Data analytics has a “last mile” problem.
In shipping and transportation, the last-mile problem is the last leg of the journey, whether for a package delivery or a passenger getting to their destination. The last mile can also be the most time-consuming and costly part of the process.
Similarly, the most time-consuming part of data analytics is often the last part: getting the data to business use cases.
Once technical data teams build the pipelines and get the data ready, what happens next? The business needs to use it. The data needs to get from the warehouse to the final destination.
The problem is that data housed in the data warehouse or lakehouse is inaccessible to non-technical end users. So, the data never reaches the finish line of business value. According to an Alteryx survey of IT leaders, 24% of collected data is never used, and only 32% of companies report getting accessible value from data.
Playbooks, powered by Alteryx AiDIN, is a new capability in Alteryx Auto Insights that automatically generates analytics use cases based on your unique business scenario from your existing datasets.
With Playbooks for Cloud Data, Auto Insights Playbooks now allows users to:
- Connect seamlessly with a cloud data source in Alteryx Analytics Cloud, such as Databricks or Snowflake, and securely search for datasets.
- Identify unused, missing, or “dormant data” that could be better used in new analysis.
- Input your own dataset to generate use case ideas mapped to departmental and vertical-specific business goals, such as supply chain optimization.
- Take action with AI-powered insights and generated presentations that make it easy to deliver insights to stakeholders.
How to use Playbooks for Databricks:
In the spirit of solving last-mile problems, let’s look at supply chain challenges! In this scenario, your organization has adopted the Databricks Data Intelligence Platform, and the supply chain team wants to use Databricks more for business insights.
The data engineer has already done the hard work of loading supply chain data and getting it ready to go in Databricks Unity Catalog. But how will the supply chain team find it and use it?
1. Discover relevant data via Alteryx Analytics Cloud:
First, a supply chain analyst can securely connect to Databricks from Alteryx Analytics Cloud. From there, they can search for and access relevant datasets in Unity Catalog without going into the Databricks UI.
Our supply chain analyst has found a useful shipment dataset they didn’t even know existed! We can preview the data to ensure it’s what we want. Let’s add it to our workspace.
2. Create a data layer in Auto Insights:
Now, we’ll add our shipments dataset to Alteryx Auto Insights to make it available for analysis.
3. Generate use cases with Playbooks:
Here, we can select the shipments dataset from a dropdown menu and load use cases. Playbooks will scan your data and create best-fit use cases relevant to supply chain challenges.
(Note: Your admin will need to adjust the dataset permissions to enable Playbooks access).
Select a use case to automatically generate a report with actionable insights, building a shareable proof of concept for business value in minutes. Let’s choose “Identify Late Delivery Causes.”
Auto Insights will generate a Mission (a collection of insights) based on your chosen use case. Think of it as a more dynamic dashboard. Here, we can see the Mission for “Identify Late Delivery Causes” generated from the shipments dataset we found in Databricks.
Auto Insights has identified key trends and data patterns related to late deliveries. Right away, we see that the “Express Air” shipping mode contributed to late deliveries, and surprisingly, critical-priority orders had the most late days.
Using Magic Documents in Auto Insights, generate an email summary or presentation to share your findings!
Playbooks for Cloud Data makes it seamless and secure for business users to discover valuable use cases for the data in your data warehouse (so you can optimize your real warehouse, in the case of a supply chain analyst)!
Interested in learning more about Playbooks for Cloud Data and how it works with your preferred data platform like Databricks? Read the Databricks and Alteryx best practices guide.