Plante Moran Uses Alteryx to Accelerate Data Insights

The co-founder of Plante Moran, a CPA and business advisory firm that recently celebrated 100 years in business, often referred to the company as “a people firm disguised as an accounting firm.” The late Frank Moran was known for saying people are at the heart of everything the company does.

The people-first philosophy is serving the company well — it’s grown to be one of the largest consulting firms in the nation with more than 3,000 employees working in over 150 countries.

The company also puts a premium on technical expertise and advanced technologies that help meet the unique business objectives of clients across the globe.

Enabling Rapid Insights with Alteryx  

For many of Plante Moran’s clients, Alteryx plays a key role in achieving analytics success and accelerating business performance.

Mark Richards, Consulting Partner at Plante Moran, says rapid time to data insight for decision-making is what makes Alteryx so powerful and unique. He says customers can visualize the potential of using the tool as soon as they see it in action.

Alteryx replaces the manual, repetitive and time-consuming spreadsheet work analysts used to spend aggregating and cleaning data, and building reports.

“Instead of spending all that time trying to pull information together, they spend the time analyzing it, and making use of it, which is really what their job function is,” said Richards. 

He says most companies are just getting started with Alteryx when they master their first use case and workflow.

Building an Analytics Center of Excellence

The analytics leaders at Plante Moran knew it would take more than technology to support the variety of business challenges faced by their clients.

They also had a vision for digital transformation that could scale and adapt to the changing needs of clients. Developing an Analytics Center of Excellence was the answer.

“The Analytics Center of Excellence was a team put together to provide expertise to internal and external customers utilizing technologies such as Alteryx,” said Richards.

“We talk to customers about their requirements, but there’s also a lot of thought leadership about things you can do — what we call the art of the possible. We also talk to them about what we’ve done with other customers they may not have even considered.”

Richards says the Analytics Center of Excellence (ACE) is made up of proactive thinkers who can see the big picture and get creative about how to use technology to solve problems.

“We do some mentoring and strategizing about where they want to go,” Richards explains. “Then we show them how to evolve what we’ve built together and take it to the next level.”

He says with the ACE methodology, they can help their clients remove barriers to decision-making, encourage collaboration and communication, drive ROI, and achieve their analytics ambitions. 

Reducing Data Manipulation from Days to Minutes

Natalia Villegas Franco, manager and Alteryx practitioner in the ACE practice, used Alteryx to transform a tedious and time-consuming process from days to just the push of a button.

Villegas Franco helps large Dental Service Organizations (DSOs) looking to acquire large numbers of dental practices. To make financially sound decisions, the DSOs need an in-depth analysis of potential acquisition targets, looking at everything from appointments and transactions to claims data.

But analyzing large data sets from disparate sources was a time-consuming and tedious process involving spreadsheets from 150 individual dental practices.

By leveraging Alteryx and API calls, Villegas Franco automated the process with workflows that could prepare the data for dashboards significantly faster.

“We were able to replicate the data process and run workflows across 150 dental practices,” said Villegas Franco, “That reduced what used to take three days per practice down to the push of a button.”

Reducing data manipulation time and accelerating insights also translated to a cost savings of more than $750,000.  

Looking Ahead with Alteryx

Analysts and consultants at Plante Moran are always looking for new ways to derive value from Alteryx. Internal Alteryx users across multiple departments meet once a month to share interesting and useful use cases.

Villegas Franco runs the Alteryx User Group at Plante Moran and jokes, “Alteryx is like a game but you get paid to play the game.”

The excitement of sharing what’s possible with Alteryx reminds analysts that their job is more than about driving business outcomes. Using Alteryx, it can be a source of professional development and personal joy.