories, depending on the data used and the analyst. Manual data tasks also sapped time from more advanced analytics that could help the business.
Solution: With Alteryx, Martinez combined operations and finance data into a single source of truth, helping standardize analyses across the business. He also created a repeatable, accessible process in Alteryx that anyone could feed validated data into for trustworthy results, helping standardize KPIs and metrics.
Finally, Martinez skyrocketed productivity by leveraging automation in Alteryx. His solution eliminated hundreds of hours of manual work for the analytics team, freeing up time for more advanced analytics.
Impact: With the solutions Martinez developed, Kraft Heinz saved over 500 hours a year and consolidated over 5,000 projects across their factories. The analytics team took on more predictive and prescriptive analytics projects, helping the company increase proactivity. The team even began a “Finance Analytics and Automation Club” where members gather monthly to share projects and best practices and learn how solutions like Alteryx can improve their day-to-day work.
Performer Winner: Amy Mai, Data Analyst, Evelyn Partners
Best Quantifiable Results
Challenge: Evelyn Partners is a financial services company based in the UK. Each year, the business receives 1,500 to 2,000 financial portfolio reports as PDFs. Each contains data that needs to be imported into a tax-compliance software and then manually matched with the right client. Caseworkers were spending up to 80% of their time manually preparing client tax returns, which was vulnerable to errors. The process, which included over 6,000 clients and hundreds of hours of data entry, exhausted caseworkers.
Solution: By implementing Alteryx along with several other solutions, Mai was able to centralize and digitize every PDF report. With Alteryx, Mai’s team could quickly combine various files and clean the data. The team also created a repeatable workflow in Alteryx to analyze the data and scan for errors. A second Alteryx workflow automatically pushed the data into the tax-compliance software.
Impact: By automating part of the tax reporting process, Mai’s team saved at least 840 annual hours and £840,000. With more time to dedicate to data analysis and assessment, each caseworker is now able to glean deeper insights about their clients and identify future discussion points for compliance. Thanks to the time savings and increased efficiency, Evelyn Partners is expecting business growth of over 100% in the next few years, with 2750 hours saved annually, or £2.75M in savings.
For Good Winner: James Roberts, Head of BI & Reporting, City & County Healthcare Group
Best Data Used for Good
Challenge: City and County Healthcare Group, the UK’s largest social care provider, faced an uphill battle trying to utilize huge volumes of its unstructured data. The organization had limited data governance across its branches, inconsistent KPIs and metrics, no single source of truth across its systems, and the analytics team lost the majority of their time to time on manual data analysis. With old processes, the team could only analyze 0.03% of all the unstructured data.
Solution: Within six months of implementing Alteryx, Roberts and a small group of skilled teammates were able to automate various ETL solutions and create a central data warehouse that refreshed data in virtually real time. Having access to real-time data unlocked many strategic opportunities, but two invaluable solutions that impacted the wider community were:
Rapid development of a COVID-19 tracker for all branches including FTE, care workers, and service users, supplying data to Public Health England during the pandemic
Swift creation of a PPE tracker, inventory list, and an ordering system to ensure each branch had sufficient PPE to safely deliver visits based upon government and local authority guidelines
Impact: Within 12 months, the 0.03% data utilization had grown to 15% and is now at 35% and growing daily. Other benefits are hard to quantify because, without Alteryx, the two solutions mentioned and others wouldn’t have been possible. But for perspective, similar solutions and developments that would have taken a team of developers months to release can now be created by a single person in a day.
But more important than the time savings and improved data usage are the COVID-19 and PPE trackers developed by Roberts and his team. These solutions inevitably saved lives by ensuring the safety of care visits and helping branches focus on care delivery.
Disruptor Winner: Shih-yu Li, Sales Solutions Analyst, FedEx Express
Best Business Reinvention
Challenge: At FedEx, a global transportation company that delivers millions of packages daily, various departments need to find the correct salesperson aligned to a customer to gather key information — a daily task. Not reaching the right salesperson can cause delays in providing a solution or shipment, leading to a poor customer experience. The team needed an automated way to give departments the information they needed that:
- Was easy to use & accessible
- Could support a large number of requests
- Ensured results while meeting data security expectations
Solution: Li and team created a Sales Alignment Lookup Tool (“SALT”) via Alteryx apps and Alteryx Server that allowed all verified FedEx employees to:
- Search for customer information as needed
- Clean messy data
- Format all requested info into an Excel file
- Get search results with custom messages emailed to them for full details within minutes
The SALT tool provides vital information to requestors quickly, is available 24/7, and is accessible for the entire organization through the Alteryx Server while also keeping the email and request stored on the back-end for record-keeping.
Impact: The SALT tool has processed over 8,000 requests to date and has automated and streamlined what was typically a seven- or eight-step process, involving up to 10 emails and four hours of work per request. The SALT TOOL currently processes 20-30 requests daily and is a common tool used across all departments. It’s saved the team over 16,000 hours of data analysis, has granted peace of mind that requests will be attended to (even over holidays and weekends!), and has provided focused time for the team to work on other projects, creating a better experience for customers and analysts.
Congratulations to All Our Winners!
Congratulations to this year’s EMEA Customer Excellence Award winners. All our recipients and nominees have achieved incredible things with Alteryx. These accomplishments showcase the extent of what’s possible with motivation, innovation, and Analytics Automation.