Hey Team, "Let's Alteryx That!"

According to Dean Stoecker, CEO and co-founder of Alteryx, “Alteryx” (pronounced all-trix or al-ter-ix, whichever you prefer) is a verb that is to be used like, “let’s Alteryx it” or “Alteryx everything”. In fact, he will even tell you that he has personally seen “grown men cry” when they talk about how they “Alteryxed” their lives. Tears of joy, of course. But what does Alteryx mean to you? If you do not have Alteryx software, it probably doesn’t mean anything. In fact, your brain may already be filing this reading into the “junk” section of your memory. Well, I am here to interfere with that mental filing and remind you that Alteryx is a powerful software that can serve you, with or without a license. Between the 4 Alteryx license holders on our NA Truck Team and your use case, you may be able to “Alteryx” your work, too.

So, in what situation would you want to “Alteryx” your work?  

In general, Alteryx creates workflows (or processes) with your data. Whatever you are doing in Excel or with data right now can undoubtedly be transferred to Alteryx, but whether or not it should be brought there depends on 4 underlying considerations.

1 | Day-to-day

First, let’s consider data that you touch every day. For example, if you are in the middle of a bid, you are probably checking Trade Extensions constantly. Trade Extensions (TE) does a wonderful job analyzing bids and spitting out awards, but maybe you want to do your own gut check. Let’s just play with this idea for a second. So you have extracted an Excel sheet from TE and now you want to see the data aggregated based on geographic/lane groupings, carrier groupings, lowest to highest bids according to these groupings, and/or all of the above. Plus, you might have carrier performance data you want to join in, years of service information, or even rail rates you want to compare your truck rates to. I am just making this up as I go, but I can imagine that in Excel an analysis like this can get quite messy and time consuming. In Alteryx, however, it would take about 30 minutes or so to build a transparent workflow like this. And, as long as the incoming data stays in the same format, Alteryx can run the analysis over and over again with a simple “data input refresh”. If this sounds like something that may save you some time and headaches, you may want to consider approaching an Alteryx license holder near you.

2 | Week-to-week

Next, let’s consider data that you work with, maybe not as obsessively as bid data, but nonetheless, important to your weekly work grind. The best example I can give is looking up rate information to quote back to businesses with. Which, for us sourcing specialists, is generally stored all over the place. Here you have a situation where very important and crucial data could benefit from some thorough cleaning and harmonizing. With a human consult to inform the road map, Alteryx can bring data together almost effortlessly. Depending on the condition and usage of the data, this is also a great first step/diagnosis to get your information ready for the data lake, as well. 

3 | Month-to-month

Now we are moving away from data aggregation (day-to-day) and data scrubbing (week-to-week) and let’s consider information we collect and report on monthly. This is a terrific space to “Alteryx” your work because the reporting metrics generally do not change, only the raw data inputs do. Thus, a solid workflow will be able to run your reports monthly in a matter of seconds. Of course, getting your workflow to solidity will depend on the initial data scrubbing needed and your understanding of what you want to report on in the first place, but let’s say, for arguments sake, that you understand your data, it is usable, and you know the insights you want to see, plus, you have a general understanding of how to derive those insights. To take it a step further, let’s imagine you even developed a process already in Excel to get your metrics, but do not feel like fussing with it anymore. Well, let’s Alteryx it! We could even Tableau it! Heck, depending on your use case, we can even put it on the Alteryx server and let it run itself every month. Again, if this sounds appealing, contact an Alteryx user near you.

4 | Year-to-year

We have covered how Alteryx can save you time, energy and improve accuracy through seamless data aggregation, data wrangling, and metric reporting, but what about (drum roll, please), the analytics? The juice, the squeeze, the trends, and the brutal truth. Well, Alteryx is a gold mine for that. Between spatial, predictive, time series, AB testing, predictive grouping, and prescriptive tools, Alteryx can alter almost any data set into a story. I cannot guarantee the story will be worth telling, but Alteryx can help us find out. This space is reserved for the visionaries, the idea generators, the futuristic types, the theorists, the risk-takers, and the reflectors. In other words, this space is for you. If your brain is cooking up a theory, let’s use Alteryx to test it. For example, do you believe we can accurately predict the success of a new carrier based on specific attributes? With a substantial data set, we can use Alteryx to gracefully test that theory with a linear regression model. The idea pit is the most fun place to be and usually derives the biggest insights, so throw your mind out on the drawing board and let’s “Alteryx” it!

Dean Stoecker, Olivia Duane Adams, and Ned Harding are the founders of Alteryx software, which was originally called SRC LLC back in 1997. They built the software to outsource their data consulting work back to the companies they were consulting. This meant they put themselves up to the daunting task of developing a software to empower any employee to achieve the same high level work of a data guru. Alteryx even coined the term, “the data citizen”, to describe the individual without a formal data background who, thanks to Alteryx, is now a data savvy contributor. So far, no other software has come close to empowering employees in the big data space like Alteryx has.

The 1990’s rap group, Wu-Tang Clan, was once quoted saying, “cash rules everything around me”. Well fast-forward to the 21st century, and now data is starting to rule everything around us. It is becoming so powerful that data is already being used as a form of currency and the amount of data a company possesses is now considered in the evaluation of that company’s monetary worth. With Alteryx on our team, we have an opportunity to work smarter, not harder. (Though we will still work hard 😉 )