We've picked three common computing problems and present to you, in three successive blog posts, how to solve each of these problems in the Alteryx Designer can tackle. Today it's the turn of blog entry #2, in which we show you how to use Alteryx Designer to calculate transport routes and rank datasets based on their proximity to each other. If you missed blog entry #1, you can find it at here.

By the way, if you prefer to try Alteryx yourself, you can also download one free trial version.

Use case: Calculate transport routes and find nearest warehouses

You work in sales and are given the task by your or your supervisor to calculate how many pieces of each product should be kept in the warehouses. Condition: Each sales location (store) should be served by the nearest warehouse. You will be given a list of sales locations, a list of products needed for each store and a list of warehouse locations (longitude and latitude):

Now you have to 1) assign the next warehouse to each store and 2) calculate the number of products to be stored. So far so good. But to make it a bit more complicated: For security reasons, the second closest warehouse should also hold the same number of products. Quite complicated! But quite simple in Alteryx:

Step 1

Several import options are available in the input tool, including Excel files. The three tables with information on warehouses, sales locations and number of required products are imported into Alteryx in this way.

Step 2

The Create Points tool is handy for tasks with geographical data. From the latitudes and longitudes of the tables, geographic points can be created by the tool and visualized in Alteryx. On the map it looks like this using the example of warehouses (warehouses are shown in blue):

Step 3

The Find Nearest tool compares the geographical data of two tables and, starting from the point of one table, finds the nearest point of the second table - or even the nearest two points. In this example, Bern and then Basel are the next two warehouses for Adelboden. In addition, the tool also outputs the distance in kilometers:

Step 4

The join tool combines two tables. So you can combine the data of the first table with the required number of products, which is recorded in the second table. The result looks like this:

One could visualize the distance between the warehouses (blue) and the sales locations (red) like this:

Step 5

The Summarize tool calculates desired key figures from a table. In this case, it can be selected that the table should first be grouped according to warehouses and then according to product type and that the sum should be displayed for these groupings. This already brings us to the result:

Not bad, right? If this use case has aroused your interest in Alteryx Designer, we look forward to hearing from you. We'll be happy to show you what else the tool can do. Or you can simply download the free trial version from Alteryx.